By the end of my long weekend in Ohio I had reduced all of my preschool, grade school, high school, and college memories to two boxes–however, I also had half a box of essays and assignments (from high school and college–good god, the typed essays from middle school were in a font I’ve never seen since and on the kind of paper that’s attached at the short end into one long accordion of Apple 2E-produced large print) typed on standard printing paper, making them scannable. Thus my hero of a mother has been sending me emails all week with large PDF attachments and subject lines like “EL156 – Victorians and Moderns” or “Performance Ethnography.”
(Don’t worry, she has access to an industrial scanner at work and just has to slide the piles of papers into the feed. I’m an only child, not a sadist!)
Even as there’s more work to be done in the basement–which is okay with me, because I’m dumbly attached to things and my parents’ house is the only one they’ve lived in since before I was born, so I don’t mind the excuse to go back again before they move in the fall–there’s now more space there and less space on my hard drive. “Space” in a non three dimensional sense, so there’s no worry about running out of room (at least since I have a very large external hard drive and a business Dropbox account), but…
If I have thousands of pictures, when am I going to look at them?
If you have a record of everything, is anything important?
(If you have a map that’s the size of the world, can you ever find anything on it?)
It might be that taking pictures of everything I get rid of (not EVERYTHING–I don’t need five C-shaped post-it notes with the address and phone number of the guy I liked in sixth grade written on them) is my memory-addict version of nicotine gum, and that eventually, I’ll go through those and pare them down as well (I may have a big hard drive and space in the cloud, but my macbook’s GBs are…dwindling). I know I went through all of these papers at some point after college (or, at the least, was asked if I would perhaps consider going through some of them and responded by running away shrieking “IT’S TOO SOON!”)
That said, I thoroughly enjoyed the act of rifling through the boxes, even if I wished I weren’t so pressed for time.
Back to computer space: Now that film is a luxury/choice rather than a necessity, I have so many more duplicated, unnecessary, and unrecognizable pictures. I actually started to go through them several months ago–getting rid of repeats or shots of Dorito bags that seemed somehow interesting at the time, captioning the photos so that can I can locate myself in the when and where of them, labeling people with first and last names because those start to erode–but when something isn’t shouting its presence in your physical real estate, like the extra books I have in a pile next to my bed, it’s much easier to ignore.
From boxes to bytes, I’m filtering, if slowly.
