When my parents moved, I had to spend a bit of time helping them out and deciding what to do with a lot of my old stuff. Seeing as how they were downsizing it didn’t make sense for them to hold on to a lot of my things. I ended up taking a lot of it back to my place just so that I could sort it out on my own schedule. As I’m lying down here in my bed, off in the corner of my room I can see a couple of boxes of fansubs that I don’t want to part with despite not having a VCR plugged in anywhere around here. I also had to take the contents of my bookshelves in the old house. I bought a secondary bookcase from Ikea a while ago in anticipation. That bookcase is now full of old textbooks that look good on display but will probably never get air again (let’s be honest, right?)
One find that caught me off guard was the big pile of notes and correspondence from high school and university. If I think about it, some of that stuff is actually more than a decade old now. Why were we (my parents and I) hoarding that kind of thing? I spend about an hour last night picking through the stuff, seeing if there was anything I might want to keep.
I actually spotted one report card from my first semester of high school. Man, I was a decent student back then. If only I wasn’t so lazy. From later on in my high school career I spotted a letter of recommendation from one of my high school’s vice-principals. It’s not like I was openly courting administration, but I still managed to get them to pay attention to me. I also found a few letters of admission from the universities that I enrolled in. Now, we all know that I chose to go with the computer engineering program at the University of Waterloo as my thing, but were you aware how that was actually my last choice? I only enrolled into three programs at the time, and all of them eventually got back to me. I had also applied to the computer science program at Waterloo, the University of Toronto, and York University. I only applied to engineering as an after thought if only because I felt that there was no way I’d get in. Well, wouldn’t you know it, of all four, it was engineering that got back to me first. The rest is history, I guess. I poked through some of those letters. Man…what could have been, eh?
There were a lot of university notes in the pile, along with a couple of exams. As I looked through it all I couldn’t help but feel like I had mentally lost everything that I had learned. Yes, I know the whole thing about how I at least know how to find the information now, but…it’ll be a tough slog if I ever had to do so. Ah, but that’s why society leaves that kind of thing to the people who continue down that path. I don’t see myself having to do any work on a microscopic level regarding substrate layers anytime soon. WHATEVER.
If I found myself to be a bright shining star in my high school years, my university years seems to see that brightness fade. Perhaps it’s a good thing, you know? If anything, that period forced me to develop a sense of humility. It showed me that I have limits, and that even if I’m not the best at something life will go on. I could choose to stay dim and live a low-key life, but I think something in me has clicked as of the last year or two. I think back then it was almost as if academics was all I had. I am thankful that I had that because at the very least it gave me something to focus on. Without that now, I have to find other ways to shine brightly to those that are around me. Perhaps it’s why I find satisfaction in running, improv, and now yoga. Running gives me drive, improv gives me a creative outlet, and yoga helps me to find peace. At this point in my life, I’m comfortable leaving behind the things in my past. They carried me this far, but they no longer serve a purpose. It’s time to look ahead. Perhaps as a sign of that I actually threw out all of the pile.
Admissions letters, mediocre exams, recommendations, reports: all gone. Moving on.
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