the digital mess

Our digital lives are a mess. No, that's wrong. Collectively they are messes, multiple, more than two even. I've started the cleanup process numerous times, but it's never quite important enough to complete. It's certainly never fun enough. Yesterday, cep took it upon herself to start cleaning up her digital lives. She started with attacking her computer's nether-recesses and ended with old Zip disks.

She found many interesting pieces of "nostalgia" along with some oddities, most of it from college. She discovered old papers, prop lists, lighting diagrams, correspondence, etc. She got rid of a lot, but she still feels attached to some of it. I think her favorites were her rough drafts of college papers. She, apparently, wrote first drafts in a stream-of-consciousness paragraph format. To get to the final draft, she would cut up the snippets and rearrange them on her living room floor. This provided no end of hilarity for her roommate at the time.

The strangest find of all was a packing list. An Excel file was retrieved that included close to 100 lines of Book Title, Author's First Name, Author's Last Name, and Box # (1, 2, or 3). Yes, this was an OCD packing list. It was not, however, our packing list. It was created by an old acquaintance of mine from my French classes at Alliance Français. I haven't seen the woman in at least 2 years. I certainly have no idea how we came into possession of her packing list. Our best guess includes an e-mail with an incorrect attachment that was received from cep's i-Mac. cep's final word: "You really shouldn't pack that many books in your boxes. You'll never be able to lift them!"

My favorite find of hers was our courtship. Well, she found the first 2 days of it, at least.

We met online, for any out there that don't know. The SpringStreet dating network served numerous hip and edgy websites back then. We had both been trying it out for a while, but I had practically given up in favor of the new-at-the-time (and free) Friendster. I filled out my last profile questionnaire with an essay. None of the words matched the questions, but it all flowed together rather nicely from bits of work I had written previously, cep-style perhaps. I meant to save it, but who knows if I did (see paragraph 1, re: mess). cep managed to find it. She also managed to find our "response profiles," if I can call them that. She created a profile in response to my essay, and I created a profile in response to her response. On the third day we met on the corner of Halsted and Belmont. The rest is history, I guess.

Some of the writing was quite witty. I almost forgot that we could do that. It's easy to see how I fell for her based on those passages, but I can see now how she fell for me as well. I don't exactly remember writing those words in such a playfully swaggering way, but that's what I see in them now. I see that in a lot of what I used to write, as I re-read some entries in my first blog this morning as well. I guess that's why I started this up again, as a test. cep has taken to this body of water much better than I so far. I hope I can still swim.