Entry tags:
As papers in the recycling bin, such are the days of our lives
Sometimes a minor opportunity gives you a nudge and the momentum carries you to the finish line. (Or near enough.) Back in 2011 when I packed up the Oakland house, I had enough lead time that I did a lot of sifting and decluttering, but there were things I just wasn't ready for. (Or things I hadn't yet come to, such as letting go of the SCA.) But I set myself up for some future success when I decided to get rid of 14 drawers worth of filing cabinets and put the contents in bankers' boxes for later processing. When I moved into my current house, there was a stack of maybe two dozen boxes in the back of the garage that didn't have a clear "home location". Gradually, either because I figured out where the stuff should go, or because I had a chance to sort through it, that got whittled down to maybe about 20 boxes that got moved into the house and stacked in a sort of half-wall between the kitchen and the craft room.
Some of them (mostly journal offprints) got farmed out for scanning, an ongoing project with no urgency but a looming sense of unfinishedness. Some of them got moved into the library closet when I organized that as my "publications inventory" location. And that left about 9 boxes containing old financial records, old correspondence, fiction projects so old they only existed in manuscript hard copy, in-process research projects (ditto), and other random things.
A few weeks ago, during my weekly dinner with Denise, the random comment came up that some day she could bring a project over and keep me company while I started to tackle them. Sooner than we expected, the stars aligned last Wednesday and I made it through 4 of the easiest boxes (financial records and correspondence), taking it down to a half-box of immediate-family correspondence I wanted to keep.
With that momentum, I also sorted through one of the remaining file drawers (more old financial records, so I could included them in the same shredder delivery). And then this past weekend, when I was feeling too lethargic for anything but re-watching favorite movies, I pulled out the remaining boxes and tackled the more complicated stuff. In the end, most of it wasn't as emotionally complicated as I thought.
Lots of obsolete correspondence. Gone. Lots of SCA-related paperwork. Gone. Handwritten fiction projects dating as far back as high school (mostly written in pencil on notepaper, which means a lot of it was smudged badly enough I wouldn't have a hope of deciphering it anyway). That took a little more consideration and I did save a couple of projects that were tied to some con-langs I used for worldbuilding. But honestly, a lot of it was a vague outline of a generic fantasy adventure with maybe a few pages of the scene that inspired it. I saved the two completed novel manuscripts (one of which I don't anticipate ever going back to, one of which I plan to rewrite completely saving only the setting) and a few stories that had gotten polished enough that they collected rejection slips. I need to check them against my electronic files to make sure I have a final copy on the computer, after which I can let the paper go. Associated with the fiction were a lot of character doodles in the margins of my collect class notes. I hadn't yet figured out that I needed some sort of fidget mechanism to allow me to focus properly on lectures. Doodling was fairly harmless, but it led to writing out scenes and plot summaries on the backs of class handouts, which may explain certain test scores.
There was also a surprising amount of emo poetry of the "Private! Keep Out! Do Not Read On Pain Of Death!" variety. (The sort of I often wrote in one of my con-langs for extra security.) That was a rather pointed reminder that in my 20s I was not a happy person and I had no one I could talk to about my emotions. It's easy enough to let go of the paperwork that documents that era; harder to let go of the memory of spending more than half my life having no close friends I could trust with my inner life.
The last box was extra copies of handouts for classes I'd taught at some point, xerox masters of publications I have no expectation of ever reprinting. (I have electronic versions of the text for all of them.) Notes and annotated drafts for several professional articles that I've had published. Gone.
Those five boxes got sorted down into half a file drawer and half a box that needs to either be scanned into electronic form or double-checked against computer files. (Thank goodness for powerful searchh functions, because the organization of my computer files are not as logical as I'd like to believe.)
So...no more boxes between the kitchen and craft room. That means I need to examine the furniture organization that was working around it. But I have some ideas there. Maybe the momentum will take me through into finishing the kitchen decluttering I started at the beginning of the pandemic. Then I tackle the craft/sewing cabinet.
Some of them (mostly journal offprints) got farmed out for scanning, an ongoing project with no urgency but a looming sense of unfinishedness. Some of them got moved into the library closet when I organized that as my "publications inventory" location. And that left about 9 boxes containing old financial records, old correspondence, fiction projects so old they only existed in manuscript hard copy, in-process research projects (ditto), and other random things.
A few weeks ago, during my weekly dinner with Denise, the random comment came up that some day she could bring a project over and keep me company while I started to tackle them. Sooner than we expected, the stars aligned last Wednesday and I made it through 4 of the easiest boxes (financial records and correspondence), taking it down to a half-box of immediate-family correspondence I wanted to keep.
With that momentum, I also sorted through one of the remaining file drawers (more old financial records, so I could included them in the same shredder delivery). And then this past weekend, when I was feeling too lethargic for anything but re-watching favorite movies, I pulled out the remaining boxes and tackled the more complicated stuff. In the end, most of it wasn't as emotionally complicated as I thought.
Lots of obsolete correspondence. Gone. Lots of SCA-related paperwork. Gone. Handwritten fiction projects dating as far back as high school (mostly written in pencil on notepaper, which means a lot of it was smudged badly enough I wouldn't have a hope of deciphering it anyway). That took a little more consideration and I did save a couple of projects that were tied to some con-langs I used for worldbuilding. But honestly, a lot of it was a vague outline of a generic fantasy adventure with maybe a few pages of the scene that inspired it. I saved the two completed novel manuscripts (one of which I don't anticipate ever going back to, one of which I plan to rewrite completely saving only the setting) and a few stories that had gotten polished enough that they collected rejection slips. I need to check them against my electronic files to make sure I have a final copy on the computer, after which I can let the paper go. Associated with the fiction were a lot of character doodles in the margins of my collect class notes. I hadn't yet figured out that I needed some sort of fidget mechanism to allow me to focus properly on lectures. Doodling was fairly harmless, but it led to writing out scenes and plot summaries on the backs of class handouts, which may explain certain test scores.
There was also a surprising amount of emo poetry of the "Private! Keep Out! Do Not Read On Pain Of Death!" variety. (The sort of I often wrote in one of my con-langs for extra security.) That was a rather pointed reminder that in my 20s I was not a happy person and I had no one I could talk to about my emotions. It's easy enough to let go of the paperwork that documents that era; harder to let go of the memory of spending more than half my life having no close friends I could trust with my inner life.
The last box was extra copies of handouts for classes I'd taught at some point, xerox masters of publications I have no expectation of ever reprinting. (I have electronic versions of the text for all of them.) Notes and annotated drafts for several professional articles that I've had published. Gone.
Those five boxes got sorted down into half a file drawer and half a box that needs to either be scanned into electronic form or double-checked against computer files. (Thank goodness for powerful searchh functions, because the organization of my computer files are not as logical as I'd like to believe.)
So...no more boxes between the kitchen and craft room. That means I need to examine the furniture organization that was working around it. But I have some ideas there. Maybe the momentum will take me through into finishing the kitchen decluttering I started at the beginning of the pandemic. Then I tackle the craft/sewing cabinet.