At the top of my hallway closet rested one of those big pieces of clutter that's hard to get rid of. Yet I'm sure it has people asking "WHY?!?"
This is a bridge made of Popsicle sticks.
So, what's the story behind this ugly thing? Allow me to explain.
When I started college, we had a week-long orientation program for freshman. It was excellent. We eased into this new world, and adulthood itself for that matter, with a bunch of different activities that were fun or informative or both. This was an engineering college, and at some point we were put into different groups and were assigned an engineering task by our Orientation Leader: build a bridge of a specified length that would be able to withstand a given amount of weight in the middle, using only these Popsicle sticks and glue. This was the bridge that my team and I built.
Why have I held on to it for so long? I know exactly why. It's because of what it represents for me. I absolutely loved college. I especially loved my first year there. And this bridge represented the most fun time there. It was a time before any of us had become disillusioned or bitter in college. It was a time before people got stressed out over classes. The women were still making eye contact and smiling. We were all still having fun and making conversations.
I don't know how universal this is at colleges, but at mine, students rarely made any friends after freshman year. After freshman year, the students become entirely apathetic. They go on to become curmudgeon engineers. The students would often complain that there was nothing to do in our town, but when when the school would finally put on an event, they'd complain they had no time. These were guys who ended up spending every weekend night sitting in their dorm rooms with the door closed, glued to the Nintendo. Then they'd wonder why they couldn't find a girlfriend.
I always fought against that whole mindset. I loved college. I loved learning. I had a passion for what I was majoring in. And here was my fragile little bridge back to that happy world of ingenuity and creativity.
But do I need the actual 2-foot long, dust-collecting, closet-shelf hogging, impractical bridge to capture and remember all of that? Or will some high-resolution digital photos of it work, and maybe just one or two pieces from the bridge, work just as well? I think I can settle with the latter. So long, bridge. you are gone but never forgotten.
I managed to find a few other things along the way, including yet another damn floppy disc. This had a PDF file on it. I think I used this disc to transfer the huge file (or at least huge for its time) from work to my home computer which was still using a dial-up modem at the time. Well, I already have local copies and burned CD-R copies of the same file, so there's no need for this one now. Into the trash you go.
I also found a little sign I made upon the death of Jerry Falwell in 2007. But I also have a saved .JPG file somewhere of this same picture that I printed out, so there's no need to keep the paper around.
It sure shocked one of my co-workers at the time, though. He wasn't an evangelical Christian, but tried to guilt-trip me for the whole idea of being glad that another human being was dead. I stood my ground and made no apologies. I'm still glad Falwell's dead. I'm also glad I got to throw more stuff away.
