Raw Material
June 23, 2004
I have been slowly but surely getting myself organized since moving my office from Melrose to Cambridge. In fact, I actually moved to two places at the same time. I took all of my technical work to my new office in Central Square in Cambridge; at the same time, I took all my personal work to an office in the third floor of my home. I am sitting in the home office now. I don’t know how realistic a goal this is, but I am hoping to do all my technical work in Cambridge and my more personal work here at home. Ultimately, I have the lofty goal of making more and more money writing narrative nonfiction, but for now I am still on more or less the same track. Indeed, since my move to Cambridge I am as busy as I ever have been.
One of the benefits of this move is that I threw a bunch of stuff away. I had been in the Melrose office for 4.5 years. It was amazing how much I accumulated in that time. My older son and his friend filled a small dumpster in about an hour. Most of it was periodicals, the majority of which live online now, but it also included a lot of marketing materials, trade show brochures, outdated (and therefore useless) technical books, broken equipment, broken furniture, and unused and outdated office supplies. I threw away my old Macintosh Plus, but kept the 40MB hard drive (though I am not sure what is on it).
My office in Cambridge and my office at home are both pretty sparse. They both have a desk, a chair, and a bookcase. My one good file cabinet is in Cambridge, so I will have to do something about one here at home.
I am glad to now have close at hand a great deal of raw material for my personal writing. This includes manuscripts and journals that date back to college, and personal organizers that date back to my early career. I find such things to be embarrassing, poignant, startling, and confusing all at once. For example, I can open an organizer from November 1988 and see that on the 30th I had a series of meetings, my notes from which are cluttered with acronyms (EDG, ESD/PL, ESD/SC, Building R, T Building.) I even had a "mini-meeting" that day (yikes!), and I left early to get an allergy shot at 3:30. I had written one urgent marginal note, "Bug Sally!" Sally was my sponsor on a state grant I was running that year, but I can't imagine what I needed to bug her about. A few days later I interviewed for a new job&mdash:one that I would eventually get, though I wouldn't start for several more months. 1989 was on the horizon, and it would be a big year for me. I would start the new job, which turned out to be the best of my career to that point, I would get married, and I would turn 30. My penmanship seemed to reflect the eagerness and good energy I had for the next year.
This is good stuff. 1988 was a pivotal year for me, and 1989 even more so. I am looking forward to digging in.
Posted by Bill Trippe at June 23, 2004 5:30 PM
