Instead, I'm down here, with the ants and spiders and washing machine and kitty litter. I light scented candles and pretend I'm on a Beach Vacation or perhaps in Grandma's Kitchen. I keep my bare feet off the floor. My view, as well as the size of my windows, has shrunk. Where I once enjoyed a panorama of our leafy, private backyard haven from our double French doors, I now look up into the underbelly of our deck. It's dark. It's quiet.
It's awesome.
Somehow, with the move, I've been able to jettison my supper-preparation duties. I'll enjoy the break for as long as it takes for my husband to realize that he's actually holding a very short, smelly stick. For now, I'll revel in the 6 p.m. IM that invariably pops up in the corner of my screen: SUPPER!
But just because I'm in a new space doesn't mean I've left my problems behind. There's nothing like a move to remind you how disorganized you are. Now, I'm no slouch at keeping things tidy. But there's a difference between tidy and ... well ... organized. When I was a teacher, I used to call myself a 'piler'. (Actually, piling is recognized as an organizational style – and research has shown that pilers are no less organized overall than people who file every document. We know exactly what's in each pile. We're just ... not organized.) Whereas some colleagues left their desks clean – actually empty – at the end of the day, the best I could do was to square the edges of my three or four piles of paper and blow off the eraser dust. I figured if my desk wasn't exactly clean, it was a sight better than the dumper's down the hall.
When I left teaching for writing, I stopped being a piler. I no longer had the luxury of acres of flat surfaces to pile my shit on. I got into the habit of filing things in binders, boxes or folders. But the problem was that I didn't put things in order. And suddenly – after a 18 months of making a living as a writer – I am realizing that being a 'binderer' or a 'boxer' isn't quite enough, either. So I've had to go through my boxes (not the binders yet; I'm not ready to face the binders) and section off my magazine collection according to how they fit within my world. Trade mags in one box; back issues of Boulevard in another; current publications in a third; possible markets in a fourth; and educational publications in boxes five and six. Not bad.
Books have been shelved according to height, mostly – I know, it's an organizational flaw, but my eyes just couldn't take it any other way. And no, I did not purchase that copy of Coping with Trauma; that's just one of my mother's complicated projections in the form of a very thoughtful Christmas gift. Gee, thanks Mum. I'm glad you think I'm so fucked up. (Notice how it's still wrapped in cellophane? Yeah.) I will, however, own up to having exactly nine books on how to raise un-fucked up kids. I wonder if there's a connection?
All this navel-gazing aside, let's think for a moment about the word organizing. It's a good word, and it makes me feel peaceful just thinking about it. But why organize? Typically, when you ize something you're making that something into a representation of the first bit of the word, like terrorize or alphabetize or mechanize or even euthanize. (Although I suppose there are exceptions: lionize being one.) So when I break organize down, I get... organs. Hmm. That doesn't give me quite the same feeling of peace... but I guess it makes sense. Our bodies are composed of organs – one organ to accomplish each particular function. But when do we actually make something into organs?
I mean, isn't that called disembowelment?
Excuse me: I'm afraid I have to go now. I gotta go disembowel an entire room.
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