Post-Modern Drunk: Scanning Darkly
Despite spending the last thirteen years living in a series of dorm rooms, hostel beds, parents' guest rooms, couches, and finally, NYC apartments, I haven't manged to rein in my possessions in any appreciable manner. Books have always been my weakness--with clothes sprawling out far beyond my meager and threadbare wardrobe.
I prune the shelves from time to time, but I can't help being the type of guy who wants to have overloaded bookshelves--who wants to have a copy of every book he's happy to have read or considers rereading. I go through phases sometimes of reading books I suspect I'll dislike, just so I can have the joy of getting rid of it to free up the space on my shelves. As I said the other day, I try to read 52 books a year, but even then that means I can only fit in about 3,000 books in my lifetime, so I've learned to reject books in the first couple hundred pages rather than slavishly finishing them, if they turn out to seem terrible.
That 3,000 number bugs me, and occasionally I think I should get rid of all books I assume I won't enjoy, and just focus on the classics, and the works I'm reasonably sure I'll love, but if you over-think this you'll go mad, and sometimes in reading a book I assume will suck I wind up being pleasantly surprised.
But I digress. The point is, I have a lot of stuff, and its difficult to get rid of part of it, due to sentimental reasons or pure cussedness. I am excited (which should be the wrong word, but isn't. I am excited about the following revelation) to realize that I can shortly get rid of all my college papers; I've been holding onto not only the digital copies of everything I wrote in college, but the graded papers with comments from my professors. It's a lot of paper--I took almost entirely English and Honors classes, and wrote 25-50 pages for each of them.
But! I work in an office now. And office technology has improved in leaps and bounds. For instance, now we have a high speed copier/scanner. Which means I can scan all my papers, drop them into PDF format and put them into the cloud, accessing them via Google Documents anywhere on the planet. I can even put them into Evernote and the high powered text-reading software of that program could tell me easily and once and for all how many of my papers had a title that was a variation on "[x]; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the [y]". (My guess is that it's higher than 10% of all papers written, but lower than 20%. We could find out for sure, though!).
All that information can soon be at my fingertips. I won't do anything with it--there is little more painful that revisiting the writing you did over ten years ago, especially writing done in the last six hours before a paper is due, under the influence of fear and too much Mt. Dew and caffeinated ramen*. But once I've uploaded the copies, I can trash the originals, freeing up that giant milk crate full of stuff that I haven't touched in a decade but have been dragging around this entire time.
Now if only I could find a way to digitize my clothes and store them somewhere in the cloud.
* "Water Joe", a caffeinated water, I discovered in college, lead to some ill-advised experiments, such as caffeinated ramen and coffee made with caffeinated water.
