(no subject)

[nisaa]

All of our record albums are gone. Gone. Ok, I willingly let them go. But all the Depeche Mode albums, all the Duran Duran, Sting, Smiths . . . they're all gone.

Meat is Murder was the reason why I became a vegetarian in my formative high school years (and it must have marked me because people still think I'm a vegetarian til this day). Arena was the live album from the first concert I ever went to. I think the Sugar Hill Gang album was the first one I ever bought. A tiny voice inside me cried "NO!!" as she flipped through the China Crisis and Black albums. I mean, I haven't played them in about 3 1/2 years but still, there will be a void in my life without the vinyl. Don't worry, I made a list sometime last year of the lot of them in case I ever want to replace them with cds.

I stood at the back of my station wagon while the owner of Benway records combed through the boxes of albums and held up each record she was interested in to the late afternoon sun to inspect for scratches. Halfway through, she told me she sells record players. I was tempted to tell her to stop right there, give me back all the albums and sell me one of the turntables. But I didn't because 4 1/2 years ago, I vowed that I wouldn't move again with all of these albums. I got nearly $100 for about half of them.

I brought the rest of them to Out of the Closet to donate. As I left, I caught the employees going through them and one picked out the soundtrack to The Wiz.

Everyone I talked to in the course of my record album purge seemed to envy my upcoming move to the Bay area. I know it'll all be worth it. But for now, there's a whole lot of stuff to comb through at my apartment - things to recycle back into the world. Do I really need to keep my copy of Gogol's The Overcoat? What about the Russian-English dictionary my dog chewed up when she was just a few months old?

These are the tough questions I face in the next week and a half. Next up are all the video tapes I'll never play again. Except the video of my wedding. I won't be giving that one up.

Comments

[calialleykat.livejournal.com]

Keep photographs and any media of people you love regardless of format. Keep love letters no matter how old. Keep all adress books. I allowed myself 2 boxes of the books I Could Not live without,(mostly Heinlein, pagan and Robinson) everything else you can always get again used.
Stuff is just stuff, friends and lovers are forever.

[nisaa.livejournal.com]

Thank you so very much. I woke up and saw your message and immediately went to the box I had put all my old letters from friends, ready to throw away.

While I prefer email as a method of communication these days, I have friends from Europe with whom I've had snail mail correspondence for years. That's kinda special and I should definitely keep them.

[calialleykat.livejournal.com]

My pleasure. I spent most of last weekend going through the stuff I just got back from LA, and found pictures of my family and me, letters and mementos going back to nursery school and pictures I'd taken going back to high school. Although I love my digicam, my old Minolta may be coming out of mothballs. I Like print film, the hands on-ness of it and even the anticipation of sending the rolls in and waiting to see if they came out as good as you hoped. I have almost no hard prints after 2002, when I bought David a digital camera for his birthday.
I think I'll start making prints of my saved digital pictures also, just for continuity.
Besides, wonderful as digital images are, they are never more than a spilled can of coke away from disaster.