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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Great 365 Day Purge - Day Two

January 2, 2014

Day Two of "The Great 365 Day Purge of 2014".

Today, I decided to toss all of the papers I'd saved from college, tucked away in the steamer trunk my father made me years ago. These papers range in length from ten to a hundred pages, those larger papers, of course, heavily padded with tables and graphs, and filled with the awkward, pompous, overly-intellectual use of "one" rather than "I".

One paper explores the possibility of exporting an Ohio-made product to Canada. Another, the potential economic development of a nation in which I conclude, "what remains to be seen is whether this nation's people are willing to take the necessary steps towards industrialization." My "marketing awareness journal" reminded me of the time when I wanted to be in advertising, writing jingles to convince people to buy the products I was pushing. But even then, I must have felt some tug of my future self, a self that knew that to promote a lifestyle of purchasing was to promote a life of loneliness and dissatisfaction.

A paper for Corporate Finance, complete with hand-drawn graphs of stock prices and PE ratios, recommended investing in clothing company Paul Harris. That company went bankrupt in 2001. A group project investigated how to market "lite" syrup. Another group project studied the culture of Saudi Arabia.

I had a paper on the "Chinese Culture". One on Dante's Inferno. Another I wrote about a freshman whose mother had died of cancer two weeks before the girl left for college, each paper hand-written in blue ink.

There was a paper that contained the typo, "they ass the west," circled by my professor in red pen, probably noted and left uncorrected in the hopes that the professor wouldn't pick up on the error: printing costs in the eighties were high, and, besides, the chances of securing access to a computer in the college lab were always risky.

Some of the papers are printed on continuous-feed paper, with tear marks at the top and bottom of every sheet. Some are on my mother's typing paper. Held to the light, I can read the watermark:

Eagle-a

Type-erase

25% Cotton Fiber USA

The printers I used were either dot matrix or daisy wheel or made use of a type-ball--a golf-ball sized device covered with all of the letters and characters necessary to producing a term paper. Font changes, obviously, weren't an option.

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Five Hundred Miles...

This morning, I woke to eight degree temperatures and severe wind chills.  Despite the fact that the furnace seems to have been running non-stop, the house never seems to get warm.  Cold air snakes in around leaky windows and through outlets and beneath the doors.  There is a demanding meow at the front door: Outside Cat asks to be let back into the garage. 

The dryer is running.  Great blasts of steamy air billow and swirl outside beneath the vent.  It’s a good day for soup; steamy soup gently simmering on the stove, small bubbles breaking the surface, filling the kitchen with heat and the aroma of chicken and sausage and ham and spices; soup thick with potatoes and onions and carrots and tomatoes.  The dog sits close at hand, watching hopefully for scraps.  Orange Cat lies in a patch of sunshine on the back of the couch.  He will remain there all day until thirst or hunger call to him.

And yet, I must leave, if only for awhile.   I go to the garage and get my tennis shoes.  Outside Cat tries to slip in between my legs, but I’m too fast for him.  I scoot him back outside and sit at the kitchen table to inspect the inside of my shoes.  Outside Cat has taken to messing in the garage, perhaps in retribution for his banishment from the house.  I suspect someone’s shoes are under attack. 

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