Getting All Personal Dept.

What with one thing and another, I’ve kind of fallen out of the habit of writing about Just Plain Stuff — goings-on with friends, other things apart from my writing or personal interests, things like that. A lot of the time I don’t do it because I feel like I have nothing to contribute to the conversation — there scarcely seems to be anything I can add to all the ongoing commentary about the mortgage/credit/banking crisis, for instance. So — time for some mundane and boring personal news!

First off is the endless straightening-up of the office — which has become a perpetual project due to my horrible habit of adopting an organizational strategy and then forgetting about it. The good news: I’ve found a few ways to get around that. For dealing with the endless stacks of books in here, there’s Libra, which I can use in conjunction with my webcam to scan-and-tag everything pretty quickly. Libra’s big downside is that the program hasn’t been updated in over a year, but at least it works reasonably well and I can always export the data from it into another form to be re-used in some other program. (So far, though, I haven’t really found one that works terribly well.)

On the plus side, I have managed to relax my attachment to a great many things that I thought I would never be able to let go. In one drawer I found a whole cache of tidbits dating back at least eight years, stuff I’d squirreled away and told myself I was going to need or think of as important one day. Flyers from conventions past, bits and pieces of things I’d picked up from various giveaway tables in stores … I wadded it all up and dumped it into the recycling box.

There’s only so much I can keep track of or worry about. Books and records are one thing, but memorabilia that doesn’t consist of things I actually created or had a hand in are another. After a while, you just get overwhelmed. A while back I found diaries and journals I’d kept when I was much younger, but after leafing through them I saw there was nothing worth keeping. Not everything a person produces in their lifetime is going to be valuable, and what was in there amounted to a glorified bunch of grocery lists.

On the other hand, I kept pretty much every business card I’ve ever been given. Yes, I still have the weird feeling that at some point something in there is going to come in handy, even though the total number of times I’ve actually used a business card in that fashion (outside of work) I could count on a single hand with fingers left over.