Boxes

One of the first things I did this year was help my dad clean out 10 years worth of junk from our house in Bacolod. Boxes and boxes like you wouldn't believe. I think it's because as a family we are a bunch of pack rats who can't seem to let go of anything even after we're done with it. I am a notorious receipt hoarder, even ones from McDonalds, because I have this recurring fantasy in my head that someday I just might bite into a McNugget with a cockroach leg embedded in it and I'll need the receipt to sue.

I've been improving though. I am trying to apply my scriptwriting professor's philosophy ("Be mercenary. If it's not absolutely needed, get rid of it) into my swag hoarding world. Moving into a smaller flat in Sydney has helped in a way. I used to have little nooks and crannies to tuck away shoeboxes worth of junk. Now my tiny closet threatens to burst each time I attempt to stick in one more ATM transaction slip.

So back to my dad's house. Kaila and I dug into a couple of boxes and were amazed at the number of things that we found: a veritable time capsule of our personal histories. Oh, and a TIME back issue:


Pre-couch jumping days.


We dug up some Jurassic Archie Comics. And if there's one thing you never throw away, it's comics. Especially if a photo of your younger sister's high school sweetheart is taped to one of the covers...


Kaila looks like she is nine years old. And is that an arm grazing her boob?? Grr...


Also unearthed was an old cassette tape of mine circa 1991:


Bel Biv Devoe. I know. I apologize.


But the find of the day had to be an autograph book owned by my other sister Gabbi.



Why she kept an autograph book and got members of her own family to sign it I never figured out. I guess it's one of those Sweet Valley High/ My Little Pony collecting-secrets-thing that only pre-pubescent girls understand. But of course I signed it anyway. Read on and see how cool I was at ten years of age:



1) I obviously wasn't born in 1985, so I have no idea why my birthdate says so.
2) Bacolod used to have just 5 digit telephone numbers. My friends envied mine because it ended with 007.
3) Despite being an avid member of the Philatelic (stamp collecting) Club, I never got beat up in school.
4) "Taxidermy and shooting"- I used to enjoy shooting small creatures then stuffing them with cotton. You can imagine the horror of my environmentalist dad.
5) Who didn't like We Are The World?? Our entire class would get together during recess and sing this song with matching invisible earphones held up to our ears and we would argue who would get to sing who. The cool guys always got to do the Michael Jackson parts, the potentially gay ones did Cyndi Lauper. I think I was Kenny Loggins.
6) Okay, Drew Barrymore in E.T. and Firestarter. Yes. Brookie in Blue Lagoon. Of course. But Gretchen Barretto? What was I thinking? I think it was because she was the Heart Evangelista of her time just before she did all those classy Seiko skin flicks. Whatever. My taste has evolved since then.
7) "Dance: Break." Yesss. My signature move? The headspin. No one in grade school could touch me. Come to think of it, this is probably why no one ever beat me up. You don't mess with a stamp collecting breakdancer.

And of course, no autograph book would be complete without a LOVE portion:



1) "Have you ever been in love?" In retrospect that answer should have been No. But when I was ten I thought Jamie from Voltes V was THE ONE. And she was a cartoon.
2) Notice how my secret crush is so TOP SECRET that I couldn't just write it, I had to draw a STAMP of it.
3) "How did you MET?" They must have printed out this book from the same factory as Hello Kitty merchandise.
4) "Pretty, Blonde, Funny." I really have no recollection as to who this is. Maybe it's because it was so Top Secret I erased it from my mind. With a stamp.
5) Notice how I answered "do you believe in long engagements?" with a confident "Of course." I probably didn't even know what an engagement was.
6) "Love is loving someone and someone loving you." Ah, if it were only that simple.

By afternoon's end we had succeeded in throwing out a sugarcane truck's worth of trash, but not without stumbling on a few other gems:

Faded childhood photos. Looking at the massive smile on my face as I swam and frolicked in the beaches and farms and mountains, I'm really glad I grew up in Bacolod and not in Manila.

(I wonder, in this digital age where pictures never fade, will people still get as sentimental when they look at them 20 years from now?)

National Geographic back issues. Like comics, you just can't throw these away. My dad's National Geographic magazines were my inspiration for taking up photography. Then later on in life I stumbled across his OTHER magazines. Which is a different blog entry altogether...

I came across an old high school notebook and I couldn't answer any of the trigonometry problems that were in it.

I came across my mom's old letters and I remembered how beautiful her handwriting was.

So I started the day with the intention of throwing out trash and ended up walking down memory lane. Sometimes it's a really great place to visit. And doing it at the start of 2006 somehow makes it more poignant. To completely move forward you gotta go backwards. And smile and say goodbye and chuck 'em all in a cardboard box.