(i wrote all this on a shared blog site earlier today, but when i was done, i realized this is not really a blog, but rather a journal entry. so here it is, with a few additions.)
last night i finally gathered my courage and attacked the mess of boxes and papers otherwise known as my study (or “nick’s room” as he likes to call it). even since i moved in, that room has been like my own version of a basement. no one who lives in clear lake ever has an actual basement, i think because the water table is too high. it’s really too bad. attics galore, but no basements.
my house in charlotte has this chilly, dark, dank basement. you go down these wooden stairs and come out in a little room with a cement floor and brick walls. there’s an old tool bench where my dad used to work, covered in cobwebs because it’s been ages since he’s done any sort of construction or building or fixing. the thing about our basement is that it’s not really good for storage, but great for being a creepy, damp, mysterious place. the brick walls only go up about 5 feet, and then the basement opens up to where you can see all the way under the house, to the brick foundation itself. you can see the pillars that are holding the place up, and if you crawled up over the wall, you’d be covered in dirt. i haven’t been down in the basement in a long time. our attic is the much more interesting place to explore if you’re looking for treasures, for things you long ago stored away and have since forgotten about.
anyway. i unpacked boxes and moved my new bookcases from the living room to their permanent positions in the study. when i was cleaning my stuff out of the attic in charlotte, i discovered that i don’t really have many items from high school, which was a bit of a surprise. just a couple projects i did, and yearbooks. photos, of course, but i wasn’t the obsessive picture snapper that i am now, so i really only have pictures from the touristy marching band trip each year. it’s not hard to figure out the reason for my lack of high school memorabilia though. when i graduated and went to college, i had to not only pack the things i’d need at school, but everything else in my room as well, since my brothers were finally going to be able to have their own rooms. (we had three bedrooms for four kids; i was the first to leave, and hence the one to lose their room.) so when i graduated from high school, what i didn’t pack got thrown away. so there’s not much left.
instead, the treasures i discovered last night came when i finally got around to looking through the two big portfolios i have of all the artwork i did when i was younger, and dreamed of growing up to be an artist. i found a pencil version of the self-portrait that my mom has hanging over the fireplace in charlotte. this really cool colored pencil drawing of a cat. a pen and ink rendition of peter rabbit. an acrylic painting of the ocean crashing over some rocks on the shore. tons of disney characters i drew on transparancies and then painted during the phase when i wanted to be a disney animator. the very first thing i ever did in art class–a watermelon fruit basket drawn when i was probably 6 or 7 years old.
it is weird that my career aspirations shifted so suddenly from artist to engineer. but perhaps that explains why i loved making posters in high school, and doing layout for the nique, and why some days i still want to run away and do something creative.