{"id":1074,"date":"2003-06-08T15:43:00","date_gmt":"2003-06-08T15:43:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/2003\/06\/the-great-clean-out.html"},"modified":"2003-06-08T15:43:00","modified_gmt":"2003-06-08T15:43:00","slug":"the-great-clean-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/2003\/06\/the-great-clean-out.html","title":{"rendered":"The Great Clean Out"},"content":{"rendered":"

In my nesting phase, I’m trying to clean out, get rid of the extraneous. Of course, the more I clean, the more of a mess I seem to make. I’m only a tiny bit of the way done. I found a stack of papers from graduate school, which of course I can’t bear to part with, although looking through them was strange. I don’t remember half of what I learned. I’m looking over my Master’s Essay and it looks completely alien. I wrote that? Actually, it’s an area that still interests me–my essay was “Reading the Road: The Road as Medium in the American Travel Narrative,” in which “I intend to look at how the road functions as a medium for the traveler to maintain agency, to discover self-identity, and to complicate the traveler’s past within the American narrative of journey at home”–but I’ve long since put aside. (I’ve got to reread some of those books, Going Native<\/i><\/a> especially). My thesis, my road novel, sits in the box, waiting to be revised. I don’t think that’s going to happen. It wasn’t a terribly successful novel. I like the newer ones I’ve been working on, although I keep hitting the same revision stumbling blocks.<\/p>\n

It’s been less than ten years, since I started grad school, but my, what a time warp. My teachers’ syllabi were typed. As in on a typewriter. Our phone\/address list didn’t have e-mail addresses on it. The school had just begun assigning e-mail addresses, but I was one of a few who could actually access from home (I was high-tech even then; I had a 14.4Kbps modem). Pine<\/a> was the only system I knew how to use. In 1996, during my second year, I used Amazon.com<\/a>–a new store my father had heard about that was online! How weird, an online store–back when it was just gray pages with text, to create my book list. Could it all get any more advanced than that?<\/p>\n

And now, I’m going through letters. Ah. I’d forgotten about so many of these people. And I won’t remember them again, because the letters are going into the recycling. It’s harsh, but how long can you hold on to letters from a guy you dated for a few months in high school that basically say, “Hey, you suck for only having written me once the entire year” (I’ve got about ten like that)? What can I say, I’ve always been bad at correspondence–that was one of the main purposes of this blog, to keep me from having to write individual e-mails to people (and it doesn’t work–people still<\/i> expect e-mail and they seem to expect me to have something new to say in them). I’m saving all family letters (the family ones are classics) and some of the more representative ones from those years. But I actually think the writers of those letters would be grateful they’re going into the trash–the main topic of the day seems to have been virginity or lack thereof. All these folks are now grown-ups with jobs and spouses and kids, and I just have a feeling they’d be happier if this stuff didn’t exist anymore. I’ve Googled<\/a> some of these people to see what they’re up to, but I can’t find anyone (and I’m too cheap to pay for Classmates<\/a>). I guess everyone has awfully common names (and I don’t know which of my female friends even kept their own names) or else they’re not doing much these days. Of course, if I had cared that much, I would have gone to my ten-year high school reunion. Maybe I’ll hit the twenty year. It’s only (gasp) three years away.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In my nesting phase, I’m trying to clean out, get rid of the extraneous. Of course, the more I clean, the more of a mess I seem to make. I’m only a tiny bit of the way done. I found a stack of papers from graduate school, which of course I can’t bear to part […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1074","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1074","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1074"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1074\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1074"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1074"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1074"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}