Site icon gordsellar.com

Getting Organized

Long story short: it’s less a “new year’s resolution” than it is just a resolution, period.

So, over the last week-and-a-half or so, we moved to Seoul. Actually, the process took a little longer than that: I was packing in early December, and we had the shipping company in Saigon show up about mid-December to pick up most of our stuff. (As it turns out, this is something to do on the last day, but live and learn.) We spent a week in a lovely but very affordable hotel, basically sorting out last-minute stuff, sending out job applications, and saying goodbye to a few friends we made during our visit there, as well bidding adieu to the city itself.

It was nice to leave Saigon while we still liked the place a lot, but after some of the annoyances started to get to us just a tiny, tiny little bit. That’s the perfect time to leave a place.

Oh, and winnowing the contents of our checked and carry-on baggage. Here’s what we carried onto the plane:

It was a long overnight flight from Saigon Seoul, via Shanghai. If you absolutely must carry ridiculous amounts of carry-on stuff, try get a direct flight.

Believe it or not, we’d worked hard to reduce the weight of everything we’d be carrying. But it’s impossible to winnow away the weight of a musical instrument, of course, so this mostly involved me copying data from CD-ROMs and scanning the pages of old notebooks so I could archive their contents digitally, and shed the weight of all that paper. And what do you know, it felt good. It felt good to sort through our papers, clothes, books, and it felt good to get rid of stuff.

Actually, it felt like stuff could become manageable. That maybe I would be on top of things, instead of running behind. I mean, not that I haven’t always stayed on top of work stuff, and writing, but… well, I’m a pack-rat, and I haven’t always stayed on top of all my stuff, much as I’ve wanted to. When we left Seoul a couple of years ago, I discovered belongings I hadn’t realized I still owned. I sold off backpacks I hadn’t used in years, found clothes that once again fit me that hadn’t in years. It was all, well… kind of ridiculous.

Okay, this is really a photo from a long-ago move, but… well, this was after only a few years in Korea. You don’t even want to imagine the volume of stuff we dealt with in March 2013!

So I’m sorting, winnowing still, in the quiet moments between job interviews and submitting CVs before deadlines. In the last 36 hours or so I’ve been winnowing my email accounts, cutting all those stupid subscriptions that clutter all the tabs of my Inbox. I still have a few thousand to sort through, though that shouldn’t take long: I’ve dealt with most of my outstanding emails from 2012-2014, and I don’t think I’ll be replying to most that date back before 2011. (And, besides, I suspect a lot of what’s back earlier than 2011 is sent from addresses people no longer use, so replies wouldn’t get through anyway.)

Still, I’ve run across some fascinating tidbits here and there, so I am actually looking through the emails, not just mass-saving or mass-trashing them. It’s taking a little more work this way, but I find it’s worth it, just for the sake of running across neat things I didn’t know about, or having emails on file that I would probably not have. For what? Well… I’m a pack-rat, and with email, it costs nothing. (Yet. Still.) I’m down to about a thousand unread emails (many of which actually were read, but then marked unread for some reason or other), and another five hundred marked read. That’s a few hours work, probably, since I got from 3,000 to 1,500 in about five hours. I should be approaching Inbox Zero soon… though nobody actually says Inbox Zero anymore, do they?

Certainly, they’ve run out of Inbox Zero merit badges by now…

 

(Ironically, the very idea of Inbox Zero cropped up around the time I started not managing my email rigorously, back in 2007. I guess some bandwagons are worth joining along with everyone else? I’m kicking myself for not attempting it back when the idea was really popular, which I think was around 2008 or 2009. But, you know… better late than never, I guess.)

I’ve also been fixing the Korean encoding on my site, which somehow got broken, I think when it was ported from MySQL4 to MySQL5. Sigh. That is painstaking work, involving either using a weird online decoder, or just plain guessing some of the time. But I don’t like having broken encoding sitting there for all the world to cringe at, so… yeah.

Anyway, that’s what I’m up to while I hunt for a job in the chilly winter of January 2015… in Korea. Yeah, about that: surprise? It’s not wholly unexpected to us, but we moved the date up a bit to help ensure I could make it to more interviews in person. And, what do you know, all my interviews so far have been via Skype anyway! That’s not so bad, though, just a little ironic. It’s actually nice to be back, even with the things that raise my hackles. We’re not on Line 1, though, and we’re not in Yeokgok, and that makes a world of difference.

Ah, drab, aggressive Yeokgok. If I never visit again, it will be too soon. (Though, truth be told, I’m visiting on Tuesday.)
Exit mobile version