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.<\/p>\n
A few weeks ago, at the close of the university\u2019s finals week, I sat in my home office and took stock of the clutter I\u2019d allowed to build while immersed in teaching\u2019s 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\u2026who knows what? And I convinced myself that now, with a hint of free time before classes resume, I would finally de-clutter.<\/p>\n
Except, well, putting things away wasn\u2019t as easy as I\u2019d imagined.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m 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 <\/em>struggle to go digital. My desk is littered with Post-its that\u2014were I more technologically adept\u2014might instead be rendered in some task-list app.<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t 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\u2019m 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\u2026aw hell, what with identity theft and the 200 passwords I must remember to avoid it, and with deep fears of a Revolution<\/em>-style power outage that dissipates the cloud and all of my data, it\u2019s a wonder I do anything <\/em>paperless.) I\u2019m 33, and feel like I\u2019m living in a generational No Man\u2019s Land between digital dependency and digital illiteracy.<\/p>\n After all, it\u2019s considered okay for my parents to have boxes of old home movies, to have decades-old field guides to snails and mushrooms, but I <\/em>am expected to be above any such attachment to outdated mediums or print artifacts. Heck, I used to make fun of my father\u2019s bulky record collection (stored, no joke, in an old phone booth that my parents keep in their foyer), or my mother\u2019s full bookshelf dedicated to 1970s encyclopedias. I snottily bemoaned their collections of old crap; I\u2019d grown up with\u00a0Microsoft Encarta in the \u201890s, then made my seamless transition to Google searches and Wikipedia in the 2000s. How foolish to own encyclopedias!<\/p>\n But now the joke\u2019s on me. Unlike the younger, paper-free iGeneration, I\u2019ve mostly lived a pre-cloud life. My \u201890s were consumed with CD purchasing, and so I have shelves of discs from middle and high school (Hey look, the Wayne\u2019s World <\/em>soundtrack!); my wife\u2019s 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\u2019t have purchased (see: the ALF<\/em> boxed set), and with video rental boxes we had to keep in prominent places so that we wouldn\u2019t forget to return them, thus accruing late fees.<\/p>\n Clutter felt\u2026normal. But now, there\u2019s no Blockbuster, and entertainment is streamlined by Netflix and Hulu, a world of cinema accessible through iPads and Blu-ray players\u2026we\u2019re not supposed <\/em>to own physical objects\u2026But still, many of us are burdened by those tons of plastic discs and cases.<\/p>\n But for someone my age, it\u2019s the photographs that are the worst. \u00a0<\/p>\n There are old photo albums in my home office that\u2026well, quick question: Who still buys physical <\/em>photo albums? The crunchy plastic pages\u2026the 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\u2019s where kids have it good: They don\u2019t have to open their scanners and, over and over again, transfer printed photograph to digital file\u202615-year-old photos that were once prized possessions, but whose quality is worse than the accidental pictures you take on your iPhone.<\/p>\n Let me be clear: I\u2019m not a hoarder. I want <\/em>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\u2019t get the \u201cpass\u201d that is handed out to someone 10 years older\u2026we\u2019re not the old Mom joining Facebook and accidentally tagging her son in a picture of her dog\u2026if it wasn\u2019t for us, there would be <\/em>no Facebook.<\/p>\n This year, to unclutter my office, I finally scanned the stacks of photos I\u2019d shoe-boxed for years. And for one full day this December, I plugged my camcorder into my computer and transferred two years\u2019 worth of videos. My son running around in his Where the Wild Things<\/em> Are <\/em>Halloween costume, or riding It\u2019s 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 \u201cEaster \u201889\u201d for their nostalgic mothers.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cuncluttering my desktop,\u201d endlessly organizing folders on my devices, trying to make the digital information ever more accessible, editing \u201cEaster \u201889\u201d to perfection, searching for the most recent digital task-list that I commended myself for having typed on my phone\u2026but which has long since disappeared into the haze of clutter obscuring the screens of my devices?<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Nathan Holic teaches in 麻豆原创\u2019s Department of Writing & Rhetoric. He can be reached at Nathan.Holic@ucf.edu.<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"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…","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":56296,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"template-twocol.php","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"lazy_load_responsive_images_disabled":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":"","_wp_rev_ctl_limit":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[10243,7882],"tu_author":[],"class_list":["post-56540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinions","tag-nathan-holic","tag-ucf-forum"],"yoast_head":"\n