bento box

I’ve been thinking a bit about all the accreted crap we all end up carting about as constant reminders that we did indeed have a life before this particular instant.

This came up as I did a vanity search recently for my name.  We all do it, to see how far we have to scroll before we go hey! that’s me!.  Most people want that distance to be small, I kinda want it to be large.  Back when I blogged a lot and really was all over the new social media crap the first several results tended to be mine.  Then I realized that it wasn’t stuff I wanted everyone to read.  So I started taking my name off stuff, then I started just deleting stuff.  I kept backups though.

Several computers later I realize the ephemeral nature of hard drives.  Several moves later I recognize the ease in losing CDs of inscrutably labeled backups.

I really went digital when I tossed aside paper journaling for blogging back in the 00s, and putting photos online etc. etc.  So having my computers explode and disappear has left me with virtually no record of the past decade.

As I move and clean I’ve slowly lost or thrown away much of the other stuff:

• certificates of Youth Leadership, and my presence on the honor role (I had kept the one where I got honors in gym for a long time, but now that I look for it I find that it is gone)  Certificates indicating my presence at computer camp — several years in a row.
• my high school diploma.  I can’t imagine throwing this out, but somehow it disappeared.
  
  
• The scrapbook with pictures of me skydiving, bungee jumping, in my scuba gear, all that “look at me I’m adventurous” crap.  No idea where that ended up.
  
  
• I had a photo album with pictures of vacations from when I was a kid, with my first point-and-shoot camera.  Hawaii, Jasper, probably other places.  I remember taking the photos out and putting them in a box when the album got too beat up for words.  I threw out the album and the photos disappeared.
  
  
• All my old journals.  I think I burned a few of the hilariously embarrassing teen-age angst ones.  The one that I really liked, that was a scrap-book of all the places I went and things I did, just disappeared at some point.
  
  
•  All the old books of my formative years — the ones you grow up reading, handed down from friends and family.  I kept these for so long, then — in a fit of minimalism — sent them off to the used book store to make space on my bookshelf for boring textbooks I’ll never read (but can’t part with because they were so bloody expensive)

 So, to sum up:  I have only the one frame of family photos my parents gave me last year, upon discovering that I have no pictures of my family.  I have no papers, photos, etc. documenting my past besides a pile of tax returns and my university diploma — which I nearly threw out by accident once.  Even my citizenship card is new.

If this was a spy novel I would obviously be living under a false identity.

If I ever become someone worth writing a biography for future biographers are going to scream and tear their hair out.

When my iBook died I lost all the pictures I had of old friends and exes.  If I ever go senile I’ll have nothing to fall back on.

Then again I don’t have any documents detailing what I wanted to be when I grew up — and the memories of that are fading — so I won’t be spending any nights reading old journals and feeling like a failure.  As I age I won’t look back at old photos and regret the things left unsaid, or the friendships lost to time, since I will have forgotten and there are no photos to remind me.

I can continue barging forward in life, blissfully unaware of my past.

Ok, ok, ok.  So I abandoned the FB, and then decided that it would be gauche to be completely socially isolated — on the internets at least.  So then I went and plugged LinkedIn back in and re-added people (for what, the third time?).

One reason why I did this was the “networking!” argument getting lobbed at me from the career councilor folks at school.  Apparently its teh thing now to look at people’s professional, networking, blah blah through the internet machine.  Not only do potential employers now judge me on the content of my resume, they judge me on my “connections” to people, and stuff.

I’ve always kinda looked askance at the crazy that people who work in HR spew w.r.t resumés and whatever.  It’s a heady mix of arbitrary rules and blatantly selling yourself like a cheap crack whore.  I think of LinkedIn as rentboys.com for the rest of the business world.

Eventually, when I’m done school, some kindly gentleman will look me up on LinkedIn and hire me to “carry his luggage”.

(also: if you are on LinkedIn and you are foaming at the mouth for another connection, you can add me.  As we’ve already established I’m a whore for social validation)

so the ol’ fb and I have had a rocky relationship in the past.  I have gone from over-share to complete hermitude, suspended my account and re-activated it.  I finally got around to deleting it after I don’t-even-know how many years.

By delete of course I mean I registered it for deletion and just have to not use it for 10 more days before it is gone.

So why exactly have I committed social seppuku?

After the honeymoon was over I largely stuck around on fb out of a sense of social obligation: all my friends were there, used it, tagged things.  After a while I cleaved it out of my life mostly, I just hung on for the events — if I wanted to be aware of things happening I needed to be in the fb-loop.

Finally I decided that all my real friends know my personal email address, they know my phone number.  My real friends know my pseudonymous accounts on things we use together.  At the end of the day I don’t need facebook to connect to my friends, facebook was just an artifice for projecting some highly cultivated image towards people I didn’t really know.  While that probably serves a niche for some people, it was more effort than it was worth for me.

I think, also, facebook makes it easy to appear like you care about people without having to be mindful of them:  It reminds you of people you haven’t talked to in a while.  It presents you with constant updates (phatic communions I believe we’ve all agreed) for you to “like” or tack on some banal commentary.  You can (and everyone does) invite everyone you know to every event.  It makes it easy to make your friends feel included in your life without having to actually care about them or think about them.

Maybe by ditching the social network intermediary I will actually be more mindful of people I care about, and they will be of me.  I will invite people to things because I actually think they might want to go, not because they are presented to me on a conveniently clickable list.  Maybe I will make more of an effort to be a good friend without facebook to hold my hand, I will tell people what they mean to me instead of clicking a thumbs up, listening to what they really have to say instead of skimming their updates.  Maybe.

(also I use twitter, and I like twitter more… ha!)