I took a couple of vacation days from work, using up personal days to address the spring fever that not just infects students, but taunts teachers as well. All went well until my last day, when the rain and storms and tornado watches and wind kept me home all day.
The only thing left to do was tackle that summer to-do list, those projects that have sat dormant for years for no particular reason, only that something more pressing overtakes their dinky priority. My goals for my four-day vacation had practically completed themselves so I found myself looking through my pathetic project list, wondering what I might complete weeks before summer starts. I call it pathetic because these are the types of activities that won’t matter one way or the other, but my perfectionism demands something of them.
I had already eliminated two projects, simply by tossing them after assessing their worth, or lack there of. The ridiculousness of some of the remaining ones reminds us that our lives are filled with such triteness: find pictures to fill frame ornaments, label files, organize childhood photo album.
There’s something vintage and nostalgic with old photo albums, the kinds that have the cardboard cutout pages, with pictures inserted between the pages into the open frames. I found one years ago with a keepsake box (that project has been on my summer to-do list since the pandemic) and I filled it with pictures, ordering sepia-colored prints to make it all look old-fashioned. But I didn’t “finish” it, finish it. The lines underneath each picture remained blank, having decided not to write captions and/or dates, the reason of which I left this undone eludes me now.
I thought this would be an easy task to tackle, to knock off my list with just an afternoon’s work as the rain and the wind raged outside. But how could I leave it as is? The album only contains pictures of my six-year-old son—he’s now 20. The picture of Kippy, our beloved cat, shows him laying comfortably in our bathroom sink, a sink he outgrew. Kippy died two Thanksgivings ago. Baby, our 15-month-old Great Pyrenes/Newfoundland mix, isn’t in the book. How can I leave it like that?
My perfectionism won’t let me.
I spent the afternoon dismantling most of the book, leaving only the pages of my parents intact. Even the pictures that will stay in the book will have to be reordered in different sizes because of rearrangement and the various shapes and sizes of the ovals and rectangles.
Not only have I complicated a task that I had already completed once, I’m raging at myself all those years ago, wondering why I hadn’t written the captions.
On some subconscious level, I refused to write those captions, knowing that once I did, the book could never be redone, freezing us in time back to 2010.
That’s one of the problems with all these “projects,” these seemingly benign activities that one thinks would bring delight and create a family heirloom. They will never feel done because time continues to move. Yet I know why I completed the book: the album had sat on my shelf empty and incomplete, and I thought if I am not going to fill it up with pictures, I might as well get rid of it. But I left myself an out all those years ago by not writing on the lines, forever cementing the range of the album, which would have forced me now, in my I’m Tossing Almost Everything Downsizing mode, to keep the album as is, or take the pictures out and toss it because would it be worth keeping? I don’t know if I would have kept it or tossed it, which is a moot point anyway now that I’ve made a bigger project in need of completing.
Which brings me to my next perfectionism conundrum: DVD labels. In a world where everything is digital with no hard copies in existence, I still like being able to hold stuff in my hands: the good pictures are printed and put in photo albums that take up way too much space, my favorite songs are purchased and housed on my computer to avoid having to use a streaming service, and old home movies on VHS are transferred to DVDs. I also saved all those music videos I recorded from MTV and VH1, including Pop-Up Video, all those years ago. Some of the tracking wouldn’t even rectify itself so I couldn’t transfer them onto a DVD. But now I have a stack of unlabeled DVDs, sets of threes wrapped in a rubber band, with my high school handwriting on a torn-out sheet of notebook paper, listing the contents of each DVD.
This is not good enough for my perfectionism.
On heavy cardstock bought specifically for the project, a typed list of contents reveal what lies on each DVD. But that looks as boring as it sounds. Why not make it fun, a kaleidoscope of picturesque nostalgia for the Eighties and Nineties, and copy images of some of the videos onto it?
Sure, each little square looks cute, with famous scenes frozen in time: Madonna voguing, Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ jean jumpsuits, the infamous wedding dress from “Ordinary World.” And why not take it a step further, using my delightful laminator to seal all the ink permanently, safeguarding against nuclear war?
Who cares if it took me an hour to find pictures and crop and shrink them to fit within the 5×5 square? Who cares that I have 27 more left to do? I’ll probably run out of laminator sleeves as well, turning a project that I could have completed for free into a rather costly one (I might run out of ink too). The finished project is delightful and makes me smile with nostalgia, but what will happen to those when I’m dead and gone? Probably tossed into the garbage.
So why must I complicate simple projects, something I could have completed in an afternoon, crossed off my list, and moved on to something else?
Not everything I complete has to be cute or pretty—bland and functional will suffice, especially if it will all end up in the landfill when my mortality ends. But I can’t not do such a thing, especially now that the idea has implanted itself into my brain.
I could find a thousand other ways to spend my time. Maybe that’s what these projects do—distract me from writing, making me feel like I’ve got more pressing things to complete. It’s still a productive activity, albeit a needless one, but it’s not like I’m just surfing the internet or social media or binge-watching a show. I’m doing something, but not really doing what I should be doing, like writing. And my perfectionism means that it will take me ten times longer to complete.
Instead of mulling over a blank Word document on my laptop, wondering what will become of any sentences I type onto a page, only knowing that the sentences I create probably aren’t good enough and will probably never be read by anybody, I sing along to Jewel’s “Foolish Games” while I print off another square for a DVD, with a warm stench of laminating hanging in the air.