More relics of my introspective teenage girlhood

When I was in high school, I had an enormous bulletin board. (Murry, do you remember it?) I would put all sorts of things on the bulletin board - mostly magazine clippings, pictures of my friends, quotes I liked, poems I liked. The typical self-expression of a teenage girl. I would make minor updates every now and then, use different quotes or move around the pictures, but the core of it remained the same.

I really loved my bulletin board, and was enormously less-than-psyched when it was time to trek off to college. The fully decorated board would not have survived transport, so I stripped it of its contents, put them in a folder, and schlepped it all off with me to Berkeley.

When I got there, the bulletin board got left in the foyer and the folder got lost among some seldom-used notebooks, so I didn't repopulate the bulletin board right away. A couple months later, I found the folder and looked through the contents. After being at college for a just a little while, already I was different, and it didn't seem right to put everything up again - the things I'd once had on the bulletin board didn't reflect me anymore.

At first I started purging the folder of things. Goodbye, postcard of Hawaii from friend-I-no-longer like. Hasta luego, photo of ER cast. Smell ya later, Jewel lyrics. But that didn't seem right either - even the stuff I kept wasn't stuff I wanted to put up.

So, I made a new folder, and started scouring my magazines and books for new pictures and quotes that spoke to me. That was easy - lots of random pictures and quotes have meaning for me. Soon enough I had a very full folder. I realized some of the things I was putting in it weren't "bulletin board" things, they were things I just wanted to keep for later reference, so I started breaking it up into different folders based on topic. One for quotes and articles I liked, one for photos of people I liked, one for Buffy stuff (I was 17), one for hair styles I liked, and so on.

I never re-created the bulletin board, but I still have the folders. And I've kept adding to them over the years. They've been pared down and re-stocked, and they're now in a tidier state, but some of the things I've had in there for maybe six years. This weekend, I was sick and sitting around, so I grabbed a stack of magazines and read/ripped through them. At the end, I took my pile of to-be-filed pages, placed them in the appropriate folders, then did a little weeding. It's surprising how many pages I found that I had no recollection of ever seeing, and no apparent reason to keep. The folders got marginally less full after the weeding, but they're still pretty bulky. In order of decreasing full-ness, I've got:

- quotes and articles
- people who I respect/admire/aesthetically enjoy
- fashion
- home stuff
- hair
- fitness
- recipes
- makeup

I guess you can tell my priorities from that. ;)

I still have some of the items from the original bulletin board: bizarre paintings of cats by Louis Wain; poems by Emily Dickinson and Miklós Radnóti; a photo of Sara gorging on blackberries; a picture of a forest that still makes me feel calm; a photo of myself, age 4, in a dimly lit cave. It's weird, the stuff I've chosen to keep, but then again, so am I.