Receipts

In a terrifyingly lame moment of avoiding the many projects that really need to be done (unpacking from a lovely wedding weekend, revising chapter 4, making bread), I just went through our file folder of Visa receipts to take out the ones that are more than a month old.

If you are a reasonably organized person, this task probably sounds simple to you since you would keep receipts in a way that allowed you to easily pull receipts out by month, or you'd only file them once a month. If you are one of the millions of people who don't see the point of saving Visa receipts, this task probably sounds baffling to you. Why would I have a folder stuffed full of 9 months' worth of Visa receipts anyway?

Unfortunately, I live in a sad world in between those two nice logical places. A world in which I feel compelled to save receipts but have no ability to maintain that organization. So, I stuff receipts into a file folder for months at a time and then, eventually, spend an hour flipping through them, sorting out the recent from the old, and then have a shredding festival with the old ones.

Now, sorting receipts is crappy work at the best of times, but I have been known to start smiling stupidly in the process when I come across the receipt for a particularly fabulous meal or the detritus of the little costs of travel to see friends.

Today however, whether it's the rain coming down outside, having just left family, or the general malaise that dissertation writing has left around me lately, sorting receipts has left me, embarrassingly and ridiculously, near tears. In a year when money seems infuriatingly, depressingly tight (I know, we are so lucky compared to so many, yet that doesn't change the fact that things are tight here too), I just felt heavy seeing little receipt after little receipt for mediocre meals eaten hurriedly while driving from DC to Illinois or back... for gas ... for the other small ephemera of separation.

I think of how archeologists learn about long-gone communities by sifting through their garbage. Seeing how those by-gone people lived, what they ate, and what they valued, in what they threw away. I wonder, what could some future archeologist specializing in credit card receipts say about us? And, what would be missing from that tale? She would know that we traveled and, looking closely, she would learn that I traveled, most often, alone and by car. She might wonder about the erratic patterns of grocery buying, swinging from indulgent Whole Foods excursions and multi-bottle wine purchases to weeks in a row of trips to the little corner store for cheaper conventional groceries. She would notice that I used the credit card more than Anna (or, at least, that I saved more receipts) and that those indulgent trips were usually on my end. That when I traveled, my frugal love would eat bowls of Cheerios or pasta with sauce.

If, as is likely, she were an environmental archeologist, critical of previous eras' destruction of the planet, she would find us as guilty as most of our neighbors, given to the consumerist approach of buying organic and choosing to eat in rather than take out styrofoam, yet still, fundamentally, buying too much, eating too much, using too much petroleum ...

If she could figure out that I was writing a dissertation (though she'd need to do some triangulation to put that together, perhaps by making deductions from my travel routes or by working with a specialist in checking accounts), she might launch an insightful critique of the early 21st century academy and its economy of coffee and wine consumption and its problematic reliance on international import/export markets and shipping. We might all get slightly off the hook for our obsession with fair trade, organic coffee and our preferences for locally-owned options, but I'm guessing the academy won't have changed so much as to let her be too easy on her decadent predecessors.

Perhaps she'll launch a new methodology, find a way to crack the codes of some of those old decaying google servers discovered on the west coast of what used to be the United States, and trace the networks of expenditure that facilitated early 21st century academic work, looking especially at the phenomenon of long distance relationships. Maybe she'll find scraps of old blog posts and decipher their cryptic phrases, to discover a world of self-absorbed, navel-gazing dweebs who look, when she really stops to think about it, a lot like the self-absorbed, navel-gazing dweebs who inhabit the offices around her in the University of West Reclaimed Landfill Department of Environmental and Technological Archeology. And she'll keep that mostly to herself, at least in her publications, but she'll probably post a comment about it on whatever the late 23rd century equivalent of facebook is.

Who knows.