Greetings my fellow ETEC 540’ers!
It’s truly a pleasure to be joining you on our summer journey in this interesting time of life. I’m excited to try a new course format. This will be my 9th course in the MET program and I’ll be participating in one of the summer institutes this summer as my 10th – so this is my swan song semester – as it seems to be for many of us in the group. Congrats to all!
I have been in previous courses with many of you, so you will have caught snippets of my life from earlier introductions. But there are also many new faces and I’m excited to get to know you better. My name is Matt Wilde (pretty much no one calls me Matthew) and I currently reside in Chestermere, Alberta – a bedroom community to Calgary. I’ve been married to my wife, Sheryl, for over 13 years now and we just recently (3 weeks ago) had our 5th child. Yes, you read that correctly – 5th! Life is a party at our house! We’ve lived in the Calgary area for 10 years now after completing our schooling in Edmonton. But we both grew up in tiny rural towns in southern Alberta – hence the choice to live in a bedroom community. We want the rural lifestyle, but my work is in the ‘big city’…so this was the best compromise we could find!
What’s In My Bag?
My life is a life of paradox (something that this assignment has brought into stark clarity for me)! This was an interesting assignment for me. Because I don’t carry things around! In my heart, a battle between two opposing forces rages. Force #1 = sentimentality. Force #2 = minimalism! I was raised on a family farm where everything was used and reused and loved and passed on. But farming isn’t the isolated endeavor that it once was – I’m also a product of our consumer use-and-get-rid-of culture. I seem to have an innate need for EFFICIENCY. So I’m constantly trying to trim the fat and I can’t stand to have excess clutter lying around….especially in my bag if I’m going to be carrying it around all the time! So force #2 is currently winning….but at the expense of many pangs of sorrow from force #1.
Because of my minimalism and desire for efficiency – I generally refuse to carry pretty much anything around. I digitize everything and then clear out the clutter. I technically don’t even carry my keys and wallet in my back … but the picture seemed really empty with just a laptop and charger! But this is literally ALL I carry around with me.
- My laptop sleeve – when I saw this at Dollarama, I was immediately in love. It spoke to me on a few different levels….the first being that it was cheap (another one of my defining characteristics….but let’s call it frugal)! And it fit my laptop so nicely without having to carry around any extra bulk. I use this to carry my laptop to work and back along with the charger in a way that is easier and more efficient than carrying the items separately. Its use is purely functional which I appreciate greatly.
- My Dell laptop is provided by my employer. I could have had a MacBook, but I seem to have developed an anti-Apple sentiment somewhere along the line (not really sure how or why). Its sleek design and lack of any kind of bezel compared to most other laptops make me happy because it feels even more slim and easy to carry around. Efficient! It also seems to scream that I am part of the ‘system’ of corporate Western civilization.
- The wallet I carry isn’t a wallet at all. Because that would be too much to carry! It’s actually a very small stack of the most important cards that I use on a regular basis held together by an elastic band taken from a head of broccoli. Are you noticing a theme yet? Cheap, slim, and efficient! This I actually carry in my pocket with me, not my bag….and the thought of carrying around extra things that I rarely use just aggravates me. In my wallet, I carry 1 credit card (PC FInancial – because it’s got no annual fee and we buy everything with it to collect the points and then once/year cash them out and use the money for camping trips), 1 work credit card (because I have to), 1 debit card (to access cash in our accounts if needed), 1 Alberta Healthcare Card, 1 drivers license, and 1 Blue Cross card (all because…they’re important!). That’s it! I refuse to carry around any more and have a giant mass in my pocket if it’s unnecessary.
- My keys – the same! A house key, 2 essential work keys, and the tiniest Swiss army knife I could find to use for cutting things open and randomly prying/slicing things as needed. I would say I use this approximately weekly – otherwise it would get the boot too! No frills! (Which oddly enough is the name of the grocery store we frequent…..) Maybe I need to see a therapist? ????
- Laptop charger. Again, totally functional. I actually bought an extra one of these so I can have one at work and one at home. So I usually carry this as little as possible too! But with our current COVID situation, I often find myself working in all sorts of random locations – so it’s now in the bag more often than not as well.
Now here’s more of the paradoxical part of my life. I actually LOVE things! Especially things that have meaning to me and to my family. And I hoard all sorts of random things at home “in case it comes in handy someday”. You probably read about my bag and thought, “this guy’s living the life of a robot and needs to get some help or he’s going to snap!” But I actually feel like I have quite a different public persona than what my efficiency-driven toting would imply. I love being with people and enjoying the moment, I love getting out into nature and taking time away and finding peaceful time to meditate and ponder, I love to reflect and journal (I’ve been keeping a regular journal for the last 20 years almost), and I ESPECIALLY LOVE our growing family:
And trust me, there’s not much efficient, sleek, OR cheap about raising a family of 5 kids! You should have seen our bonus room yesterday with Lego and dolls strewn about!!
I think my bag actually represents very little about what really makes me – me. I think an archeologist would have a hard time deciphering much about my life and what actually happens in it based on the minimal contents of my bag….unless they could unlock the digital world that’s housed inside my laptop. There, they would find a treasure trove of information about myself, my family, my life, my journals, the books I read, my genealogy – and all the other various ways that I engage with text and media. There’s so much more to me that just isn’t housed in the objects themselves.