Travelphilia is moving!

When I first moved here when I was six, my uncle introduced me to the little girl across the street. We quickly became friends, the type that's more like a sister in that the two of us could bicker and make up in the span of ten minutes. I spent a lot of time around her family and vice versa, and we picked up each others' quirks. They had this phrase they used in their family called "goo gee ga," which meant, in a word, junk--the kind of stuff that sits in a drawer somewhere that you never look at, but still can't bear to throw out.

Back then, I had an entire bureau that was full of goo gee ga. Over the years, and especially since I got back from college, quite a bit of it has disappeared. But now I'm moving, and it keeps surprising me when I find things from my past that I'd completely forgotten about.

The worst are the pictures. Awkward school photos from high school that I thought might come in handy someday, books full of photos from the days before digital cameras when you just had to take what you got when the film was developed, envelopes of pictures from a family trip to Disney World that never made it into albums or frames. Then there's the scratchy blanket I used to keep on my bed when I was a kid, the boxes of old birthday cards, the Polaroid camera I got one Christmas for which I can no longer buy film. Tons of books that I'll never read again, cute pictures my little brother drew me in school, instruction booklets for cell phones and electronics that I haven't used in years. Almost-empty notebooks left over from school and saved to provide scratch paper. A half-finished scrapbook of high school events that seemed important but that I can't bring myself to complete now. A monkey carved out of coconuts that my boyfriend calls "creepy" but that I can't bear to part with because my uncle brought it to me as a souveneir from a tropical vacation before he passed away.

My life has been taken over by goo gee ga now. Most of it will probably end up in my parents' garage, in a back corner upstairs to collect dust until they go through and make me throw it out 10 years from now. Will it seem more valuable then, or will I have saved it for nothing? Should I assume that if I don't need it for the next chapter of my life in Washington, D.C., then I won't ever look back for it at all?

Either way, Travelphilia is moving--to Washington, D.C., to be exact, for my new job. The goo gee ga problem explains my hiatus from posting, but I should be back on track after I've settled in and found an apartment. In the meantime, it's goodbye Boston, hello D.C.!