dianaschnuth

I’m not sure why I took this photo. I think it was mainly because of the cats on my desk. At any rate, I kind of enjoyed seeing this snapshot in time: Autumn, 1995.

During the summer before I went off to college, Mom and I moved out of the craptastic Walden Apartments in Medina to a nicer neighborhood on Jackson Street. We were on the third floor of a small apartment building—about eight units total, I think.

I didn’t get to spend much time there before I went off to college—or did we not move there until I was *in* college? I think that was it. At any rate, I spent one year in college before I got put on Academic Suspension and had to spend a semester at home. No internet, no computer, and Mom’s new boyfriend Gary was suddenly in the mix. This photo was taken during that time.

Commentary, from left to right:

I forget where I got that white, wide-brimmed hat (way lower left corner), but I recently unpacked it from a box that had been living at Mom and Step-Gary’s place for years. It’s no longer really white, but a kind of tan nicotine-coated color. I need to clean it in a bad way.

That same dresser lives in my bedroom right this moment. I recently unpacked the doll, which was a present from my Nana (my first stepdad Tom’s mother), and the jewelry box from the same storage box which held the white hat.

Note the loverly ghetto “curtain,” made from a bedsheet thrown over the plastic curtain-rod. In front of that, my desk, which was a salvaged sewing machine table, sans the sewing machine. When Mom and Gary moved to Parma a year later, they left my desk behind. I was pissed… but now, looking at the desk and its condition, I can see why they left it.

On the desk, my two cats, Vic (left) and Sylvester (right). Sly lived to be about twelve years old, having lived through my middle school and high school years and nearly all of my college years. In this photo, he was about seven.

Vic adopted us when I was in high school, while we were living in the Walden Apartments. We had a crappy window screen that consisted of screen material nailed to a homegrown wooden frame, with plenty of space at the top for a little kitten to climb into. Every time he’d climb in and get caught between the screen and the closed window, we’d open the window, pick him up, and toss him out the front door into the snow—and by the time the door was closed, he’d be back inside the screen. We finally gave up, and Sly had a new friend. 🙂 Vic lived through Christmas 2001, I think, to about age eleven or twelve. In this photo, he was five.

I think my Aunt made that bookshelf for me out of plywood. Note the entire shelf of Star Trek paperbacks. Also on the bookshelf is the dual-cassette CD boom box that my stepdad Tom got me for my 15th birthday. That lasted me quite a while. Did some cassette dubbing for bootleg trades in college, got its CD lid broken by Amy (quite by accident), and remained in service even when I had to smack the top cover repeatedly to get the CD laser to track properly.

To the right of the bookshelf: my keyboard stand (the keyboard is standing against the wall, out-of-frame) and my Guitar Chords poster (did I even still *have* a guitar? I don’t recall, but I must have).

Yes, this was the normal state of my bedroom. This was “clean,” if you can believe that.

Sometimes it’s fun going through old photos of normal life. I remember things I’d forgotten about my daily slog through existence, and things that seemed so mundane back then are nostalgic now. What’s even stranger is comparing the photos with what I wrote in my journal back then, and getting a bigger picture of what my life was like… or what I thought it was like.