Mark This

There are a lot of things that I mean to do but don't. As I mature (which is a rather late breaking development, I'll admit), I actually start doing them more and more. I get up at a decent hour and go to bed at a decent hour more often than not, to begin with. I keep my room tolerably neat, and the amount of time since it was last an irredeemable mess might be a new record for me. Still, there are other things that I don't quite manage to do.

There are certain things that I always have on me. I always have my wristwatch (which I was not in the habit of using for years). I always have of course my keys, my wallet and my phone. For a while I made a point of carrying a proper Zippo lighter, but gave it up since I never have smoked. I mostly have my sunglasses now, as I got tired of being half-blinded and squinting all the time. They're a nice fashion accessory, despite costing a dollar.

Wrapped Around My Little Finger

After I graduated high school, it seemed like the thing to do was to get a class ring. I had the idea somehow that you get issued one, and everyone gets an identical item. It turns out that it's not so much like the Super Bowl in that respect as I though. You have to buy the ring, and you have to make a lot of choices which affect the price of the ring and which distinguish yours from everyone else's. I'm not sure of where that ring is now.

For some time I wore it, but soon enough I couldn't stand to anymore. I suppose you get to a point of maturity which no longer permits you to wear a high school class ring, but I don't think I got as far as that. It start to really unnerve me, having that thing on there. I would sometimes feel a desperate need to get it off, and even when the process was eased by soap and water, it could be a real task getting it off of there. When at long lost I was almost unable to remove it, I would not put it back on.

Light

Not so long ago, I got a new wallet for Christmas. You'll recall my writing about it. It's very nice, so of course the first thing I did was to jam it full of everything that was in the old wallet (and which probably shortened its functional lifespan). I just did this automatically without taking advantage of the obvious opportunity for assessing the necessity of every item and thus increasing efficiency by winnowing down the number of items in there.

Well, I've done that now. You can just imagine the kinds of things I found in there. There are always going to be blank slips of paper that used to be receipts before the ink rubbed off. What was I going to do with those? I certainly wasn't going to use them for the purpose of substantiating claims for reimbursement. You have to have an employer for that. I wasn't going to use them for claiming business expenses on my taxes either, because I think you have to have actual tax liability first.