It's all just bits of paper flying away from you

Diary of a mature student: Look out!

There are many positive things to the summer period. Oh sure, the only jobs that want you for sixteen weeks tend to be fairly soul-destroying, and signing on for unemployment benefit means selling what little dignity you have left, but...

...

Give me a minute here, I'm sure I had something.

Time is a pleasure (because it's oh so rare), I guess. Last summer I spent most of my time scanning every photo I could find and digitising my CD collection to iTunes then getting rid of the pesky physicality. Same with books - I adopted a 'keep only the ones you need' mantra and the rest went to charity shops or sold on Amazon.

Around ten years ago, you see, there was The Move. Oh, sure, while I was on the merry-go-round the first time I moved eight times in three years, between different sets of accommodation, but while doing so I rarely accumulated more than a rooms' worth of belongings, and then suddenly, in the final year, everything sort of... ballooned into box after box of stuff that I obviously thought I needed at 22.

But, as usual, I'm getting ahead of myself. The Move meant that everything from my previous twenty or so years was packed up - and I was a packrat as a child and even more so as a teenager, so, damn - and boxed up and stuck in a huge pile in The Garage, which is basically where I've spent the last two summers.

It's strange, because the closest way I can put it is kind of a personal archaeology - like digging through the strata of my own history. But there's an element of psychology to it, too, because a lot of the material stuff had become a kind of psychic weight, in that knowing I had a garage full of crap was weighing on me.

Not so much, anymore. Oh, there are about twenty boxes of books etc., but you can actually get into the garage now rather than fighting over the detritrus of a life spent absorbing pop-culture in a pre-digital age.

It's an interesting equation - at least, to me - to consider the changes. For me, it was fairly simple;

music = audio cassettes and cds
film = videos, and later dvds
literature = books.

For the generation I currently interact with, everything listed above is now available - more or less - as data. And it's mostly entirely up to your personal ethics whether you pay for it or not, because with a modicum of knowledge and an internet connection, everything is potentially available.

For me, converting to digital was a relatively simple process - albeit time-consuming. My CD conversion project has yielded an iTunes library spanning 70gb of music, etc., meaning that if I listened to everything there I wouldn't surface until June 27th. And that's more than enough for me, because God only knows I'll never listen to all of them - it was just part of the process to digitise everything.

Videos were a little less simple, because although the basic expedient of not having a video player anymore made them less valuable, certain ones still had to be kept because they might not be available otherwise. And the equation for books was simple; need / don't need.

So that's a lot of weight, just, gone.

In case you can't tell, yes, I've been pretty bored.

I do have something to do in about a little over a week's time, but... We'll see about that. I'm naturally skeptical, but I'll say no more than that.

The world - or at least my world - feels like a quiet and solitary place, for the next three months. And then, well...