Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Garage Sale

We're having a garage sale this weekend to get rid of some unwanted items. Our apartment has been a complete disaster due to getting ready for this thing. There's Heroclix all over the living room, boxes of random clothes in the garage, and tons of boxes with loads of priced crap just ready and waiting to go clutter someone else's house.

And the major thing I am getting rid of is my computer from college.

It's a Dell and it was probably the bottom of the line when I got it, but it was the best I could afford at the time. And since I didn't game or anything, it didn't have to be the best thing ever. About a year ago, the internet card pooped the bed, and I inherited Bill's old laptop--my first ever. Yesterday and today I was spending time going through the computer to get rid of stuff on it--outdated programs, any personal information, my docs, and my writing.

Most of the stuff I had moved to my external portable harddrive when Ollie first decided it didn't like the internets anymore. But there were these discs I had to go through.

This computer has a floppy disc drive--not the ginormous ones, but the little hard discs that were just starting to go out of vogue when I was still at Iowa. I thought that maybe I would toss in the ones I clean off as a total package kind of thing for the computer--along with the awesome printer/scanner/copier that I can't use anymore either because it doesn't have drivers for the current version of Windows I am running.

Going through those discs was like looking at a photo album--but instead of pictures (well, there were some) it was mostly short stories and a lot of No Shame pieces that never made it to the stage, as well as all my exercises for Playwriting 1 and 2. I was VERY excited to get all these things onto Lorby, my portable harddrive. Now I could upload the very first No Shame piece I wrote way back in my first year at Iowa. It was presumed lost to the annuls of time, and it was probably better that way, but I will upload it anyway. I found several other plays and bits and pieces of things and I was struck by one thing.

This is a girl who is rough, but she's got a heart and a pen, and that, in the end, is what matters. I grouse about money for graduate school and about being impatient about my writing, but when I look back at the sheer volume of stuff I was writing at the time, it's mind-boggling. Not all of it was good--a lot of it was quite bad. But I am glad I got to see it. A lot of it has been deleted now--especially the stuff that I wrote for my fiction classes, but it was wonderful to see myself in a portrait of writerly progression. I can look back and see where I came from and realize I have come a long long way in a short amount of time. This is still something to be proud of, and build on.

Ollie is pretty much ready to go I think. Honestly, I won't miss the clunky heavy monitor and the tower, I do much prefer the laptop, Bad Horse, I am writing this on. But it was a wonderful, precious thing to see where my roots came from--and continue to grow.

1 comment:

CarrieMarie said...

I love looking back at my older writing. I had a whole disc of stories I'd written and random tidbits - and do you know what it did? It died on me! Completely broke. :( I'm glad your discs were still working & that you got to see it all. *HUGS*

also - bad horse. LOL LOVE IT!!!