It isn’t every day/week/year that an earthquake and G20 riots shake Toronto. I thought it best I document what I was doing as I will likely want to recall this week years from now.
I’m disappointed to report that during the earthquake, I was at work watching my monitor shake, and yesterday during the riots, I was home sifting through personal documents.
I probably wouldn’t even have checked-in with the world had my sister and mom not stopped by for dinner. When I turned the radio on to hear about all the commotion, I was so disappointed that I wasn’t down there taking videos. Except for perhaps Immigration issues, I don’t think there was any bandwagon that I would have jumped on, and even then, I wouldn’t have because I don’t think that a protest is the right forum. I just wanted to be in the heart of the rare action that Toronto sees. Oh well. I’m safe? I’ll find consolation in that.
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I’ve finally decided to sit down and go through all of my filing. They have been in disarray since I moved in with Daniel (September 2008). Well, “disarray” as in “divided”: there are the pre-Daniel files, and the post-Daniel files.
In setting out about this task, I had wanted to merge them into one huge unified system. But I changed my mind.
I cracked open the filing cases, and found neatly organized bank statements, credit card statements, bills, pay stubs, tax documents, and more, all dating to as far back as 2001 – the year I started University. Well, there were my bank statements from high school, but I changed banks before starting University, and I had no interesting documents until 2001.
So, I peeked through them all. I looked at what I spent money on. I expected to find generally irresponsible purchases reflecting youth and negligence, but what I actually found was lists of transactions resembling my current spending, except now I have perhaps 5x the income. Ok, so maybe it was negligent to spend that way without the income I have now.. But it was still interesting to see that I haven’t changed very much: I love to watch movies, eat out at least once per week, I buy electronic toys, and I like to go away on one big trip every 1.5-2 years. I’m … predictable. And apparently, I’ve been so for many years.
I suppose this shouldn’t be a big surprise. It just is because I felt like the last 10 years of my life were very formative, and that I’d grown and changed a lot, and further that a lot of things in my life had changed. But I guess some things never do.
As for the files, I’m scrapping most of them. I admit that it’s hard to just discard my neat and well-kept files, but … why keep them? Without them I can entertain the myth that my metamorphosis into adulthood was more interesting than the documents would declare.
