Better read than other alternatives

One of the strange things that always happens when I move is that I become incredibly focused on cataloguing and organization. Some of this is sensible. I want my kitchen to be a certain way in order to optimize the experience. Have the pots and pans here, the dishes there, that sort of thing. Other times it makes a little less sense such as earlier tonight when I took everything out of one perfectly good box and placed all of the papers into a perfectly good bin. I did this because I preferred having bins over boxes. The fact that I just repacked notebooks from a job that I left and that I have no intention to ever look at again somehow doesn’t factor into the equation whatsoever.

But that is completely sensible compared to the following.

Now I often mention my spreadsheet containing all of the CDs that I own. It is the driver behind the random CD project and while it is uber geeky there is at least some sense behind it. I first put it together when I went to grad school and not all of my CDs traveled with me. Basically it was a quick reference guide as to what CDs were in which state as I bounced around the country. I kept it up because it was simple to do. Bought a new disc, add it to the spreadsheet.

Well, for the past two nights I have been doing a similar thing with my book collection. I had tried this a few years back but gave up after screaming at the madness of trying to catalog every single book I own. It’s not like I am going to randomly choose books to reread. There is some peace of mind knowing that I have a list of everything that I own but even that isn’t the main reason for this task. See, I am doing this entirely to impress people on Facebook.

I have the Visual Bookshelf app and am now in the process of trying to make it match up with my actual bookshelf. Now when I first joined Facebook I entered almost 300 books that I had read. How does one identify 300 books that they have read? Very simply if you are me and have kept a list of every book that you have read since 1998. Now I’m adding in the books that I own that I read pre-1998.

So that is the how but the bigger question is the why. Part of it is being a completist. If I have a list of books I read I want it to contain every possible data point. But mainly it is because I am an arrogant prick. See, if you click on the profile link it shows where you rank compared to everyone else on Facebook in terms of number of books read. So I have this unbelievable desire to be ranked as highly as possible and to show to the world just how incredibly well read I am. I want people to see me and go “Wow, that guy has read a lot of books.”

Except of course no one would ever actually do that. Who cares if I rank 2,000 on a Facebook app? Am I really impressing anyone when they check to see what I have read and find a surprisingly large number of books discussing pro wrestling? Maybe it is just this little ego boost for myself. It is a way to help convince myself that I actually am smart even if reading a lot of books does not necessarily equate into intelligence. Or maybe I just find it cool. Sometimes that is enough.

Your life in words

Here is what I like about seeing hockey highlights on television. On the box scores you get to see lines like “Satan shot on goal”. It makes for a much more interesting sports recap knowing that the devil himself laced up the skates tonight but was still only held to one shot. He needs a lot more help on the wings.

Played trivia tonight and did not have one of my better performances. I’ll be lazy and blame the categories as opposed to any lack of knowledge on my part. I’m just not going to be able to contribute much when a quarter of the game is devoted to Grey’s Anatomy and Name the Royals Player Based on their Picture. Heck, I only knew two of the Mortal Kombat characters because I only played that game once in my life. Now if it was Virtua Fighter I would have run the darn thing. Screw fatalities, I want to play the game where I can master drunken Kung Fu.

It’s incredibly late right now so I’ll finish off just by writing about something interesting I’ve discovered over the past few days. Ok, discovered is not the right word but I’ve now seen firsthand the effects of it. I’m nearing the ten year anniversary of starting my writer’s journal which later morphed into the blog so I’ve been going through my old entries. It’s also been part of my novel research because I wanted to tap into certain parts of my past to tell the story.

What I’ve found by going through these entries is that I have documented entire swaths of my life. Events that I had completely forgotten were all there written in my bad grammar and stream of consciousness style. There were entire conversations that I recapped that now strike me as fascinating. I could even point to my first recollections of meeting someone and all that has happened since that moment. It is really amazing to have such a record of your life.

But the strange thing is that once the blog started what I wrote about has changed. The writer’s journal was always meant to be just for me (and my future biographers. Can’t forget them.) It didn’t have an audience. It was just my attempt at cataloguing my life in a way to clear out some of the thoughts in my head. As a result it was straightforward and truthful even if in some cases there were stories I didn’t tell because I didn’t want a record of them. And while the blog is truthful (at least within the 75% rule) my subject matter has really changed. I no longer write about myself in the same way. It’s not just that entire posts revolve around My Beloved Lindsay. I tend to write much less about the people in my life.

It’s mainly a case of what I would like to share to the whole world. I hide parts of myself. Not very well but I do hide them. Some people would probably be less than pleased to discover that I am writing about them and posting it online. Plus, I have a horrible feeling that if I would ever write about something good happening in my life I would jinx it and it would go south immediately. So the blog has taken on more of a resemblance to a daily newspaper column than a personal journal.

In some ways that is good. It’s more enjoyable for others to read and I am a lot funnier this way. Plus, sometimes my life is so boring even I don’t want to read about it and I doubt many people are that interested in the ups and downs and more downs and so far down that you come out the other side of my romantic life. But I miss not having a record of it. When I look back at the past couple of years I won’t be able to point to a passage and go “See, this is what I thought the moment I met you.” Maybe what I’ll write will become a little more personal (especially now that I don’t have the spectre of a company blogging policy hanging over me.) Maybe I’ll just write more pieces that are only for my eyes. But I’d like to find a way to keep a record of my real life.

Enjoy the weekend everyone. Go to hell Carolina. I’m not cheering for Kansas, I’m cheering against Carolina.