January 1, 2000

"How To Balance It All Out"

There's that ancient thing in the library, whose sole use is scanning, and absolute desperation when the other two are occupied. It used to sail the web. But its 14K modem and Netscape 2.0 render it almost useless now. Still it's better than nothing. I'm curious if old Windows 3.1 is "Y2K compliant". I must go check . . .

. . . Back again . . . I'm not so sure about that computer. The properties of the modified file gave it a date of 01/01/:0 - what's this COLON ZERO all about? Still, it's not rendered useless. We, the users will know a file of COLON ZERO is newer. The programs that work on that computer still work. All those fears some people had proved to be just panic, as nearly always.

And what of my own little computer crisis? I removed ten pictures from the art gallery painlessly. They weren't that good anyhow. While I was busy excising them, and Laura was off somewhere with Serena, Julia started in on me. She proudly told me how she's got the condensed essense of herself down to two files, here and here. "Nobody will read all those pages of yours," she informed me. No, I didn't really think someone was going to slog their way all the way from October 31, 1996 to the present. I KNOW there's a glut of information on the web and no one can pay attention to all of it. Still, she just doesn't understand the mind of a journaller. Yes, we are an obsessive lot, with our need to chronicle the minutia of our lives. I have often read from the beginning to the end. That's enough. That I like perserving those pages safely is enough. BUT, yes, there are those SPACE problems . . .

. . . No sooner than Julia had finished lecturing me, Laura was back from bringing Serena home, and SHE begin lecturing me. Not that they don't make some good points. We've been going through Shayna's things the past few weeks. Gads, was she a saver. She saved EVERYTHING, from what to us is useless garbage, to a few really fine items. I found a lovely calcite piece of perfect crystalline structure and iridescence, among a pile of broken glass bits. YES, some discrimination is necessary. Another person we know obessively makes copies of all his writings in quadruplicate. He really thinks after he's dead, someone is going to sort through all that. It's too much. It will all end up in black bags, and hauled away to the landfill.

So, how to balance it all out? I can't, like Rachel of Blakdog, just start slashing mercilessly away on my archives until hardly nothing remains. Yet, I don't want to save the written equivalent of broken glass, either. So I've started in on the past year of Weighty Matters. GONE, the tedious daily diet log! I don't give a damn what I ate one year ago, unless it was one really fine repast. If I don't give a damn about it, I can be sure you dear readers won't, either. I'm not sure just how much I'll slash and burn. Julia was saying she'd save all the old archives at the free servers, and house only the current stuff on AZ and CG, "Nobody reads the old pages" Laura said she'd write the current stuff and never let anyone see it until she could sift the junk out that one only sees with hindsight. Neither of those solutions sound that good to me. Both new and old are important to me. I need the informal heat of the expression of the moment. I want it sent up as soon as the last <P> and <Q> is written. But I also need the carefully selected memorabilia of the past as well.

I'll find that balance.