麻豆原创

To be a teacher is to shove all housekeeping tasks to those tight windows of time when the grading goes away. All semester long, dirty laundry piles up. The lawn grows unchecked. And then, just after my semester ends in December, or May, or August, I schedule long-overdue oil changes and haircuts and dental appointments.

A few weeks ago, at the close of the university鈥檚 finals week, I sat in my home office and took stock of the clutter I鈥檇 allowed to build while immersed in teaching鈥檚 daily tedium: the piles of unread (and hopefully non-urgent) mail, the stacks of magazines, the abandoned safety pins from various 5K bibs, the old printer-paper boxes now stuffed with鈥�who knows what? And I convinced myself that now, with a hint of free time before classes resume, I would finally de-clutter.

Except, well, putting things away wasn鈥檛 as easy as I鈥檇 imagined.

I鈥檓 expected to be part of the generation for which iTunes purchases are a first option, the generation that can do everything on the phone (completely paper-free). But my dirty secret is that I do struggle to go digital. My desk is littered with Post-its that鈥攚ere I more technologically adept鈥攎ight instead be rendered in some task-list app.

It wasn鈥檛 until last year that I finally switched to e-statements for my bank account, and my phone bills (still delivered via postal service) contain each month some new snarky message about how I鈥檓 killing the environment by not going paper-free. (Every month I try to log in and change this, only to be rebuffed by forgotten usernames and passwords and鈥�aw hell, what with identity theft and the 200 passwords I must remember to avoid it, and with deep fears of a Revolution-style power outage that dissipates the cloud and all of my data, it鈥檚 a wonder I do anything paperless.) I鈥檓 33, and feel like I鈥檓 living in a generational No Man鈥檚 Land between digital dependency and digital illiteracy.

After all, it鈥檚 considered okay for my parents to have boxes of old home movies, to have decades-old field guides to snails and mushrooms, but I am expected to be above any such attachment to outdated mediums or print artifacts. Heck, I used to make fun of my father鈥檚 bulky record collection (stored, no joke, in an old phone booth that my parents keep in their foyer), or my mother鈥檚 full bookshelf dedicated to 1970s encyclopedias. I snottily bemoaned their collections of old crap; I鈥檇 grown up with听Microsoft Encarta in the 鈥�90s, then made my seamless transition to Google searches and Wikipedia in the 2000s. How foolish to own encyclopedias!

But now the joke鈥檚 on me. Unlike the younger, paper-free iGeneration, I鈥檝e mostly lived a pre-cloud life. My 鈥�90s were consumed with CD purchasing, and so I have shelves of discs from middle and high school (Hey look, the Wayne鈥檚 World soundtrack!); my wife鈥檚 CDs are there, too, the entire catalogue of Backstreet Boys and Boyz II Men. My generation popularized Napster and the MP3 movement, sure, but we also have boxes of leftover Goo Goo Dolls and TLC CDs, the fixtures of a normal turn-of-the-century life. Not long ago, the homes of my generational peers were also cluttered with DVDs that we shouldn鈥檛 have purchased (see: the ALF boxed set), and with video rental boxes we had to keep in prominent places so that we wouldn鈥檛 forget to return them, thus accruing late fees.

Clutter felt鈥�normal. But now, there鈥檚 no Blockbuster, and entertainment is streamlined by Netflix and Hulu, a world of cinema accessible through iPads and Blu-ray players鈥�we鈥檙e not supposed to own physical objects鈥�But still, many of us are burdened by those tons of plastic discs and cases.

But for someone my age, it鈥檚 the photographs that are the worst. 听

There are old photo albums in my home office that鈥�well, quick question: Who still buys physical photo albums? The crunchy plastic pages鈥�the awkward triangular shape that disrupted the perfect line of books on your shelf? Much is made about how quickly kids grow up in the Facebook Era, but here鈥檚 where kids have it good: They don鈥檛 have to open their scanners and, over and over again, transfer printed photograph to digital file鈥�15-year-old photos that were once prized possessions, but whose quality is worse than the accidental pictures you take on your iPhone.

Let me be clear: I鈥檓 not a hoarder. I want to live digital and uncluttered. But just when I make progress with conversions, some other physical object is made irrelevant by a new app or web site. My generation is expected to negotiate the spaces between print and digital, to convert to digital what had been physical for a lifetime, but we don鈥檛 get the 鈥減ass鈥� that is handed out to someone 10 years older鈥�we鈥檙e not the old Mom joining Facebook and accidentally tagging her son in a picture of her dog鈥�if it wasn鈥檛 for us, there would be no Facebook.

This year, to unclutter my office, I finally scanned the stacks of photos I鈥檇 shoe-boxed for years. And for one full day this December, I plugged my camcorder into my computer and transferred two years鈥� worth of videos. My son running around in his Where the Wild Things Are Halloween costume, or riding It鈥檚 a Small World at Disney and (justifiably) crying in terror. My dog belly-flopping into the pool. I rotated videos. Created folders. Renamed files. Yes, it was tiresome, but not nearly so terrible as in the days of videocassettes. The current generation will never know the awfulness of searching boxes of VHS home movies to find 鈥淓aster 鈥�89鈥� for their nostalgic mothers.

Still, despite how amazing it sounds to live in the cloud, the digital uncluttering has become not liberating but exhausting. When the photos are scanned and the CDs are ripped, will I then spend full weekends 鈥渦ncluttering my desktop,鈥� endlessly organizing folders on my devices, trying to make the digital information ever more accessible, editing 鈥淓aster 鈥�89鈥� to perfection, searching for the most recent digital task-list that I commended myself for having typed on my phone鈥�but which has long since disappeared into the haze of clutter obscuring the screens of my devices?

Perhaps. Or maybe I have nothing to fear. If I just procrastinate long enough, maybe photo albums and VHS tapes will come back into style.

Nathan Holic teaches in 麻豆原创鈥檚 Department of Writing & Rhetoric. He can be reached at Nathan.Holic@ucf.edu.

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