I’m a big fan of honesty and not hiding things, so let’s be up front about something: I am a complete failure when it comes to behaving like a grownup.

I’m thirty-two. I have no fucking clue how that happened — my best guess is that time snuck by while my back was turned, on a rocket or something.

Shit, lost the thread already. This does not bode well.

Right. Thirty-two. Thirty-two, and I haven’t figured out how grownup works yet.

I can’t blame my parents, because they’re pretty good at grownupping, and I’m pretty sure they tried to teach me. I just never caught on. Maybe it’s like math, or a language, because I have no ability in either of those areas.

One of the areas I fail at where others excel is organisation. I fail spectacularly. Anyone who’s seen my house knows this.

I especially fail at shit that should be easy, which leads us into storytime.

The Great DVD Debacle

Many years ago, before I bought a house and settled in to completely fail at homeownership, we lived in a pretty shitty apartment. That didn’t stop our DVD collection from growing — although it should have, I think.

One day, I was looking at the DVD shelf, and the DVD overflow shelf, and the DVD Overflow Shelf Overflow Stacks, and I started thinking, “Y’know, I can’t really remember all these. What if I buy a duplicate. And what if I want to watch something, but I can’t remember where it is, or if we even have it? I need to sort these. And I need a way to keep track of what we have.”

So I sat there, and I looked at a few movies, and a few TV series. I looked at all the information on the boxes. And I settled on the grandest of plans: I would construct a database!

This, of course, was a way of procrastinating. Because I didn’t know how to do anything with databases — I just knew that it was how you kept track of things, and sorted things. Vague ideas, really. But I thought I could learn, so I tried to learn.

Specifically, I tried to learn Microsoft Access.

I added a few fields. Title, obviously. Rating. Genre. Then, I started getting hyper-sorty. I added Aspect Ratio. I added a special field for Special Edition and Director’s Cut. Probably others that I can’t even think of right now, because they were insane.

I started entering things. By hand, of course. Then, I started getting really sick of that process, and I thought about how stores have it easy, scanning barcodes and shit.

I started dreaming of a fantastical future in which you could just scan the barcode of something with a small, available-to-anyone device, and automatically add things to a database that way.

I thought there must be a way to do it with webcams, actually.

Then, I dropped the entire thing.

Epilogue: ‘Is it streaming? No? Nevermind.’

All the DVDs were packed up and moved and reshelved, and then packed up and shifted and re-re-shelved, and now they’re on what should be convenient shelves, except they’re completely out of order, and some of them are missing, but I don’t know which ones. I don’t even bother looking for anything that isn’t a part of my incredibly small BluRay collection these days, because it’s far too much effort.

If it’s not streaming, I just don’t bother.

Debacle 2: Videogame Boogaloo

A couple of nights ago, we got the Xbox 360 back from the damned XBox 360 Sanitarium again. And Gremlin wanted to play a game.

I wanted to go to sleep, but, no, I had to go hook things up first. And probably spend an hour sitting there waiting for him to figure out what game he wanted to play, so I could find it and put it in, so I wouldn’t wake up to every damn game we own all over the place.

He hasn’t even learned that you turn the console off when you go to bed. Putting games back? I really don’t think that’s going to happen. Especially now that there’s a whole new process to learn.

But, we live in an amazing new world. That barcode scanning thing is a thing now. So, I hit the Google Play store and started looking for something that would let me do what I wanted to do.

…and I went to bed. And got back to it later.

Last night, actually. I played around with the app I found a little bit, found it to be incredibly lacking, and decided to try a Google Docs spreasheet instead.

One tab for each console, then…shit, what do I do now? Should I do one tab for each console, or one tab for each shelf? And how do I sort them? Alphabetical is popular, sure, but it might be a good idea to keep series together. And I want my Zeldas out front, until I decide to put them somewhere extra-extra-special.

…and I gave up again. Because that’s what I do. I let myself get overwhelmed with possibilities and complexity, and I shut down.

Because I don’t like doing things until I know what I’m doing. And I can’t decide what I’m doing.

The End.

Of the story, anyway. Not the post.

One of the first things I did this morning was post about it on Facebook, because I suddenly remembered that I’ve got a friend-of-a-friend who plays a lot of games. That must mean he has a lot of games, right? Unless he trades them in for new games, or rents them, or something. Still, lots of games.

He must keep track of them somehow.

If not, someone else probably knows how to make this easy.

The answer? Google Docs. Keep it simple.

Simple isn’t easy or convenient, though. It’s not ‘point camera at barcode and auto-get the information’. Simple is just…simple.

Maybe this is a goal I need to set for myself. My psychiatrist talked about how, when I got a therapist, that therapist would work with me on setting goals. But, am I allowed to set goals before I get the therapist? Am I even ready to set a damned goal?

What happens if you set goals before you’re ready to set goals?

…should I keep track of my goals?

And here we go ’round again.