The woman held my driver’s license firmly in her right hand and hole punched it with her left. When she handed it back I realized the word “void” had been hole punched in it. I was immediately torn between being fascinated by the cool hole punch and comically bummed about the sad commentary on my time in Memphis. Just like that, as if stamped by some cosmic bureaucrat with a cartoonishly oversized rubber stamp, VOID.
In the short time between getting my TN license and getting my PA license, it looks like my face has filled out a little more. Admittedly, I’ve been eating more cookies, banana bread, and pasta all while exercising a lot less. I feel like a squirrel fattening up for winter. The license itself also feels more substantial, thicker – firmer plastic. For the longest time, my license never had my full name – it always had Matt. TN insisted on putting Matthew. I suppose that’s not a bad thing – though I never go by Matthew and don’t sign my name Matthew. Now it matches my birth certificate (for all of those times I need to show someone my birth certificate).
It felt good to get the license and my car registration taken care of… all that’s left now is to get it inspected. I was a little caught off guard by the transfer fees and cost of the license, title, and plates – at $250, they seemed steep compared to TN. When I left with my new plates, I thought about the expense of just owning a car – as though I’m paying for a privilege. For a minimum wage employee, that’s about a full week’s worth of pay.
These past few days I’ve been focused on trying to get these things taken care of. It is ridiculously easy to focus on unpacking and work and getting to know people and let slide the more tedious tasks – the things that require paperwork and order. I suppose that too has been a focus – creating a sense of order. Moving is a disruptive process. At work, I’m constantly looking for files or papers – everything is new to me, and there’s a lot of old materials to wade through. Always opening things that aren’t what I’m looking for. As I’ve been getting my new phone set up, I’m feeling the same way about my own files and digital life. Photos strewn everywhere (on hard drives, in the cloud, on thumb drives) and music libraries that don’t match. In a box somewhere I have old hard-drives stripped from defunct computers – worried that they might have sensitive info on them or that I might need something from them… I probably should have switched to cloud-based storage two or three devices ago. It seems that with every new PC or phone, I end up recopying the same files to an external drive and having multiple backups and multiple copies of folders in different places. Each switch brings with it increased disorder – a filling the garage of sorts.
Feeling a little frustrated (which is probably more about control than anything else) I started purging and merging. Two nights ago I tackled the iTunes library. iTunes is still a pain in the ass, but I think I finally got everything in one place and was able to sync my phone. Unfortunately, in doing so, it doubled the number of songs on my phone (a mystery to solve another day). With my music all in one place, I started working on photos. This is, as one might expect, a little more sentimental. There are pictures of my old house, and graduations, and vacations. I was only mildly horrified at how much heavier I was back when my wife graduated from grad school – my chin basically disappeared in my neck (thankfully, the new license is nowhere near as bad as that). I’ve come across pictures from the Baltic and Italy and the house at the shore. Going through old photos and files – I realized I can be a bit of a digital slob (and potential hoarder). I could do a much better job of deleting and filing things away.
I began writing this post last night because I was happy with the progress I had made on some these things I needed, or wanted to, or should get done. In the moment, I was determined to spend a little bit of time each day cleaning out. I also say this about the boxes I haven’t unpacked. Today, I have none of that enthusiasm. Instead I’m thinking about all of the “I should” statements that I make: I should exercise more, eat less, clean up, get outside, get organized. Yesterday I read an article against making to-do lists. Of course, I can’t find the article… but if I remember, it argued that having these never-ending to-do lists has the effect of making the tasks seem prolonged or like progress is never made (or something like that). The example was walking by the the garage that you know is a mess… you sometimes take a stab at it… but over time, it feels like you’ve been cleaning the garage everyday for years. Today I read a similar article about not putting “should statements” on your partner. Which all seems to boil down to acceptance and grace… and freedom.
Tangential to the I should statements are thoughts about freedom and burden. Paying fees to bring my car here feels like a burden. Having all of these things, digital and tactile, feels like a burden. And maybe burden is the wrong word. It feels like dragging things behind me and with me – necessities, items of comfort, reminders, and memories. How freeing it might feel to not carry so much around. Purging and putting things in order is one small attempt to make sense of the mess. When I make measurable progress, as I did yesterday, it almost feels worth it – but then I’m reminded of a quote I saw: “Life’s too short to worry about matching socks.” Why do I want to spend my present moments rearranging and organizing my past?
I have hundreds of pictures of sunsets over the Mississippi and recordings of blues shows, pictures of women I’ve dated or become friends with, pictures of places I’ve been and things I’ve done. I carry with me items of comfort and the familiar like the art I hang on the walls. I box and unbox books I mean to read and notebooks of things I’ve written. I have shoe boxes of tickets and programs and mementos. And yesterday, the woman at the DMV handed me a license where just between my picture and the word Tennessee is the punched out word void.