Housekeeping
It’s funny how things get lost in our closets; how our stuff keeps on piling up, until it obscures all the other stuff that makes up our past.
It’s also funny how this very same thing can (will, does) occur digitally. The computer I use right now is old, ugly, and clunky — but thanks to spare-part-gankage, still does what I need her to do. Back in the day I paid for a machine with Windows 98 installed and a “free upgrade to XP in the fall,” which gives you an idea of age. At the moment she’s running Ubuntu 7.04 + Windows XP, but the drives currently inside have been wiped clean time and time again. Nothing much stays the same, and I’m constantly redecorating. I don’t even bother with fullscale backup anymore, as the only files deemed important already exist in multiple forms (papers/projects/photographs all twice-and-thrice recorded). So over the years I’ve completely forgotten about a box in my closet partition on a secondary drive that holds all sorts of old junk.
Holy crap. The dates start around 2001. I found essays that were written when I was a painfully young high schooler; I find myself going “dude. I wrote that?”, in more tones than one. I found pictures I’ve forgotten I’d taken of people I’ve forgotten I’d known. And I found a folder (”websites-old”) that actually made me laugh.
So much of that folder is “wow-that’s-so-1990s”, but there’s still a lot that surprises me. Back in the day I kept various blogs, and I’d never heard of wordpress. MovableType was still some vague, nebulous unheard-of. Greymatter was new but too much to wrap my brain around. So I did everything by hand. A lot of my laughs and groans this afternoon come from looking at that code (proof that homeschoolers really DO have too much time on their hands?), but some of it’s pretty good. A lot of the css+gimp creativity makes me happy - not zengarden worthy by any standards, but better than I could do now.
Old closets are funny, but bittersweet. College has killed whatever writing talents I used to possess. Lack of necessity, and maybe desire too, has stifled whatever creativity I used to employ. Things I used to care about have been shoved to the side, and anything left has been flattened. Oh, there’s plenty in the dust that I’m glad to have abandoned — but a lot that I kind of miss.
I think what bothers me most is that I seem to have stopped thinking and only continue to exist out of habit.
