catching up. archives. worries.

i'm always too optimistic about my productivity. i had big plans for this, my last winter vacation. my visions encompassed a new online portfolio, scores of job applications, screenprinting, reading through seven or so books on rhizomes, complexity theory, and geophilosophy, and catching up on blogging.

but everything is getting bogged down because i forgot how much time i waste everyday just being around all my possessions. it feels so...pleasant and borderline nostalgic to be in the room that led me through high school and to have the wonderful chore of going through all the things that have fallen into disorganization while i've been gone the past few years.

magazines. i've been reading all the magazines that had continued to come in my absence. and rereading the ones that deserve it, several years after their publications. i have been disastrously trying to sort through my closet, which-- via my mother's good intentions-- has become bloated through the store-closing sales of a local department store and is now uncomfortably swollen with clothes and accessories. and i spend about fifteen minutes each morning repositioning the tom clancy hardcovers that are holding up my broken bed. i detangle necklaces for an hour and don't notice that time has passed.

in short, my vacation has been distracted with my own brand of domesticity. i am about fed up with it, but as soon as i feel productivity coming on again, a carful of family members roll up from new jersey. i'm happy to see them and to be in a household that feels like it has something to do every day, but all the same, this bodes poorly for my portfolio etc.

part of my hesitancy, though, is rooted in a bizarre ideological paralysis i'm having about how to organize myself and my thoughts. before leaving stanford for birmingham, i arrived in andreas's loft space, flustered, near-militant, and demanded that he sit down and figure out how i was going to archive my life.

with blogging, flickr, facebook, all the various files and formats on my computer, on my external hard drive, the logbooks that keep multiplying, the files of clippings that have yet to make it into the logbooks.... we have all these methods of making, keeping, and storing things, but i feel like i'm engaging all these archives without an idea of what kind of work i want them to do for me in the future.

the way i see it, the archive has been based on "retrieval," or being able to go back and find something later. but how often do we go back and look for something specific? sites like flickr or digg are really good at sharing things between lots of people in a given slice of time, but will the site with the most diggs on a monday even matter the next friday? when will anyone ever go looking back for that stuff? ...it comes down to "relevance" and what that means in a cultural semantic. right now, time and keywords determine relevance, but should we be searching by "relevance" at all?

clearly, we don't yet have criteria for what is "good," "useful," and "important" in the storing and organizing of information. i t would be nice if data could be informative in real-time, all the time. because no matter how good or thorough your tagging is, tagging only contextualizes things with that capcity that you, the user, are capable of tagging it in a given moment in time. i guess i want my archive to be better than i am at organizing and figuring out the potential in things. i want it to be able to draw connections that i might not be able to see.

so... all this to say: i'm not doing so well with blogging. i don't post often enough and certainly don't always post the things that i really should be archiving/sharing. sometimes it feels like too much of a hassle to scan something, so i won't blog it at all. and sometimes i feel a weird guilt about writing too much or else putting up too many images. and i am definitely deterred from posting about something if it seems "achronological." which is stupid, especially, since i think that chronology can be the most retarded organization-crutch to fall back on.

anyways. i shall be blogging haphazardly since i don't have any better ways of doing things. quickrpickr will help, i think. its a flickr app that will help me put images up better. and i'm going to try to keep up my flickr stuff better. captions? tags? who knows. all that stuff annoys me but it's probably a good idea. archiving seems to be a hard business.

any suggestions?