If I'm A Packrat, Then Old Bills Are Cheese

So I spent the weekend going through boxes of stuff to store, pack, donate, and throw out.

My brother and I went through several boxes of old mail. Things like telephone bills from 1990, old pay stubs from my job in college, and cancelled checks. Thousands and THOUSANDS of dollars in cancelled checks. (And that's not because I had three old checks for a thousand dollars in there. The average amount was more like $46.50)

You would not BELIEVE the number of things that have your social security number on them! It was a full-time shredding operation for the both of us.

In amongst the old credit card statements and long distance bills from MCI (remember them? remember long distance charges???) I found a few things worth keeping -- mostly letters and birthday cards from my parents and grandmother.

I also stumbled on a Christmas card from an old friend of mine from college named Anne Joseph. We studied together for a semester at the National Theatre Institute in Waterford, Connecticut.

It's been a long time, and we fell out of touch, but I decided to do a quick Google search and it turns out that, after getting degrees from Yale Law and Harvard, she did a little clerking for... Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She's now teaching law at Berkeley.

It's interesting that two of the most fascinating people I know I met at NTI. (The other being Danica, who has been a fabulous fountain of advice and encouragement about moving to LA.)

--Although Danica and I both agreed way back in the day that if anyone was going to go on to something huge, it would be Anne Joseph. NTI, or 'Theatre Boot Camp' as it was called, was her way of bringing some right-brained balance to her education.

-Tom, who really hopes that she organized some staged readings of Strindberg with the other Supreme Court clerks.