Brian's World

Horcruxes

When I return home to my parents house, often for holiday festivities and gatherings, I’m always a bit unbalanced by the amount of sentimental items I encounter.  Specifically, I tend to encounter a collection of college related items which seem to trigger a deeper connection in me than I’m expected or quite frankly comfortable with.  I’ve tried very hard to avoid the attachment to physical things that seems to weigh so many people down in life, but I haven’t done a good job casting off some of these dusty collegiate anchors.

Pulling out my college laptop, because my current laptop is too cool for a DVD drive, brings me back to my dorm typing out posts on this very blog or chatting online with AIM or gChat and having some of the more memorable conversations of my time at college.  I suspect most people remember specific parties, places, and events they attended with friends, lacking those experiences I’ve held on to the memory and feeling of online chats and conversations embodied in this laptop which struggles to stay functioning after booting up.

My parents moved the bed I had in my college apartment back to their house to serve as my sleeping arrangements when I’m home.  Statically speaking, it’s the location I spent most of my time while I was in my apartment (aka sleeping) and it adequately reminds me of that year.  I should have been smarter and associated memories of my apartment with a slightly more portable and less obnoxiously sized object.

I very well may have such an object packed somewhere away in the boxes labeled as my college and non-college archival material.  When I concluded my time as a graduate student I was on a plane literally the next day flying across the country to find a place to live and join the workforce.  It was a very busy time, and as a result I didn’t have time to go through and digest the result of my time at school at all.  I quickly archived it all in boxes under the false premise that I would sort through them “soon”.  Now that I’m back on the East Coast it’s slightly more plausible that I’ll have time to process all the raw material into what’s worth keeping, but I’m terrible at not doing work. Knowing what I know now I should have pushed back a bit more on my relocation timeline.

I’m a big fan of the idea that making progress in any direction is better than sitting around making progress in no directions, but I need to remember that work or projects aren’t the only direction I should make some progress in.