plastic ninja

My Living Room is a mess right now. To some that have been at my place before – that may surprise you. But it looks like I’m having a walk-through Garage Sale at my condo right now, but that is not the case. Having my first place, Mom and Dad are recognizing this fact and whenever I’m home in Ohio they’re constantly trying to get me to go through old boxes in our basement. These boxes are pretty much a gigantic collection of stuff that I’ve acquired from birth to High School. Now that I have the space, it’s now my responsibility to take the contents of said boxes back to my own place and store them somewhere. Well, needless to say – they’re beginning to pile up. So much so that it’s tough for anyone to hang clothes if they come and visit since the boxes are overtaking the 2nd bedroom’s closet space. So that has been this week’s project: go through all this stuff! If a Jonathan Botkin museum were to ever open, this would be the stuff that would be left in the warehouse and never shown to the public for the simple fact that it means nothing to anyone else except Jonathan Botkin.

Among one of the boxes was a smaller box. I remember going through this box after I graduated from High School and I remember purposely putting things inside of this smaller box because they meant something to me. The contents: a denim dew rag, a plastic set of joke glasses with a nose and mustache, a half used bottle of cologne, and many other quality items. Another item that the box contained was a 1” orange plastic ninja. This is the one thing that surprised me the most. Why the crap would I keep this? It just seemed like the most irrelevant thing in the whole box. But as I thought about it, I realized that it was kept for a reason because I don’t consider myself a packrat, but rather a nostalgic person. So for some reason High-School-Graduate-Jonathan though it necessary to keep small plastic ninja guy because it reminded him of something. And whatever that was, it was import to me at the time and I needed to be reminded of "that". Whether I got it on some High School band trip, a meaningful Youth Group retreat or it was because it was given to me by someone that I wanted to remember for being funny/stupid/crazy. Whatever the reason, back then I need that memento to bridge High School familiarity into the unknown environment of College. I guess it’s just interesting how on rare (albeit important) occasions, God places items into our lives for a split second and really, that’s all that was necessary. Whether that item was a person who helped us through a rough time, or an event that taught us a lesson - the purpose was served and the bridge was crossed.