The Other Side of Woe - as in WHOA!

So there I was, making the big realization that what was bugging me so was simply a case of the blues. I took a good hard look at myself, my dissatisfaction and my anxiousness to GET AWAY FROM IT ALL, and I realized that just insisting to myself that I was going to do it was actually contributing to my panic. Of course it would be lovely, but how would it be in my case to make two separate trips back-to-back over the space of three weeks... that would be three weeks of no pay... that would be a two-week family road trip, followed by a quick solo plane-ride to visit my family in the States for another week. I mean, since when am I rich enough to do that kind of traveling? Since when can I "have my cake and eat it too?" Since when can I just blow off work at a time when we are trying to encourage more students to enroll?
With a sigh and a shrug, I thus resigned myself to the fact that I was being stubborn and blind to the truth. I decided that, okay, I wouldn't push so hard for these trips...we'd see how things developed. Meanwhile, why not watch a movie!

Funny that Fned's recent blog talks about a time when we lived with almost nothing in the way of possessions and money, yet still had constant and almost cost-free access to unlimited cable channels on TV. And it's true that we watched lots of movies (see her blog for the details). At any rate, I realize now that perhaps that time in my life was the beginning of my insatiable hunger for movies. And last night, it all hit home as I began my search for a movie.

Now I have all my movies - VHS and DVD - in one place, but that does not necessarily mean they are easy to find! So as I stood before the bookcase, letting my eyes travel over all the visible titles, I suddenly understood once and for all how I could keep track of where each one is. All I have to do is NUMBER THEM!!! Why didn't I think of that before??? So I started then and there (at 12:30 a.m.) to do just that! And I got as far as the first 50 VHS tapes.

You might think I could surely have gotten farther than that, but then you don't realize that these 50 black-and-whiters were taped for me by my mother over the years... each has at least 2 if not 3 movies recorded, and of course you need a magnifying glass and patience to decipher my mother's thoroughness in labeling each tape... she includes the dates, the times, the movies, a commentary - i.e. "really good!" - and if she has taped over something (she gets good use out of her cassettes) you have to figure out which are the current movies... or you have to realize that The Josephine Baker Story of Chanukah is really "The Josephine Baker Story" taped over "The Story of Chanukah"... but it was a lot of fun going through them, and don't they look nice all lined up with their little numbers on them? Can you see the numbers at the tops of the boxes?

But that was just the beginning. My own tapes, the 100 or so I've recorded over the years, are still stacked on the floor!...

And of course those are the tapes that I recorded at home... but you can see that I've also bought a few movies over the years, and though they may look orderly, they are not in any order, so I've still got to pull them out and record all the names and put numbers on them and put them back...

Which I thought would be a cinch, until I looked at the larger scope:

So yes, I've started to number the tapes, and will follow with the DVDs, recording the numbers and titles together in a list that I will later feed into the computer, and posting the reference numbers at the sides of the shelves where the corresponding videos are... but as I write this, I realize I've got a looooooooong way to go...

And knowing myself as well as I do, I'm laughing at this whole thing even as I write it!! Dream on, Minshap! Dream on!