Scraps

Well, it's week 4 of the semester, which means I've finally started opening my textbooks.

I have a lot of used and rented textbooks, and I think my favorite thing (besides them being significantly cheaper than buying new textbooks) is finding scraps from the lives of previous people who used the book.

I just leafed through one of my textbooks for quantum mechanics and I found a black plastic...thing (I don't know a more sophisticated word for it since I don't know what it is), a note-card that says "Bis until 10" with a box around the number ten, and the torn front page of a Notebook PC Quick Start Guide.

Admittedly, these are not very exciting items, but there's a sort of cryptic nature to them; I think that's what makes them fascinating. These scraps, little thoughtless pieces from daily life that somehow got stuck in the textbook while being mixed up in a backpack, or maybe used as a place-marker for something important: I have no idea what role these scraps played in someone's life, or why they ended up in the textbook.

And I don't know why, but I just really like that.