Great 365 Day Purge - Day Six

January 6, 2014

Day Six of "The Great 2014 Purge."

And since I am authorized to shred, today I shred an box full of index cards: Some are snippets of dialogue I've overheard and recorded over the years. Some are descriptions of characters. Still others are plot notes for a story I was writing.

I also shred an old passport from a college trip to Europe, a passport I thought I'd lost.

I shred cards from my bridal and baby showers; yellowed newspaper clippings; my final high school transcript.

I shred my high school graduation announcement; the program from my college commencement; three of my wedding invitations and one of my sister's, the twenty-five cent stamp neatly affixed upside down on the response envelope.

I shred two expired driver's licenses and an advertisement for a failed cleaning business a friend and I started.

I shred the results from some standardized test. A certificate of completion for a high school driver education course. The 8th grade occupational interest test, on which I reported I wished to be a nurse and showed no interest in writing.

I recycle the school newspaper that shows my class rank. The other newspaper that shares the senior confessions, in which I admit to, among other things, filling the soap dispenser in the boy's bathroom with mustard.

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Great 365 Day Purge - Day Five

January 5, 2014

Day Five of "The Great 2014 Purge."

A break from the trunk this day. Today, I'm getting rid of the Dell laptop I crashed a year ago, spilling a hot mug of tea over the keyboard, destroying the motherboard in a quick sizzle.

I pull the hard drive out of the laptop and set it aside.

Another computer: Desktop. A slow behemoth of a machine that nobody uses anymore. Full of photographs. Music. School papers. Taxes.

I want to delete everything on the hard drive, format it a couple of times and reinstall Windows before pulling it, to make sure the data is wiped clean. In the DOS days of old, this would have been a snap: Get yourself to the c prompt and type del *.* before telling the computer to format.

I find my way to the c prompt, get to the root directory and issue the delete command. The cursor blinks once and I am returned to the impassive, uncooperative prompt. I run a dir command to check my success: All the files remain.

When I issue the format command, I'm told that I'm "not authorized" to perform this task. I wonder, briefly, who does have the authorization and how I can reach him or her.

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Great 365 Day Purge - Day Four

January 4, 2014

Day Four of "The Great 2014 Purge."

Still excavating from my trunk. Disks, this time. Old three-and-a-half inch disks, contents neatly inked on the label: Database programs I wrote twenty years ago. Work reports just as old. College papers. My writing.

I break off the metal piece; snap open the plastic case. I withdraw the disk and slice it in half with a pair of scissors, hoping that that measure is sufficient to keep people from reading the data thereupon.

I don't count the disks I destroy, recycling what I can, throwing out the rest. It must be at least sixty. In years past, I've likely thrown away twice that amount.

Bits and bytes of my life, digitized; an existence represented by a series of zeroes and ones.

I tie up the trash and take it to the curb.

010101000110100001100101001000000110111101110110011001010111001001110011011010010111101001100101011001000010000001100010011000010110011100100000011100100110010101110000011100100110010101110011011001010110111001110100011100110010000001101101011110010010000001110100011100100111010101110100011010000011101000100000010010010010000001110100011100100110010101100001011001000010000001110100011011110110111100100000011010000110010101100001011101100110100101101100011110010010000001110101011100000110111101101110001000000111010001101000011010010111001100100000011001010110000101110010011101000110100000101110

Kelly Garriott Waite on Google+

Great 365 Day Purge - Day Three

January 3, 2014

Day Three of "The Great 2014 Purge."

What is it about trunks, these beautiful wooden trunks, that I hold dear? Why must I feel compelled to clutter them with the detritus of my life? Today, I withdraw from my steamer trunk four boxes of checks dating from the nineties.

My children will not know the joy and drudgery of check-writing, that neat allocation of funds here...and here...and here. They conduct their banking with their phones, and use their debit cards for all their purchases.

In response to the Target data heist, my husband and I recently requested new debit cards. In anticipation of the two weeks during which we'll be without cards, we withdrew a substantial amount of money from our checking account. It's been an interesting experiment, this temporary return to cash-only transactions. We can see how easily the money slips through our fingers: groceries...take-out coffee...movies...gas...Christmas decorations...a hundred dollars we cannot account for.

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