Cleaning Out My Room

I've been cleaning out my childhood bedroom in my parents' house recently, and it has been a very time-consuming task, to say the least. You see, I'm the biggest packrat in the world, and I hate throwing anything out. Unfortunately, my mom has been putting pressure on me to get rid of all the crap I've been storing in my room in the basement, and she threatened to clean it out herself if I didn't do it. This is a completely unacceptable scenario because I don't remember if I hid anything down there that I don't want my parents to know about. Even though I don't remember having anything incriminating, you never know if you hid something so well that you forgot about it. I'm also unsure of what the statute of limitation would be for my parents finding out about numerous indiscretions, so I'd rather not risk it. What this means is that I've been having to make a bunch of tough decisions, such as whether or not to keep that ticket stub I got for seeing the movie Dante's Peak at Hawthorne Theaters in 1997. I mean, how can I live without this priceless heirloom that reminds me of when I went to see that timeless film?

Quick aside: in order to determine the year that the ticket stub was from, I visited imdb.com. When I got to the Dante's Peak page I found that there were upwards of thirty different users who wrote a review for Dante's Peak. Checking some of the other things that some of the actors were in (one of the guys in the movie was the university president from Coach and has appeared in about 500 shitty sitcoms during the 90's) I came across the pages for some other forgettable movies/TV shows, things like The Jackal(Bruce Willis as a hitman), The Fan(Robert DeNiro as an obsessed fan of Wesley Snipes), Phenom(a sitcom about a teen girl who was training to be a tennis star), and Grace Under Fire(Brett Butler as a single mom). All of these had similar numbers of user reviews and comments. Do you ever wonder where exactly all these internet reviewers came from? Of all the people I know, two or three might actually remember the movie Dante's Peak, but they neither remember nor care enough about the movie to take the time to write an extensive review about it. So who is actually doing this? Was Grace Under Fire really that great of a show that it built up a loyal fanbase who still discuss it on the internet today? Did I just miss the genius of it or something? And yes, I am well aware of the irony of using a blog to ridicule people for wasting time online.

Anyway, during my cleaning duties I also have come across a lot of old pictures, which aren't always enjoyable to look through, especially if they are old pictures of you. In fact, after looking through these pictures I've come to the conclusion that in all my life, I have never once looked cool. Sure it's not always the same thing-- sometimes I look awkward, sometimes I look dorky, sometimes I look stupid, sometimes I look confused, sometimes I look drunk(in some of the more recent pictures, and really is just a combination of looking awkward, dorky, stupid, and confused at the same time), oftentimes I'm blinking-- but I never look cool. And this is a little unsettling because for at least a couple of these pictures, I'm certain that at the time I thought I looked cool. Otherwise, why have a rattail or a bowl cut? Or why wear the red and black plaid suit with a smiley face tie? It sure makes me wonder what me in five years is gonna think about pictures of me now. Whoa, these are some pretty heavy thoughts, I think I might need to lie down for a little bit.