Firstly, I don't like new Xanga. I consistently dislike all the changes that Xanga makes. Just wanted me to make that clear.
Secondly.
I take fliers from people who hand them out on the streets. Fliers for Chinatown tours, unneeded SAT prep courses, dollar pizza, club parties. I take them because I used to hand out fliers. As it turns out, handing out fliers is one of the most lethargic of jobs, and having suffered it, I like to ease the suffering of others.
But I don't just toss out the fliers, regardless of uselessness. Fliers tend to guide my hand into my right butt pocket, neatly folded in half or fourths, depending on size, and tuck themselves in. When I get home to empty my pockets, the quotidians land on the table: cell phone, keys, wallet, followed by right butt pocket's contents. The flier.
The right butt pocket is the general storage unit for all of the day's collections. Fliers find themselves with paper napkins, movie ticket stubs, small whatevers. They all find themselves in a pile on my desk.
I refind all of these things once in a while, on a twice a year process, usually.
Like sediments, most of these get washed away by either daily ebbs and flows, or a few rare moments a year, by the hurricane force of my mother. But for those that are lucky enough to remain, the movie stub from that date with that cute chick, or the museum map from that reconciliatory meeting with a friend, they settle into a spot somewhere on, in, under my desk for the long haul.
Only some catastrophic effect, like the movement of the foundational furniture upon which this sedimentary memorabilia is layed upon, will disturb these items.
Today is one such day.
A replacement of a cabinet required the clearing of the cabinet, and the movement of the desk beside the cabinet. And I have spent the last three hours mining through memories.
There are sweet spots: the German comic book from Andrey on my 16th birthday, the 1925 ten dollar bill hiding under books, the folder full of my drawings next to the folder beside my Spectator articles. But most of it is mundane.
Papers. And papers. And papers. Grades, classwork, homework, schoolwork, doodles, notebooks, learnings, education. All of it just sitting and aging.
When first layed down, I left these papers to clean later, save for later, read much later. But these are Stat notes, Math homeworks, Chinese character sheets, Writers' Workshop days. They sit. And are never read again. So I throw them away.
But I can't help but think, "Is that it?" All these things, 13 years of school, they either sit in my brain, or sit on these sheets of paper that will be soon sitting in the garbage. Or the sit in neither, somewhere in the in between of misconceptions, inattentiveness, or lost memories.
I have only mentioned school papers, but I also don't understand what I am to do with a stack of Christmas/Birthday cards from many ages, and what to do with scraps of former art projects and Halloween costumes, and trinkets saved from something I thought was meaningful that I can no longer remember.
I remain a sentimental person, though I can't see the point. Memorabilia sits and gathers dust. Meanings and moments are great to visit, but there'll be so many more to come. Where do I store it all? When will I visit it again? And is there a reason to reboot every morning with a full understand of the evolution of my person?
There's been so much that I've experienced and it would be a lie to say that this storagequake didn't bring some old memories back to the surface. Great memories, like Dina's posters made for my first Stuyvesant birthday, or Firebirds Rising, a great collection of short fantasy stories. But is this the reason to save stuff? The storagequakes that happen once a god-knows-when?
It hurts to throw away things that might retain memories. It's troubling to figure out how to save things that just take up too much damn room.
Knowledge and memories.
I guess I'm not rich enough to save all of them in both tangible and intangible form. | 
