While executing a mission in the War on Shit All Over Our House (Operation Feng This Motherfrakkin' Shui) last night, I came across a little bag of stuff in my closet. Inside it, with a bunch of business cards, some old incense (Nag Champa is a constant in my life, it turns out) and a bunch of change, I found my sides and call sheet from the first day I worked on Star Trek: Nemesis a few years ago. (One page of my sides is scanned and pictured at right. Click to embiggen, but it's 1.3 MB, so don't complain if your modem screams at you and doesn't want to have a second date.)
There were a lot of things in my closet that were clearly important to me at one time, but it was as easy to throw them away as it was to open the closet door and dig them out: old T-shirts, shoes, hats, and a few little bags of stuff like the one which contained my sides. It was a sort of time capsule of the 2001-2005 versions of me, and I loved identifying the threads that have tied me together all these years: Converse shoes, collared bowling and lounge shirts, nerdy T-shirts, and baseball caps from the Cubs and Dodgers (why I end up with new caps at least twice a year is a great Mystery of the Universe.)
Every time I go through my stuff and find things that used to be important to me, only to jettison them into the great beyond, I feel a certain amount of freedom and serenity that I won't trade for anything. It's good to feel like my stuff doesn't own me, because it's pretty easy to get rid of my stuff. The other side of that coin, of course, is when I find things that I'm happy I kept, like these sides. I sat on my bedroom floor tonight and remembered holding those sides in my hand, even though I'd known the lines for days, when I was walking from the makeup trailer to the stage when I worked on Nemesis, and I'm glad that I have a physical touchstone from that day. The obnoxious red polyester shirt with the houndstooth pattern and slightly-too-big collar was a nice bonus, too.