I work with real archival storage all day. acid-free tissue, museum board dividers cut to the exact millimeter, foam that’s been tested not to off-gas anything that’ll eat a hundred-year-old photograph over the next fifty years. so you’d think, coming home from that, the last thing I’d want to do on a Tuesday night is more of the same thing but smaller and pointless. instead I sat at my kitchen table with an X-Acto knife and a sheet of foam core, building a custom insert for a card game that has, I counted, fourteen total components.

it does not need an insert. it came with a plastic tray that holds everything fine. I built one anyway, with little labeled dividers, because the plastic tray rattled slightly when I picked the box up and something in my brain simply could not let that stand.

Deb, my boss at the museum, would probably have opinions about this if she knew. she’s the head registrar, exacting in a way that used to intimidate me and now I mostly just admire, and her whole professional worldview is that an object’s storage should protect it and nothing more, no flourishes, no unnecessary handling. by her actual standard I’m doing this wrong. the game would survive the rattle. the rattle bothers nobody but me.

but I think the honest version of what’s happening is that cataloging isn’t something I clock out of at five. it’s become the shape my attention takes. at work it’s donated photographs and someone’s grandmother’s letters, deciding where things live and how they’re protected from their own fragility. at home it’s apparently board games, which are not fragile, which do not need protecting from anything except my own inability to leave well enough alone.

I brought the insert to Thursday game night to show off, mostly bracing for someone to point out how unnecessary it was. instead half the table wanted to know how I cut the foam that clean. Marisol, who got me into this hobby in the first place and has never once organized anything in her life, just laughed and said I’d finally found a hobby that let me bring my job home without actually bringing my job home. she’s not wrong. I don’t think I’m going to stop.

the thing about a well-organized box is that opening it feels like a tiny promise kept. everything where it’s supposed to be, nothing rattling, nothing you have to dig for. I get that same small satisfaction at work when a drawer of processed accessions finally closes flush. it’s a strange thing to chase for fun on your own time, and I’ve mostly stopped trying to explain it to people who don’t already get it.

next up, probably, is the game with the enormous plastic bag pile that everyone in my group has been too intimidated to sort. I’ve already looked up foam core prices.