Shredding My Life, Circa Early Aughts

In packing and moving one's life to a new space, one must determine the value of one's possessions. Yeah, when I was deciding what I actually needed to bring with me in our move, I got to throw out and donate some crap but I'd say the single most satisfying purge was the banker's box chock full of files full of information that was at one time, important enough to name a colored file and keep. Yesterday I stood in front of the industrial grade paper shredder at work and permanently destroyed many old parts of my life. I now delineate some of the stuff I kept and subsequently abolished.

Mind you, this is now 2007. I have not worked in a restaurant since sometime in mid-2004ish. I still had every pay stub and clock out chit from my time in restaurants, from 1999 to 2004. To be fair, and to not totally label myself an anal-retentive freak, my operating partner at unamed-but-easy-to-figure-out Corporate American Chinese casual dining chain, was trimming back our hours after we'd clocked out. Not to screw us out of money per se, but rather to make his total numbers look better thereby making him the Golden Boy of the Southern California stores. Ooooh. Exciting. I kept them as proof of the money that was owed me, but the accounting of said shaving mysteriously never made it to the hands of the Regional Manager. I wasn't over it until I was included in a class action suit that awarded me double what they actually should have paid me in the first place, and my best friend who was still a manager would comp my meals. So karma wins again. Fuck you PF Chang's. I mean, nevermind. It felt good to shred those little yellowed print outs.

There were the notes, office space quotes and emails from the failed startup production company that never paid me. I worked for this guy I met at one of my tables, and we were going to produce content originating mostly from comic books. I'm not sure what the truth of the situation is, but something went awry with the timing of us going public and doing PR too early, or something, and the thing never got off the ground. I'm probably owed about $3000 for my time but seeing as that was 2002, I seriously doubt I'll ever see a dime of it. Shredded.

Papers with the address of where I lived with my ex from 1999-2001, confetti. Old itemized phone bills, kaput. Email exchanges with an ex who is now married with a baby and another bun in the oven, gone. Copies of letters of recommendation from my high school teachers so I could get into college, bye bye.

There was something really freeing about letting go of so much crap and filling up the bin with slivers of paper that at one time resembled the experiences in my life. When I opened the bin to pack it down, I could see the occasional "Victoria" or "Tarzana" where I had inserted the pay stubs in just such a way where my full name or the town I grew up in were not dissected.

The call sheets survived, the copies of my first ever tax refund checks for $14 and $6 did not. The tax returns survived, anything ever related to my time at the boutique talent agency did not. Insurance policies from a car I haven't owned in five years only exist now in narrow strips that will probably be recycled into mushy paper pulp and new blank sheets.

This has been a great year for new beginnings.