Confessions of a Digital Packrat

Nostalgia.



This is the week when I need to make my decision about moving in January. I'm really pretty sure I'm going to do it - I think I'll give them the final decision tomorrow. I can think of lots of reasons pro and con, but my heart has built up enough momentum in that direction that it would be pretty disappointing to back out now. I'll certainly miss this place, though... the enormous kitchen, the sunlight streaming through the sliding glass doors in the morning, the two wonderfully spacious balconies...

Standing out on my rear balcony tonight, looking up at the cold, sharp first-quarter moon between the smooth, high clouds of ice crystals, listening to the silence of the crickets and cicadas who serenaded me to sleep every evening and chanted louder than my alarm to wake me up in the summer mornings, looking out to the empty street, cold, still, devoid of cars, then stepping back into my tatami room that has been with me for the last year and a half, I am struck by wave after wave of nostalgia.



Just a few of the many memories from this apartment that come back to me, mostly parties and sickness:

Last summer, sweating profusely, curled up on my little tatami cushion thing, three bottles of Canada Dry Ginger Ale by my side, hardly able to sit up as I stayed home for three days with food poisoning, barely managing to stagger out and go see the Robocup for an hour, but mostly spending the intervening time throwing up or watching Full Metal Alchemist from my cushion on the floor.

A small Christmas party last December with Hiroko, Mitsuko, and Noda-kun, all of us sitting at my kotatsu, sharing stories and wine over a nice Italian dinner and some Christmas cake.



A weekend last winter when I suddenly came down with a terrible fever and stomach bug, and Linda came over to bring me some medicine and make me some hot lemonade... thank you, Linda! You're awesome.

The random night when Emma locked her house keys in her kendo dojo and had to crash at my place. We stayed up till 2am playing go. :)

David standing at my whiteboard, educating us about the geography of France.



The going-away party / hanami / not really sure what the excuse was party this past spring, when Masuda-san brought an entire branch of a cherry tree in full bloom.

And of course, my very first night here, dropped off around 11pm by Kanda-san, exhausted, hungry, with no food or knowledge of my surroundings, hoping that (a) all of the stuff in my luggage survived the flight unscathed, and (b) I would be able to find the bus to work in the morning...

I guess sadness is an essential part of awareness. I find that if I really open my mind and try to perceive everything without all the social guards we usually put up, I am overwhelmed by emotions of joy and sadness. I will really miss this apartment, but... is that a reason not to move? It's kind of like ending a relationship. It is ending a relationship. Inasmuch as people have relationships with inanimate things, the relationship with your home is a particularly intimate one.



But just because something is good doesn't mean it has to be perpetuated forever. This is where my "meaning of life" instincts start getting confused. For example, if you were to go to the pile of my stuff that still sits in my parents' basement, you would find a lot of things that aren't essential at all. Old binders from elementary school, t-shirts from high school, an old fish tank I had many years ago... a lot of that stuff is junk, and has no practical value. Its only value is to be a vessel for memories. How can I possibly part with my "Cobleskill College Math Team - We strive to be number -eⁱπ" shirt? (Yes, that's what it says, rather than the correct -e^iπ) And yet... when would I ever wear it again? What would I do with it?



A few years ago I came up with the idea of taking digital photos of things like that and then throwing away the originals. That way the memories would still be retrievable. I haven't done it so much yet, though. Which is probably good considering my personal history with hard drives.




But where does the value in life lie? Is it in our memories? Memories fade. They can only be kept alive with the taking of photos and the retelling of stories. Even so, "living in the past" is something most people consider negative.


Ok, is it just me, or do we all look SUPER young in this picture?

On the other hand, "living for the present" can also be taken to excess. How would you rate the quality of life of somebody who, say, spent every waking hour drugged out and happy, staring blankly (yet contentedly) at the TV as the days pass unnoticed? Something tells me that is "bad".

Yet someone who moves from town to town, job to job, building no lasting relationships, is living in the present and staying active.. and yet still it seems to me that something is missing. Memories, history, and deep relationships are important.



I think Philo mentioned something today about how taking photographs is unnatural. Looking at the images artificially reinforces insignificant memories in our minds, and thus alters our structure of memory, which, I would add, fundamentally changes who we are, since memories are a significant part of our identity.

It's a difficult balance, trying to preserve memories that are important to us, and yet trying to avoid being a packrat and keeping boxes and boxes stuffed with baubles and trinkets with no significant meaning to us. Do we really need to commemorate every single week of our lives?



I wonder if our generation is seeing the birth of a new breed of "digital packrat", an obsessive personality type hoarding gigabytes and gigabytes of personal history, from blogs and digital photos, to archives of old emails, office documents, chat histories, ... and descending into the realm of neurosis, how about even keeping web history files, system error logs, old bookmarks files, and obsolete software? I have a few old Infocom games from the mid-80's for the Apple IIGS in my parents' basement... it's hard to part with games like that when I poured so many hours of my life into them.

I guess it's a subconscious pursuit of immortality. By keeping an exact record of everything we ever did, we can preserve our lives forever. The only problem is that documenting this information and sorting through this information takes time. Blogging itself has taken up approximately three full days of my time over this past month. That's time when I could have been living life instead of documenting it. But what is the worth of a life not shared?



As for sorting through and weeding out the valuable from the worthless, I often brush off this responsibility, saving it for this imaginary time "when I'm 75 years old and bored, sitting in a rocking chair and staring out my picture window all day", but I wonder whether that day will ever come.

Just like that old bag of gummi Ninja Turtles candies from Spain from 1990 and that nasty old box of Ghostbusters Cereal with the hologram on it from who knows when, I guess it's time to part with this apartment. It's sad to say goodbye, but sometimes you know that it's time to move on.



I'll miss the balconies, though.