I have this persistent habit of destroying things.
I don't mean that as some depressing metaphor. I just can't keep anything in pristine condition. I crumple and rip the edges of papers; I fold parts of pages of books; I'm more effective than a paper shredder when it comes to disposable cups. I don't know why I do it; I just can't stop myself. I think that somewhere in the back of my mind it all just relates back to how for a person who has so many things I am hardly at all sentimental about my actual physical possessions.
When my computer hard drive crashed in September last year, and me being me didn't back up half the files on my computer, I instantly lost virtually all of my pictures and files from my middle school years. Such is my attitude now that everything's gone digital; I hardly ever print anything out, and unless it exists somewhere on the internet, it makes its lonely home on my computer, and maybe a flash drive, if I don't get too lazy. You'd think that I'd be really upset about losing all these fond memories from my relative youth. But what upset me more than losing all of these files was that when my laptop was rebooted with an empty new hard drive, the dock from my desktop was missing. Never mind that I easily downloaded it from the Dell website later, when I turned on my laptop and it was missing, I burst into tears.
Yeah, that small outburst was just my release of my frustration over my computer dying in the first place, but the whole thing is just reflective of how I am sort of aggressively unsentimental about most material things. That is not to say that I live a life free from materialism or that I don't care about anything I own -- because there are certainly some things that I would be really upset to lose, and god help me on the day that I become too poor/financially independent from my parents to afford, like, new slipper boots -- but I just sort of have an implicit just-let-it-go attitude towards most things I own. I don't let the physical things replace the memories I have associated with them -- my memories, the ones that really matter to me, are meaningful to me without a physical token to represent them -- so I guess I'm just not that bothered when the actual thing goes missing.
(And, okay, when you lose a whole bunch of stuff, it makes the few remaining pieces from that collection all the more special. I have a few pictures and such from middle school and I think that ultimately those show more about me than the hundred crappy ones that I took with our old digital camera when I was 13. It's annoying but also sort of peaceful to start from scratch.)
That's also why the copy of TFioS that I'm annotating is the signed copy that was signed actually-in-person by John and Hank. I have two copies, and the other one I want to keep clean for lending out to people, and I didn't really want to get a third copy just for annotating... so I was like what the heck, it's just a book, and books are all about the interaction between the text and the reader, so I will write all over this goddamn signed copy because it's not the signatures and the pristine pages that make this book special, it's what I take from it.
I kind of like that attitude, to be honest. I figure all things in this world are some kind of fleeting (even memories, really, when you get into the whole memory reconstruction thing), so why bother getting so upset about the inevitable?
No comments:
Post a Comment