Chaos, Inc.

Here are a few things I've forgotten recently:

1. my lunch.
2. my office keys, still stuck in my door.
3. a book I was supposed to bring for a student.
4. where my iPad happened to be stashed. Seriously. It was under my chair, and I had to use Find My iPad. It sang a soothing but persistent song to me from under the chair. Like, what kind of jerk leaves an iPad under a chair? but in dulcet bell tones.

Also, tonight when I was trying  to tell my son about a piece in USA Today about Kyle Korver, and the historian simultaneously reached for a handful of caramel popcorn and accidentally, gently, knocked over an empty soda bottle--nothing was broken--and also simultaneously Bruiser made a "let's go on a walk dammit!" noise of whatever kind, and also at the same time I noticed that my house was dirty and the Christmas tree is still up,  I almost lost it.

I've always said I thrive on chaos. Which is kind of true, until it isn't. And then it's more like chaos is eating my brains out and also making a hella lotta noise while doing so, which means I might be losing my mind whilst also feeling mighty tetchy about it.

You know how this narrative is supposed to go. I'm supposed to figure out a solution. But frankly, on a day when I sent this text to my son:

because I had to conference with students at 6 p.m. and 6:20 p.m. and 7 p.m., and moreover tomorrow I have to be at work directly at 8 a.m. (what are we? farmers?), I have not one solution in mind. Literally: not. one.

I need:

(a) a cleaning robot with super-cleaning-robot powers. Like, the CleanBot 2000, with detachable Sorting Arm and an Executive Get-Rid-Of-That chip, for a 30% less cluttered home™.

(b) a DeLorean, so I can go back to the future, and make better choices about all kinds of things, including my Amazon purchases and my personal organizational habits.

(c) a full night's sleep.

Obviously, I'm not going to get any of these things. So basically, I'm going to try for 80% of (c) and see how that goes. Untidily, probably.

My study is again a ruin.

Today I washed the holiday tablecloth. I lit the Christmas tree for what I hope will be the last time, although I really can't say for sure. I still have a little gift bag that has three bottles of glitter and a glue pen, which I used again today to inscribe a birthday card for a one year old boy.

However, the truest measure of whether the holidays are over is my study, which is a disaster. Just as it is every January.

That's because when it was December, time to get the rest of the house all gussied up and sparkly, it happened also to be Old Semester Season, when all sorts of mad Old Semester work needs to be accomplished. Uncoincidentally, that means that there's a massive and ever-increasing accumulation of life-stuff, like bills and magazines and papers and books, occupying surfaces such as the kitchen table and the living room, which have to be moved somewhere to make space for the sparkly. Do these things have actual places? Where they, you know, belong? Probably, sure. But to put them in those places requires thinking, and--at least as I remember it--we were in a big hurry to get that damn sparkle on.

I've been reading--well, at least it's on my bedside table--The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. I have in mind a life-changing bout of getting rid of things, and then after that, a life-changing bout of organizing. Life-changing, you see, not just figuring out where three bottles of glitter and a glue pen go. In the matter of resolving the ruin that is my study, I will settle for nothing less than total transformation!

Which is why I will be working on my syllabus and an educational comic and a re-narration of a screencast and another syllabus in squalor tomorrow. Because total transformation takes time, and January is New Semesterville. New Semesterville will be here in a red hot minute, so total transformation will just have to wait.

The rubble and the glory.

Today I took on the ruin. But before that I took on my bureau. But before that, I started on the ruin. The true story is, there is a lot of ruin in my house, and it isn't confined to one room.

My study, though, is the big ruin. Let's analyze:

First there was stuff that just needed to be put away. But before it could be put away, the things that were extra and not necessary and perhaps even egregious needed to be sorted. Old magazines? Boxes with artifacts from my youth? Expired discount cards purchased from long-gone high school athletes? All these things and more needed to be sorted and culled and, in my current ruthless mood, thrown ruthlessly away. Then the putting away could commence. Rinse, lather, repeat, if you see what I mean. This has gone on all day.

"Did Bruiser do this?"

The room, however, has sectors, and all the sectors cannot be dealt with at once. For instance, one of my first goals was to make sure that there were no more books on the floor. We are just about, just about there. Maybe we're even actually there. Now, though, there are papers. Not on the floor, per se, but on the level above that: on the footstools and ottomans. These must also be sorted and gone through. Some things must be shredded. Others must be placed into some sort of conceptual domain, or moved into another room, but preferably into a space where they belong and not into some new vortex of randomness.

Pause: is my house my enemy or my friend?

Tonight, I took everything off my desk and threw away a good cubic foot or maybe more of random nonsense. I will say that my desire for an entirely clean surface is not fulfilled. But there's a much larger area of tidy, not cluttered space, so it's an improvement. For the entirely clean surface to result, I would need to have a better filing system.

Question: what is actually in my files?

