This is a confessional. One of my strange psychological quirks is my desire to archive things. It's crazy, self-centred, and it consumes an hour every few weeks or so. I've just always hated the feeling of losing my memories. It's a fantastic feeling when you're able to see your past before you, when you wish to. To know that while your memory may one day fail, you will not forget. I'll appreciate it in my old age. (Although I'm working on keeping the past in its context and not letting it interfere with the present).
I've got collections of travel diaries from every holiday since I was 7 (Those are funny to read, I wrote the precise time we arrived at places more than what we saw). From my travels, I also have old passes to mountain ranges, tickets from trains, museums, trams, productions I attended, films, art galleries, clubs. If I enjoyed overseas music, it has been downloaded and forms the audio part of my travel memories folders, nearby the photos.
I've got all my writings for the last 5 years and many from before, with the date of writing mentioned, and the content categorised. I've got archives of every conversation I've ever had on MSN, archives of interesting web pages or articles I've saved to my hard disk for retrieval when my interest on researching a subject is reignited. Old mIRC programming, and other nerdy material.
I'll have almost all my photos right back to primary school camps, and even my dad's old 35mm slides digitized and filed away on my computer in their appropriate place.
I've got diaries, dream diaries, dead end writings, old workbooks. Lists of my top 50, 100 books, movies. I've got stand-up comedies, film clips, TV shows. Data systems with application backups. On an external hard drive I've also got just about every computer game I ever played (I no longer play them). I've got old clothes, old trophies, team memorabilia, board games.
It's compulsive, addictive, but it's incredibly satisfying for me and it's proven very useful many times. I thought I was going to run out physical space, but most things are digital now anyway. Even this blog is sort of an archive. I wonder how long I'll keep everything up for.
3 comments:
Nothing wrong with such a collection.
Might be of interest to some future generation.
I have a little book in my collection, Journey to Ohio in 1810.
The lady who wrote this account of her travel probably thought that the modes of conveyance, typical experiences, etc., that she endured on that trip, would always be that way.
Probably couldn't imagine airplanes and superhighways. Thus, her collection of memories preserves for us, in a vastly different age, that moment in time.
I have the weirdest travel collection of possibly anyone in the world. Writings, of course; but also sand, rocks, dried-up Indiana corn cobs, pressed flowers, shells, even a jar of water from the Mississippi River and a jar of sea salt scraped from a tidal pool in Hawaii.
My other "archive" is a personal Dewey Decimal system for my book collection, organized by topic, and including the date and circumstances for acquiring each book, along with notations as to when I've actually read it and where the notes from reading it are stored.
Ahh, your travel collections are better than mine. My recent trip I started getting physical objects, but before that, aside from maybe a T-Shirt, all I have is photos.
I want a library of my own too, but unfortunately I refuse to buy books all the time. 99% of what I read has to come from the library. So what is on my shelf is probably unrepresentative of what I've been reading lately, which is annoying when people question books you bought like 7 years ago.
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