My College Notebook
Or: That shit in our garage.
My college notebooks sit in the garage, buried by a few trinkets from that time. A prop gun from an old production. A Frisbee, from when I convinced 0 people to start an Ultimate Frisbee team. A broken protractor from a math class I didn’t care about. But the biggest treasures are the notebooks.
I have one for every class, plus one for each production I worked on. There’s close to 50 notebooks in there. I graduated college over a decade ago. Why do I still have them?
I never reference the notebooks. There are directing tips in there, and lots of notes from productions I was involved in. They will never be useful again. I don’t see myself directing Terrance McNally’s “Noon” again soon, especially not with the actors I got together for my college production. I don’t talk to any of those people now. Nothing happened between us, we just drifted apart.
But why can’t I throw it out? Perhaps because there are so many scribbles. Each page is full of nitpicks and notes, praise and condemnation. Even if I did another production of the same play, the information in there is useless. Everything except the text would be different, myself included.
Psychology notebooks, theatre notebooks, and the occasional gen-ed spiralbound lay in wait for a revival that will never come. They are junk. They are trash. But I sunk hundreds of hours into them, and so believe they have value. I can’t throw them out.
Recently, I put on a shirt and asked my fashion-genius* wife, “Is this a shirt or rags?”
“Rags,” she replied. She was right. My frugality is shiny veneer for what are really hoarder tendencies.
Do you also keep your notes from college laying about, in case you need to relive Psych 101? This is not a call-out; hoard all the junk you want. I do.
*You don’t have to be a fashion genius to know that it’s rags, but she has other qualifications too.