etherfarm

shredding the past

Later

03:10 on Tuesday, September 02, 2003 • 6 responses

Earlier

Apparently one of the reasons I returned to California was to be present for the moment in which I decided to turn my house inside out. Starting with the office.

I don’t quite recall the sequence of events, but they went something like this:

1. I walked into the room.
2. I looked at a perfectly functional arrangement of furniture and a perfectly acceptable layout of equipment on work surfaces.
3. I decided then and there that every single thing in the room had to be reconfigured.

So for the last four or five days or so I’ve been buried in any and all of the following: drywall dust; books; cables; audio, photographic and computer gear; files; power tools and screws and other hardware; shelving. The biggest pain in the ass is rewiring the studio. My solution? Sell off a few pieces of gear and presto—fewer things to cable together.

I’ve also decided to completely rebuild my staircase and landing, replacing the carpet with oak. But more on that next week.

As is the case with all re-office projects, sorting and trimming the files in my file cabinet was among the first stages. It only took 3 days to get through the first two drawers.

I can’t decide whether the process of shredding things found in my file cabinet is therapeutic or some twisted form of torture. In any case, going through my files is akin to going to a reunion for all the experiences I thought I had successfully offloaded from my working memory. It turns out that there were very good reasons for offloading some of said memories. Keep in mind that some of the things in my files date back to the paleolithic age. There are records and receipts from the time I lived in Chicago, a city I left almost exactly 8 years ago.

Phone records
Phone and cellphone numbers of people whom I’ve told to “have a nice life” (or, to be more precise, people whom I’ve told to “fuck off for life”). Telling people that I never want to speak to them again is one of my [many] personality flaws. If being my friend was like stepping to the plate in baseball, most people would be out after one strike. Some people would be asked to leave the park. I hate this about myself. So seeing these phone numbers and thinking about my inability to forgive certain forms of taking me for granted and particular types of flake-outness makes me sad. Very sad. Until I remember some of the people. That makes me even sadder. I wish these people were more honest and even marginally dependable, because some of them were pretty interesting people otherwise.

And yes, I found photos of these people in another file. And they got shredded too.

Financial records
The impulse purchase. The expensive impulse purchase. No—wait—they’re all expensive impulse purchases. I wish I was better with money. I need to find an inexpensive hobby. Like breathing. Oh shit. I have asthma. The year I spent $6700 on pulmonologist and emergency room visits and about $800 on asthma medications pretty much disqualifies breathing as a contender for ‘cheap hobby’. Damn.

Undergraduate papers
No one wants to remember what thoughts they committed to paper as an undergraduate. And on top of that, I certainly don’t want to remember that it wasn’t since I was an undergraduate that I’ve turned a paper in on time.

Documentation for various pieces of household equipment
Sign of the times: a manual for an answering machine purchased in 1994 is 8 pages long. A manual for an answering machine purchased in 2000 is 54 pages long and includes a “troubleshooting” section.

If you decide to go through your file cabinet…don’t. Have someone else do it for you. While I made my file cabinet lighter by roughly six kitchen-size garbage bags of shredded paper, I can’t say the trip down memory lane was particularly pleasant.