Cruft
My life is full of cruft.
My life is a hard drive of fixed size, with various bits strewn about in badly fragmented parts of this hard drive. There are precious few free sectors left, and there's just enough swap space in there to move little bits in and out.
I'm reaching a point where it's unmanageable. Soon there won't be any swap space. There won't be any free sectors. I'll just seize up and I will no longer be able to progress.
How did I get here? 41 years of life has accumulated many memories. These memories are in the form of material possessions which have clung on to me like barnacles. I cannot pry them free and let them loose. They are my memories, and without my memories, who am I? Where did I come from? What did I do?
The problem with all these material possessions, my memories of what I have done in my life, is that it prevents me from moving forwards. I spend so much time maintaining my possessions that I have no free time left to progress and be creative. There's just no space for it.
I'm not a hoarder. Well, I'm not an extreme hoarder, but I am a pack rat. I have thrown out things. I have made decisions in the past and discarded items which have collected where I have decided the memories attached to them are not important. But I must become more drastic in my actions.
I knew about this problem long ago, but it hit me again last night. I 'need' space in the house to work on new creative projects. But there's all this junk in there now. Ok, so I can box up some of the junk I don't need and put it in the garage. But the garage right now is packed to the gills with other junk. So maybe I can discard some items in the garage to make space.
So I go into the garage and pull out my old Mac which I have promised to someone. I bring it inside along with all the equipment that I'll send along with it. Housemate cleans it up. We power it up. Except for a dead CMOS battery, the thing works like a charm. I cleaned up the hard drive ages ago, but it still has games and other applications that I played back in the early 90s! Oh man, the memories flooded back. I remember how much time I spent farting around with those applications, and those cheesy games.
Still, I'm willing to let go of that. It's long enough ago that maybe I should be willing to forget that part of my life. But it really is forgetting a chunk of multiple years that I lived. It's a tough price to pay in order to progress in life. To go further in my life, I must forget parts of who I once was.
I also pulled out a cardboard moving box full of photos, from an era before digital photography. I had hoped that I could discard a number of them because back then I regularly had double prints made, especially for photos during furry cons. People always like photos of themselves, and I handed out prints of people I knew to those people.
I sorted out a bunch of those already, but not all. I was hoping to find the doubles I had not already distributed so I could toss them.
I found the box to be far less organized than I hoped. I even found a number of photos that I never realized I had. And the memories. There are few things that evoke strong memories as photos for me. I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of items in that box that I needed to go through, so I closed it back up and put it aside. I'll look at it again tonight to see how much I can get through.
But this is just a taste of what I have to deal with. I have too much stuff which act as reminders of what I have done so far in my life. Having all this stuff impedes future progress because my current stuff gets in the way. I act as a curator in a museum of my own life. Each day adds more stuff to maintain.
I have books. I have papers with handwritten notes that I've made for my work. There is so much to learn, but there is not enough time on this earth for me to learn all that I could from the books I already have, assuming all I ever wanted to do was just book learning.
I have an inventory of electronic parts for soldery projects. I have bags of fur and lycra and pvc and fleece and zippers and foam all begging to be made into something wearable. I have 'some' tools. I have very little workspace. I need to break free of this madness.
I have many projects that I would like to work on, but I am forced to spend a good deal of time preparing for it by ridding myself of the less important reminders in my life. I hope that I don't get rid of anything important.
Maybe I could just find a bigger place. That would certainly help. At this point, I should just buy a house. But this area has a crushingly high price for entry if I wanted to buy within a decent commuting distance from work. Or I would trade money for time by commuting longer distances. No, that would not do, and is in itself a whole journal entry whose size would rival this one.
I envy those who seem to get by with nothing. I don't know how you all do it. Rooms devoid of everything but some furniture and some decorations and bare space. How do you organize your life? How do you remember what you've done? How do you share what you've done and what you've made if you can't see and feel it within arms reach?
My life is a hard drive of fixed size, with various bits strewn about in badly fragmented parts of this hard drive. There are precious few free sectors left, and there's just enough swap space in there to move little bits in and out.
I'm reaching a point where it's unmanageable. Soon there won't be any swap space. There won't be any free sectors. I'll just seize up and I will no longer be able to progress.
How did I get here? 41 years of life has accumulated many memories. These memories are in the form of material possessions which have clung on to me like barnacles. I cannot pry them free and let them loose. They are my memories, and without my memories, who am I? Where did I come from? What did I do?
The problem with all these material possessions, my memories of what I have done in my life, is that it prevents me from moving forwards. I spend so much time maintaining my possessions that I have no free time left to progress and be creative. There's just no space for it.
I'm not a hoarder. Well, I'm not an extreme hoarder, but I am a pack rat. I have thrown out things. I have made decisions in the past and discarded items which have collected where I have decided the memories attached to them are not important. But I must become more drastic in my actions.
I knew about this problem long ago, but it hit me again last night. I 'need' space in the house to work on new creative projects. But there's all this junk in there now. Ok, so I can box up some of the junk I don't need and put it in the garage. But the garage right now is packed to the gills with other junk. So maybe I can discard some items in the garage to make space.
So I go into the garage and pull out my old Mac which I have promised to someone. I bring it inside along with all the equipment that I'll send along with it. Housemate cleans it up. We power it up. Except for a dead CMOS battery, the thing works like a charm. I cleaned up the hard drive ages ago, but it still has games and other applications that I played back in the early 90s! Oh man, the memories flooded back. I remember how much time I spent farting around with those applications, and those cheesy games.
Still, I'm willing to let go of that. It's long enough ago that maybe I should be willing to forget that part of my life. But it really is forgetting a chunk of multiple years that I lived. It's a tough price to pay in order to progress in life. To go further in my life, I must forget parts of who I once was.
I also pulled out a cardboard moving box full of photos, from an era before digital photography. I had hoped that I could discard a number of them because back then I regularly had double prints made, especially for photos during furry cons. People always like photos of themselves, and I handed out prints of people I knew to those people.
I sorted out a bunch of those already, but not all. I was hoping to find the doubles I had not already distributed so I could toss them.
I found the box to be far less organized than I hoped. I even found a number of photos that I never realized I had. And the memories. There are few things that evoke strong memories as photos for me. I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of items in that box that I needed to go through, so I closed it back up and put it aside. I'll look at it again tonight to see how much I can get through.
But this is just a taste of what I have to deal with. I have too much stuff which act as reminders of what I have done so far in my life. Having all this stuff impedes future progress because my current stuff gets in the way. I act as a curator in a museum of my own life. Each day adds more stuff to maintain.
I have books. I have papers with handwritten notes that I've made for my work. There is so much to learn, but there is not enough time on this earth for me to learn all that I could from the books I already have, assuming all I ever wanted to do was just book learning.
I have an inventory of electronic parts for soldery projects. I have bags of fur and lycra and pvc and fleece and zippers and foam all begging to be made into something wearable. I have 'some' tools. I have very little workspace. I need to break free of this madness.
I have many projects that I would like to work on, but I am forced to spend a good deal of time preparing for it by ridding myself of the less important reminders in my life. I hope that I don't get rid of anything important.
Maybe I could just find a bigger place. That would certainly help. At this point, I should just buy a house. But this area has a crushingly high price for entry if I wanted to buy within a decent commuting distance from work. Or I would trade money for time by commuting longer distances. No, that would not do, and is in itself a whole journal entry whose size would rival this one.
I envy those who seem to get by with nothing. I don't know how you all do it. Rooms devoid of everything but some furniture and some decorations and bare space. How do you organize your life? How do you remember what you've done? How do you share what you've done and what you've made if you can't see and feel it within arms reach?