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My life isn't that busy at the moment, though the lack of money is making it stressful (and thankfully, I'm in an upcoming pharmaceutical study which ought to take the edge of my money woes significantly). But the majority of my roommates are either prepping for finals week or past finals and graduating this semester, so I think some of the crazy time-deprivation has rubbed off on me. Starting in a week or two, things should be calmer, which will hopefully have a positive effect on my reliability and timeliness.
Anyway. Making a post simply to apologize for not posting seems a rather pointless exercise, so I suppose I ought to find something to discuss.
I'm a packrat. I've spent some time today cleaning out the Inbox of my old yahoo mail account, the one I used from age 13 or 14 until last year (technically, I still use it - for facebook notifications and chatting on Yahoo Messenger). I had 2700 messages in my inbox when I started - and I sort mail into subfolders when I can, so at a guess that's over 4k total messages. 400ish a year. More than one email received every day, on average, that I felt was worth saving.
In my apartment are boxes full of notebooks. They date back about as far as the emails do -- they'd date back further, but the paper pretty much starts falling apart at that point, or the pencil lead has gotten too smudged to read. Most of these notebooks don't even have a single story in them. Many of them just have story seeds, or single lines of dialogue, or mental images I wanted captured - one per page, seventy or so per notebook. The last time I counted my notebooks was when I first moved up to college, nearly 7 years ago. Then, I had something approaching sixty. Now... well, I've gotten exponentially more prolific over the past few years (though nowhere close to the level I want to get to).
It's a big number. A lot of dead trees, a lot of flipped bits of data (or whatever). Most of which, I freely admit, I may never even look at again. And yet, bringing myself to part with it is nigh impossible. I'm not a materialistic guy; it's not the acquisition of stuff I care about.
It's the ideas. Even discarded, even when I sneer or cringe when looking at them, even then I want to keep them, for the map they show me of what I was thinking and feeling, how my brain was working, who I was back then. Sound and fury, signifying nothing, most likely. But the Romance of the Record seduces me every time - the tangibility of my history. The evidence chamber of my mental precinct house, and half a dozen metaphors even more strained.
A lot of these saved emails, these notebook scribbles, (these LJ posts, here and on my old journal), are recursively introspective - they're talking about how I have changed as a person, how I look back, how I collect, how I build myself. I think this one may be the most meta, talking about talking about myself, but still.
It's worth doing, this forensic examination of shed snakeskins. That's what I'm trying to say, and having difficulty justifying. I learn from it. It calms me, grounds me, keeps me thinking about what I do and how and why I do it. By charting a course from past to present, it gives me a notion about the future (probably not a very good one). My interest in the discussion, however it turns in on itself, is one of the few things that doesn't change from one examination to the next.
Does this provoke thought in anyone but me?
Anyway. Making a post simply to apologize for not posting seems a rather pointless exercise, so I suppose I ought to find something to discuss.
I'm a packrat. I've spent some time today cleaning out the Inbox of my old yahoo mail account, the one I used from age 13 or 14 until last year (technically, I still use it - for facebook notifications and chatting on Yahoo Messenger). I had 2700 messages in my inbox when I started - and I sort mail into subfolders when I can, so at a guess that's over 4k total messages. 400ish a year. More than one email received every day, on average, that I felt was worth saving.
In my apartment are boxes full of notebooks. They date back about as far as the emails do -- they'd date back further, but the paper pretty much starts falling apart at that point, or the pencil lead has gotten too smudged to read. Most of these notebooks don't even have a single story in them. Many of them just have story seeds, or single lines of dialogue, or mental images I wanted captured - one per page, seventy or so per notebook. The last time I counted my notebooks was when I first moved up to college, nearly 7 years ago. Then, I had something approaching sixty. Now... well, I've gotten exponentially more prolific over the past few years (though nowhere close to the level I want to get to).
It's a big number. A lot of dead trees, a lot of flipped bits of data (or whatever). Most of which, I freely admit, I may never even look at again. And yet, bringing myself to part with it is nigh impossible. I'm not a materialistic guy; it's not the acquisition of stuff I care about.
It's the ideas. Even discarded, even when I sneer or cringe when looking at them, even then I want to keep them, for the map they show me of what I was thinking and feeling, how my brain was working, who I was back then. Sound and fury, signifying nothing, most likely. But the Romance of the Record seduces me every time - the tangibility of my history. The evidence chamber of my mental precinct house, and half a dozen metaphors even more strained.
A lot of these saved emails, these notebook scribbles, (these LJ posts, here and on my old journal), are recursively introspective - they're talking about how I have changed as a person, how I look back, how I collect, how I build myself. I think this one may be the most meta, talking about talking about myself, but still.
It's worth doing, this forensic examination of shed snakeskins. That's what I'm trying to say, and having difficulty justifying. I learn from it. It calms me, grounds me, keeps me thinking about what I do and how and why I do it. By charting a course from past to present, it gives me a notion about the future (probably not a very good one). My interest in the discussion, however it turns in on itself, is one of the few things that doesn't change from one examination to the next.
Does this provoke thought in anyone but me?
