I'm in Edmonton, where my parents have asked me to go through all of my childhood shit so that they can cull what they can and get the house ready to sell. I started the process yesterday, going through two bookshelves and three desk drawers. Dear Lord, I had a lot of useless crap. I've already stuffed one recycling bag and am well on my way to filling another.

I expected having to sort through my old belongings to be exhausting and emotional, but it hasn't been too bad so far, possibly because we went through a great purge of our apartment a few months back, when I learned that I needed to take a clinical approach. Still, twenty years' worth of accumulated possessions, memories, and unfulfilled ambitions are bound to be fraught.

What isn't hard at all is throwing out my old florid writing from my high school days. I'm almost embarrassed to read it—it's so awful. I now know that's a phase I had to go through. Experimenting and pushing the edges of my sensibilities so that I could feel out where my boundaries are. Not that I knew that's what I was doing at the time—I'm sure I thought my writing was fucking brilliant back then. I'll just have to keep this in mind when it's Lil' Dude's turn to write for school and not stifle his own discovery by trying to impose my standards of quality on him . Fortunately, since I rediscovered this blog eight years after starting it, as I read through the archives I was relieved to discover that only a few of my past entries really made me cringe. Of course I hope I'll never stop learning, developing, and evolving, but it's reassuring to know that my tendencies have been reasonably stable since I've matured a bit.

I also found (and discarded) stacks and stacks and stacks of my old study cards from high school and early university. The handwriting is mine, but I have no recollection of creating it. This exercise has made me realize how much I once learned and how incredibly much I've now forgotten. How knowledgeable I'd be if I could just retain a fraction more of what I read.

So now I'm left with about a shelf's worth of university-level physics and math textbooks that I have no idea what to do with. My cursory online research has turned up Books for Africa, an NGO based in the U.S., and Books 2 Prisoners, which has a Vancouver office. Not clear if the latter will accept physics texts, though; its focus seems to be the humanities, and law. More probing needed.