Busy Work (Resolution #4)

Four solid days of scanning, photographing, and copying media! Here's the tally so far:

All 328 DVDs are on disk! That's 1.8TB, if you're curious. Add to that around 78 VHS tapes (mostly of dance instruction), 18 Hi-8 tapes (mostly of dancing in ATL clubs), and a slew of cassettes. (+10GB)

This may sound funny coming from me, but I do write on paper. A lot. A whole filing cabinet's worth in just over two years, actually. Well, that cabinet is scanned too!

I've also scanned in every letter from every friend, pen-pal, and ex-g/bf! Every greeting card I've ever received too! Also have scanned diplomas, transcripts, award certificates, and photographed trophies, medals, and trinkets. (+3Gb)

I've been busy!

Basically everything I ever kept in my life. My tangible memories are reduced down to one box, with everything in it transcoded to digital form... just in case I never see it again.

Phew! But we're not done yet!!! There's still to go 13 years of academic notes and every book that has been valued enough to keep for this long. We'll tackle the notes this week, hopefully finishing by the end of next, and I'm calling in reinforcements from BSU for the books, but more on that later.

So I'm very close to having everything of importance I've ever saved or created on one disk that fits in a shirt pocket!!! Going through those memories is pretty emotional, (especially when one is not in the best of places) but it seems I was fortunate enough to save the things that mattered most from my youth. Bittersweet memories.

And I'm delighted and proud that I can take them all with me and travel lightly at the same time! :) So here's a twist on Zen... dissolving the ego while using technology to preserving it digitally, effectively reducing one's life to electrons. Hey, that's pretty compact!

Hopefully, this kind of thing will become common in the future allow us to better deal with death and the destruction of the self-identity, since it will be preserved exactly as one wants it to be.

For what more can one ask?