My Weekend Project

As most of my friends and acquaintances know, I have amassed quite a DVD collection over the past 11 and a half years. I have possibly over 1000 combined movies and TV shows on the format, though I have no way of knowing that for sure since I never made an inventory of my collection...

Well that is going to change this weekend.

I've just found an app on the Android market called 'My Movies' that will categorize my entire video collection in a way I never thought possible. I've already inventoried my blu-ray collection on the application, but that's a drop in the ocean compared to the mountain of DVDs I've accumulated over the years. I used to refer to my enormous stack of movies as "The Monster". It was fed weekly and grew regularly. However, over the past two years I've started to run out of space on my wall for all those flicks. And with my current addiction to watching online content on Netflix and Hulu I barely have time to sit back and watch movies the old fashioned way: on coaster sized digital discs. It's all about the stream now and as a person who frequently watches movies and television on their mobile device, I can't help but notice how much larger a compact disc is compared to my touch screen smart phone. Oh, how times have changed. I used to feel about watching movies on my phone the same way David Lynch did in this video:

Although now I'm singing a different tune. So far in the month of January, I've watched nine movies and out of those nine movies, I watched six of them on my Droid Bionic. How refreshing and convenient technology has become. I can take comfort in the fact that I can easily enjoy a movie while I'm waiting on line in a coffee bar, or on the toilet taking a shit. That's a convenience DVD has never been able to afford us and it's a convenience that is completely unnecessary, but lovely to have.

Yet, as much as I marvel at how media has transformed over time, I still have an incredible amount of pride in my DVD collection. It's something that's tangible and nice to look at when I have a sudden urge to contemplate. A terrific conversation starter during those rare times I actually invite a friend into my apartment. It's a physical timeline of the last decade. You can pick any movie out of my collection and I can tell you what store I bought it at, what year, who I was with and what was going on in my life when I purchased it. That is a personal touch you can't quite get by watching Netflix.

So yes, I'm taking stock of every title I own, but what sucks is that for as much as I know about how I attained this collection, I can't easily remember the order in which I bought them in. All I can tell you is what the first movie I bought on DVD was:

(purchased July 2000 at a Blockbuster Video in Las Vegas)

And what the most recent movie I bought on DVD was:

(purchased 1/2/2012 at Zia Record Exchange in Las Vegas)

So all the DVDs I own come with their own little piece of personal history. Each one was a building block that made me the man I am today. So I'm actually very attached to it-- even the movies I might actually regret owning like:

So I take it as a personal responsibility to keep some kind of record of all the discs I own. It'll be a hell of an undertaking and will take up most of my weekend, but in the end it will be worth it and it will be a list to be most proud of, most proud....