Also, I would need to have a place to store the ribbon and glitter, true story.

Well, I continue the sorting and organizing. I hope not to lose momentum before I take the books off the shelves and imagine a more logical and evident order, one that will help me lay hold of the book I want when I want it. But this may necessitate reordering books all through the house. This, as you may imagine, seems daunting.

Also, I need to recycle approximately the contents of one file drawer. I even know which drawer it is. There is also a heap of cameras that need a place to live. But where? where?

For the past two days, my back has been a little twinge-y. This happens, sometimes, when I've been sick, because of the dramatic increase in laying around. It's a thrill to see which sector of the back will twinge next. At the moment, it's the area between my shoulder blades.

Cheers to a cleaner desk, and to books off the floor, and to a plan for greater order and more file space and a place for everything and everything in its place. And to the next stop for back twinges to be elsewhere, wherever twinges go to sort themselves out.

photo credit: whistlesinthewind, "moorland ruin 2"

Moviegoing fail.

Tonight, after a long day that was the end of a long week, we agreed we would go see Lincoln after we ate Mexican food like it was our job. Which we did, the Mexican food part. It was good, although maybe the time-sensitive nature of our dining timetable meant I felt a little stuffed as we drove down the road-equivalent of the backbone of the valley, State Street, wending movie-ward.

When we reached the theater, we hustled in, only to be told that the seating for Lincoln was LOW. There it was, the word flashing intermittently with the time: 6:45, replaced by LOW. 6:45 LOW 6:45 LOW.

"When it says 'LOW,' what exactly does that mean?" the historian queried.

"Pretty much just the first row," the ticket counter woman said.

Nope. I will not be looking at the monumental head of Abraham Lincoln, in the grand personage of Daniel Day Lewis, from the front row. I, Lisa Bickmore, do not watch serious movies with gigantic heads in them from the front row.

Alas. 

So we headed home. On the way, I had a moment to ponder the better parts of our nature, I mean my day. Including this:

This week, my son has been looking for his immunization records, because the University of Reproach and Prohibition will not let him register unless he puts his immunization records on file. Yesterday, my son Facebook-messaged me this information:

Question: How long will I have to be held responsible for stuff like this? Also, is it crazy that I kind of feel like immunization records is a weird thing for a university to be demanding? (Oh, spare me your public health lecture. I know. I'm just saying GOSH is all.)

Important subtext and a continuation of our story: looking for anything in my study is a fool's errand. I began hallucinating about all the places I might have put his immunization record. I summoned up its very image in my mind. Then I thought about where it might be: stashed in between two books on my Shelves of Chaos? In some secret file in my Filing Cabinet of Chaos? Perhaps I moved it from my study into my bedroom? And stashed it in between two books on my Auxiliary Shelves of Chaos?

This sort of search leads to a line of thinking that inevitably spirals downward, until I am castigating myself for all my moral failings. All of them. The Several Moral Failings of HTMS, or perhaps The Myriad Moral &c &c until I am ready to cry or huff around or cry and huff around or just quietly, softly scream.

And then I went to bed, where kept on hallucinating/summoning up the very image &c/dreaming about the Lost Record of the Immunizations of Son. There may have been Book of Mormon characters in there, I can't say that there weren't.

This morning, when I awoke bleary-eyed and self-reproaching, my son came up and said, "Would this be the thing they'd be looking for?" The thing in his hand was the immunization record.

I said, calmly as all hell, "I think it is."

"I thought so," he said. He thought for a moment, and said, "I guess you gave it to me to keep."

"Huh," I said.

Immunization Record Finding WIN.

Organizing.

Funny thing, I feel like I have written this post before, the one I'm about to write, the one about how disorganized I am.  But really, how can I be expected to be organized, when I have so much stuff? Wait, I think I've already written that post, too--the one about how much stuff I have. Come to think of it, this may be my true subject, the chaos and disorder of me and my stuff:

Today, I thought I might make a little movie using some excellent footage I got at the beach, of two lively dogs playing at the water's edge.  I was thinking I might revive a poem I wrote quite a while ago called "Shoreline Grammar," which has dogs playing in it.  This merely required me to find a copy of the poem, then I could begin fussing around with iMovie &c., fussing around being a good way to learn at least some basic stuff.  But first I had to put my hands on the poem, or at least, that's what I figured a logical first step would be.

About eleven or twelve file folders later--and these are actual files, the people, files made from paper--I found (get this!) a handwritten copy of the poem, which I believe I actually had made copies of and took them to my writing group, because it also had my notes from the group.

Please consider these details:  Handwritten copy.  Paper files.  Twelve file folders later.

But now I have it, this sad little handwritten poem, and I have made a digital file of it, started digging around in the Indo-European roots, blah blah blah.  The project will happen.  It's just, the pre-production around here is such a nightmare.  

(file this under:  Chaos and Disorder and Stuff.)