Memory Lane

Currently I am curating material from this blog and other sources to show how vocal I have been in sharing my opinion over the years. This has meant spending an awful lot of time driving down the metaphorical memory lane. In particular, I had to open up boxes that hadn’t been touched in so long that I could still smell the cigarette smoke that was so prevalent in my house growing up.

I am not the biggest pack rat in the world, but it is interesting what items I took with me from Florida up to D.C. twelve years ago and which items I left behind, perhaps lost for all eternity (or until my presidential campaign stirs up some old skeletons).

For example, I found a letter that told me the results of my failed audition to give a speech at high school graduation, but I can’t, for the life of me, locate the text of that speech. I kept a copy of a writing award that I do not remember receiving. And I found more flyers for Student Government campaigns than I probably passed out during those elections (okay, that’s not quite true, but I still found more than I expected).

I even found the pictures taken when I won the Dreamer/Doer award back in middle school. At that time, if I have this right, Disney selected 3 students each year from each of the counties in Florida based on some touchy-feely notions that align with Disney’s family-friendly branding. I was selected because I was a prolific but unpublished writer of short sci-fi stories at that point.

I kept everything UC Berkeley sent me when they accepted me for undergrad and UF when they accepted me for the master’s in political campaigning program, but I also kept the rejection letters from Georgetown (undergrad) and University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (grad school). I ultimately turned down UC Berkeley because it cost too much to attend as an undergrad and went to GW for grad school regardless of the cost because it got me close to D.C..

It’s been fun going down the memory lane for this project. But I am also glad the project is nearly finished. I prefer to keep my storage closet like it’s a time capsule, only to be revisited sparingly, if ever.