I was home sick this weekend. Sick with AFFluenza. That affliction many of us have with just having too much stuff. It is true: stuff takes time. I continued the clean out I started with the past few weeks (spurred by my shelves) and threw out loads of papers. I hold on to many papers. It's the hardest thing for me to get rid of. I'm not talking healthcare claims forms and utility bills, I'm talking personal things like notebooks, journals, letters, and memorabilia (which is a very loosely defined term for me). I have managed over the years to dispose of much of what I've collected over the years, but not completely. Though it would be tempting to just dump everything in one fell swoop, I don't want to completely rid myself of everything that holds memories. It's just that there's so much of it, and I have a hard time distinguishing between the important and the "yeah, it happened." I wish I haven't been such a collector over the years. The longer you keep something, the harder it is to let go of. What had ZERO significance somehow snowballs into an extremely meaningful bit of your past.
A major coups this weekend for me was disposing of my calendars. Appointment calendars from 2000 to 2006. Nothing fancy. I think I just liked looking back and remembering certain days. I decided to photograph a few pages. Like this event:
A pottery sale that I went to with Erin in August of 2000.
This brings me to another topic. You'd think with "going paperless" and with technology, life would be easier, simpler. In some ways it is. But, there's a whole OTHER problem created: techno trash. Another duty I was engaged in today was trying to sort through all my CDs of computer files and deciding what to keep and what else to archive. Between electronic music, documents, pictures…there's just so much info. And, so much trash. I have a bunch of spent CDs, as well as my old computer and other similar techno flotam and jetsam to find a recycling home for. In some ways, having records/cds was easier, because at least then, you wouldn't find yourself with random multiple copies by accident.
We also deal with advancing technology. For example, my VCR and tapes. I removed all my tapes from the boxes I was storing them in. I don't know why there's even a question, but part of me wants to keep them. Yeah, I like the films, but I literally haven't touched them in over a year. Literally.
So, once again, I'm ending a weekend, and I have piles of stuff yet to deal with–like the tapes, like a bag of random stuff from my clean out to donate, like paper and cds that I have to work on consolidating/cleaning. Sigh.
I see why some people like to just bring in a dumpster and start throwing. I just want it over. I want the stuff to never have happened. Know what I mean?
Lest I feel defeated, I made progress….bags of papers to prove it: