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Three days, with correspondence
I think it was Diane Patterson who noted that she felt disappointed when there wasn't a new entry on these pages every time she checked ... no matter how often she checked.
I owe a lot of people email. If yours is one of the journals I read regularly, don't ask me when the last time I read it was; I'm embarrassed to tell you.
I've been busy. But it hasn't been here.
On Tuesday I went out and bought magazines for this week's mouth organ, wrote it, had Nonelvis edit it. Since I had actually done work all day Tuesday, and mouth organ took all evening, that was Tuesday.
On Wednesday I worked during the day (on my projects as well as the Institvte's - several pixies got important changes this week), then went to celebrate Rose's birthday with dinner. When I got home, I still had to do the final edits and post mouth organ.
As I checked some of the internal links, I found that one of the 1998 mouth organ columns is mostly missing. Two-thirds of it simply isn't there. My backup copy is mutilated in the same way. I don't know what happened to it, I'm very unhappy about it, and I hope that there aren't any other columns in the archives that have the same problem. I really need to go do a colossal cleanup of those archives, meta-tagging them and writing Hindsight notes where needed ... and one week when I have absolutely nothing else to do with my life, it'll happen.
Anyway, it took me until after one a.m. to post mouth organ. So that was Wednesday.
Thursday I took off work early so I could get office supplies and do laundry. I went to Staples and priced file cabinets. Now, I can't carry a four-drawer metal file cabinet in the Toyota. I've already got a little two-drawer one; buying another two-drawer to put beside it was my original idea. But the cheapest one was about $45.
Meanwhile, they had these boxes designed for interim storage of legal documents - they're cardboard, and they come flat, but they're in two pieces, with a actual drawer that slides, and the box has metal reinforcements so it'll keep its shape. These were $22 for a pair. I said, shucks, I'll buy two pair of these. I'm not proud. It's not like the office is all that stylish anyhow.
I bought them and more file folders, went home and assembled the "cabinet" (the boxes come with fasteners so that you can attach them to one another for stability), and spent the rest of the evening trying to begin The Great Paper Sorting Project.
See, I have lots of paper. I keep clippings, articles, information - I never know when I'll need something. Plus I keep old correspondence. The correspondence was actually most of what I worked on last night.
I used to have the correspondence behind tabs with letters of the alphabet. Now the folders have surnames on them. Some folders have more than one surname; these are people I didn't get a lot of letters from. Several people have folders all to themselves. Marc has two folders. One for his letters, and one for all the other ephemera he's left on my doors or windows or bathroom mirrors over the years. Marc likes to leave notes.
I can use this really weird method of sorting correspondence - with some folders out of alphabetical order, given the way I've combined names - because I don't expect to get much more of it. Sad but true. The Correspondence Collection is effectively closed. I haven't gotten a paper letter from someone since my sister sent me the last of her letters in '93 or '94. (No, no, she's alive and well; she just hates writing.)
I wish I'd had time to actually read through a lot of that correspondence instead of just sorting it. It's something I need to do soon. Most of it is from the period 1986 to 1990 when I was either away at school or everyone else was. Most of the letters are not from people I went to high school with. I didn't make many friends in high school, and I've lost touch with almost all of them since then. I also never really went to college, so I didn't make friends there.
In fact, over seventy-five percent of the correspondence is from people I met through other means. Fifty percent of the correspondence comes from five prolific writers, and only one of those five is someone I actually went to school with. Two people from my high school who wrote me a lot of letters are people I never really knew when I was in high school - they were two grades behind me and I met them later when I was tutoring and chaperoning Mu Alpha Theta events - which is also where and how I really met Rose. You might say that I was more active in events at my high school in the two years after I graduated than I was in the two years before.
The correspondence helps me deduce what was going on during a certain period in my life. My high school years, and almost everything before them, are mostly gone - vanished from my memory - and I'm not really worried about getting those back. From about 1996 on, I have these web pages to provide me with a memory boost. For the period from 1986 to 1996, all I have is a little green-covered journal with very few entries ... and the correspondence file.
Since the "missing ten years" of my life are roughly 1983 to 1993, it's very important that I have these letters. Of course I don't have any of the letters I wrote then - why would I keep copies? - but I can look in others' letters and get glimpses of who I was.
There may not be any new letters coming in, but the collection does what it needs to do as is.
And that was Thursday.
© Columbine
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