Today was an alright kind of day.
Mother is moving house, and I'm playing the part of the hired muscle. It's mostly moving boxes to a storage unit downtown, but it also includes some (unpaid) sorting and digging trough my childhood cargo. I lived on and off every other week moving from her to father for many years, so it was always one of "my rooms". This leads to there being more than a few old treasures and buried memories lodged in boxes, heaps of papers, in the bookshelf or in the bottom of drawers.
The process of sorting out what to keep and what to discard from my formative years is not an especially easy one for me. I've never been exceedingly tidy, and any kind of system to organize always ends up as disused as the articles it is intended to plot. How many old school papers do I keep? I certainly want to keep some of the short stories that got good merits. Notebooks half filled (always half filled. Never cover to cover, for some reason) with ideas and plans I can still recall the purpose of. Travelogues and souvenirs from mine and others' travels. Plastic doodads that recall some or other situation...
Seeing as I'm neither tidy or blessed with great situational memory, these items all work as memory keys, triggering a cascading sequence of sights, sounds, smells and situations. I am of a mind to catalog and image everything, store it somewhere digitally and recall it at will, but I know that would probably take too much time, and lose me the kinesthetic factor of many of the items.
I have less than a week to finish the job. Some things are easy to ditch, like gifted childrens or young adult books I've never read or intended to read. My manga collection can be gifted to a budding japanophile I know (excluding the AKIRA-book) and most of the cartoons go into a separate pile. I haven't decided what to do with those..
Let's talk about old birthday cards. I almost always keep them, and seeing them again after many years is both melancholic and pleasant. In times where depression takes most of the emotional energy I'm alotted each day, seeing kind words and the signatures of family and friends living and deceased is nostalgic. But also pleasant. It's an anchor that keeps who I am today, connected with who I was then, and who they were.
I'm beginning to see why the self storage business is one of the fastest growing. I also know that I'm unable to keep everything indefinitely unless I do follow through on making some sort of intelligent thingspace to store everything both physically and digitally.
Sigh. For a first personal daylog, this isn't much. Vote me up or down as you feel, I have no illusion that this is good. If you have pointers on what parts could be omitted or rewritten, I'm open to feedback. Even nuking, if this is really that bad.