Rattus Packensis

At various times in my life, I have subscribed to various professional publications--often, this is a side-effect of being a member of the associated professional organization. As a member for several years of the American Choral Directors' Association, I received The Choral Journal for 5 or 6 years, and as part of my membership in the Nation Council of Teachers of English, I received English Journal for a year or two.

You see, I suspect that at some point in the past, my father's ancestors were the product of an alien race's genetic manipulation as they spliced human genes with packrat genes. He couldn't throw anything away that might, possibly, some day be useful, and I have had to fight against this addiction myself. I managed to get rid of most of the issues of Sports Illustrated that I had laying around before I moved to Rhode Island, but these professional journals were harder to part with. Despite an almost-complete failure to read these issues when I first received them, that did not mean, in my mind, that I would never use them.

In fact, I still haven't admitted that, and I've been making plans to put them to use, to do some reading before the new school year starts next fall, especially with regards to The Choral Journal, because I haven't directed a chorus for two years now. I have, however, managed some small victory in the fight against accumulation. 

I went through all of these journals and ripped out all of the articles that I thought I might find useful. Not every article that might someday be useful if I somehow find myself in a job situation that I can't now imagine, but only things that I think it likely I will want to read within the next year. I really tried to be selective in this saving. Here's the result:

On the left are the discarded remains, on the right are the things I decided to keep. The nice thing is, it's actually a slender enough collection that I might conceivably take the time to read them. I was tempted to scan them into computer files and even further reduce what I'm keeping, but so far it doesn't seem worth the effort. It was one thing to whittle these down this far, but another to go to that trouble. 

I'm having similar trouble with books. I acquire them much more easily than I discard them, so I now have a lot of books to move. A lot of them, I haven't even read and, if I'm completely honest with myself, very well may never read. It's hard though--I bought them because I had some desire to read them at some point in my life, so there's a desire to keep them in case I get around to them. Moreover, I'm an English teacher, so I can always tell myself that I might need any given book for my teaching--some day. Even so, I'm getting rid of a number of books before our move and may be able to bring myself to part with more before the day comes. 

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