Slow, slow, quick, quick, slow.

So I spent yesterday and this morning sorting though 80 billion photos. I’ve been a prolific (if not great) photographer for pretty much all of my life, and until today still had nearly all the photos I’d ever taken past my teens.

As in stacks of them.

As in boxes full of photographs I’d never got out.

I’d looked at them when I took them, sure, and I’d put some of them in albums. But the very-similar-to-another, the blurred (lots), the out-of-focus (many, particularly as I got used to my AE-1), the landscape shots of the lake-district year after year after year. The school photos that make me remember how much I hated school? They sat in their little ‘Kwik Photo’ or ‘Bonusprint’ envelopes with negatives and haven’t seen the light of day for years.

My first round of university, which shows off a past I generally don’t share, where alcohol fuelled my ability to cope with self loathing. The round of photos I took of myself a year before I came out, disheveled and at 5am, trying to come to terms with my self and by body. All of them have sat in a ‘Fun Size Mars’ box (marked ‘best before 1984′).
Today I ripped the few I want to keep from the pages of the albums, I took my past and I said no-fucking-more will this hang over me.

I took the photos of my school time and took a few photos of the few people who were decent and nice, the few flashes of moments where the bullying stopped, where I wasn’t any longer sent to Coventry, where I started to actually make friends and they are now stuck, higgledy piggledy in an album.

I still have the negatives, for all those random shots of University – the first time in my life I had friends who really stuck by me, and coped with all my random depressive shite as I worked myself out into a person rather than a selection of fragments fronted by a mask. I still have those negatives from childhood, and I shall spend some time today sorting them into the photo album that happens to have negative holders in it.

I still have the letters my sister sent me when she was going by the name Milly and started letters ‘Vienna Cheesecake’ for reasons that now escape me.

But the boxes of photos are now less than a box. The albums are pruned. And I can look at them and feel nostalgia rather than thinking ‘god, I hated school’. I still can’t quite look myself in the eye at University, I can see the pain, I can see the waiting and trying to work out how to be me. But my friends helped me become whole, and for that I am endlessly grateful.

Originally published at Kates Journal. You can comment here or there.

Onwards Comrades, to our glorious digital future.

So, today, despite the sun shining (yes, really) and blue skys (I know, I should have taken advantage) I continued in the quest for compaction. Yes, the photos really are compressed down almost as small as I can make them. Negatives, contrary to best practice, are ensconced in (usually) one-entire-roll in one slot of the album’s negative holder. Either that or they’re in one-film-per-slot of the kinds of cheap-ass negative holders that came free in the dying days of film.

I’ve filled up the album that once held photos of my school trip to Budapest with random assorted photos of my entire life. I’ve got one other pack of photos to save. The rest have been painfully sorted into ‘people’ (in the bin) and ‘not people’ (offered on Freecycle, but I fear probably going to join the ‘people’ in the bin). Having completed that task (and feeling somewhat better for it) I then pulled down two boxes of CDs and started the minimise packaging plan that we agreed on for CDs. Whilst in the long term I continue to lust after a library filled with music (as well as a library filled with books), in the short term that’s not going to happen, and also, we’re moving to Canada.

So lugging half a ton of plastic cases across the atlantic seems foolish.

Instead we devised the cunning plan, pull the CDs out – and put them in my DJ cases (which is what I’ve been doing for years because there’s not enough space for all the CDs on any reasonable shelving system in any house we’ve lived in for a looong time). This part is just extending it so that some of my best-beloved bits of music ended up finally succumbing to the ‘strip the CD’ process such that all disks are separated from their jewel cases. Enroute to the box they need to be re-ripped, I’ll get to that…

The second phase is to use Delicious Library to catalogue them (so that I can have a catalogue of disks I own on my phone, so I don’t go getting duplicate copies of excellent albums because I can’t recall if I own it, or just a single, or have one track on a compilation). For this the bar codes on the CD boxes are teh handyness.

The third phase is to then yank the artwork and booklets from the cases, and give away the jewel cases, packing the artwork into a box such that when the time comes, and the house is ready, a giant bulk pack of CD jewel cases can be bought and I can spend a happy day or two reassembling the original CD and artwork. And then putting them on shelves. Nicely in order. So our kid/s will go ‘what the hell are they mum?’ and ‘What, they only hold an hour?’ And so on. Just wait until they encounter gramophones… Heh.

So that’s what I spent much of today doing. I catalogued and stripped down 160 odd CDs.

Then I offered the cases up on Freecycle (much more popular than my photos)

Then I settled down to the painful task of re-ripping the CDs. Which I’ve mentioned before, many times, I’m sure. I’ve done lots of CDs. CDs that have sat on the shelf, mainly, and which need to be stripped down as I described above and are sat waiting to begin that process because whilst they have been ripped I’ve not re-ripped all the CDs in the DJ box. And I don’t want to confuse matters by mixing ripped and unripped material.

So they sit, cluttering up the lounge, and I’m slowly working my way through the ripping process. A process made infinitely more painful by the fact that a disconcertingly large number of disks aren’t in the MusicBrainz database that Max uses to identify CDs. And very few CDs come up with artwork in Max. Why do I use Max? It’s reliable, it produces good quality audio and most desirably, it will rip into multiple formats simultaneously. Thus I can rip my CDs to FLAC and MP3 in one fell swoop.

In other news, I’ve been reading Louise Werner’s autobiography. It’s really good and very funny, but you didn’t come here for my erudite reviews. What’s really interesting about it to me, beyond the background to a musician I respect and who’s music and writing I enjoy a great deal. No, it’s the strange nostalgia invoked. She is a few years older than my sister, but so much of what she writes about is recognisably parts of my own childhood. And parts of my sister’s that I heard about in great detail because we were incredibly close once I got old enough to be less irritating to her.

So it’s kind of interesting to me to read it in that sense.

Also, obviously, I desperately wanted to be her (which is funny, because apparently the comment (advice might be pushing it) from Damon Albarn to her was that, in essence, she needed to make girls want to be her and boys want to… well… – and it certainly worked on me)). Anyhow, so it’s been an interesting read.

Anyhow, I am off to bed, because I’ve the excitement of work tomorrow, and that means getting up at 5:15… Also, I’ve now ripped another bunch of CDs, and deserve the reward of going to bed and reading more of the book :)

Originally published at Kates Journal. You can comment here or there.