Clearing the decks

is a metaphor, among the many metaphors I have for finishing one thing before starting another.

Of course, I'm just talking about grading again, which I will be until I am finished with it. Which will be, who knows when. I'm currently pretending that I can still finish by the end of the weekend. This optimism is immeasurably aided by the fact that tomorrow is Saturday and not Sunday, which I briefly lost track of. Phew! Still two days in the weekend.

I just did the math. I will be grading on Monday.

I want to work on my manuscript with a clear head, not with a grading mind.

The above represents a hypothetical and metaphorical state of affairs which, in reality, has never occurred, not every, not even once.

Also, I want to celebrate my mother and go to a movie and take my son to the airport. I'm glad I did the things I did today--breakfast with my friend, movie with my son, birthday outing with my grandson--that meant I graded for two hours instead of a lot more hours.

I have thought about acknowledging the limits of my 'clearing the decks' metaphor by starting on my projects while still grading. Sorting through my clothes. Working on my manuscript. I might be able to manage the first, but not the second. It's a superstition, maybe. Or maybe it's real--there's a cleared-er state of mind that is requisite for revising poems, and it can't be simultaneously working on grading. Not enough processing power.

On Monday, then: on Monday the decks will be cleared. My metaphor will, if briefly, have force. And then, things will be messy again, same as it ever was. But I will have fewer clothes (please!) and a head clear enough (please!) for poetry.

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.

Wait, one more project:

The Music Project!

When I was getting ready to go to Scotland--by which I mean "getting ready to risk thrombosis by sitting for countless hours on a transatlantic flight, God bless it for taking me to see my daughter!"--I charged up my iPod and the Historian's iPod, so that we would both have lots of music to listen to which would hopefully distract us from the clots possibly forming in our legs. While doing this, I confronted the shift in my iPod paradigm. A sketch:

my iPod(s): a love story. by lisab

Well, suffice it to say that in the rush to leave town, I was not able to summon the sober wisdom of Solomon to decide what music should depart from the portable jukebox of my iPod, back onto the archives of iTunes. So that meant that I left a lot of new music behind, which was sad in retrospect, because the Jet of Thrombosis would have been the ideal setting for discovering that music. For getting comfortable with it.

Alas, no. It's true that at one point, I found myself listening to a Genius playlist of 80s tunes. Which had its comforts, and that's the truth.

Anyway. I have spent some time over the past couple of days assessing the contents of this iPod and removing some stuff. For instance, when I was in the car, listening to another Genius playlist, a Jack Johnson tune came up and I thought, I don't ever need to listen to Jack Johnson again in my life. That was a rather emphatic judgment, but I made it. Jack Johnson does not come with when me and my iPod are out and about, although if I ever reconsider my judgment, I know where to find him.

What's good is that I now have some new music to listen to. I told the historian last night that I hated this streamlining, paring away project, even though it's a project that presses on me, because it seems like preparing to die. Because he is empathetic and because he is kind, he didn't laugh. The thing about streamlining your iPod is that you can have your cake and eat it too, because you don't have to really get rid of things. You can rearrange them--some things are on the iPod, some are on one or another of your hard drives. What's harder is culling out the books to give away, or the clothes, or other non-digital stuff. When that's gone, it's gone, and your life may be sleeker, but it may also be poorer.

I can hear my daughter telling me things are not people, Mom. She is right. She is right. Well, my music is in much better order. Now, onto the the things.

Changes.

Singing son said he thinks this blog looks crazy now and he can't figure out what is what anymore. "Change it back!" he said, over burritos at lunch yesterday. Well, sonny, you can't go home again. Especially if you never saved a copy of your old template, like some folks do.

Other changes:

1. We are painting our hall bathroom (blue) and our bedroom (green and lavender, which will either be soothing as all get out or will be reminiscent of the Jack Nicholson Joker of the Tim Burton Batman ilk. Or a little of both.). Our eminent housesitter and his able compatriots took down wallpaper while we were gone. They would have painted but the wallpaper was possessed of the spirit of the devil, and thus we are still scraping pugnacious little stripes of ancient wallpaper paste. Wallpaper begone! We hope to have painted by the time the weekend is through, hurray.

2. We bought a new dishwasher. I kid you not, the first thought I had upon waking, after dreaming, I'm pretty sure, about bok choy--why?--was this: I wonder if the dishwasher got the dishes clean? And lo, it did. The dishes sparkled. I'm considering washing every dish, pot, and pan in this house.

3. We bought a new swamp cooler. Our old one was rusting out at the bottom and every year when the historian climbed to the roof to get it going again, he'd say that we needed to get a new one and this had to be the last year. The very last year. We could have gotten refrigeration, but we did not because we're old fashioned like that.

4. We are cleaning and straightening like it's our job because the Scotlands are coming to American next week, and they will be here in the SLC for two and a half weeks. I will spare you all the cleaning details, but let me just say that my books are all on my shelves, mostly, and I have done the once over two or three times on some kitchen counters, and I have a list, I tell you, of the straightening and tidying and cleaning that must be done here, there and everywhere.

It was a big transition (read: change) when, on Monday, we came down the mountain into the valley where it was hella hot, especially compared to the mountain, and for one night, there was no swamp cooler. Luckily, there was a basement, because there is no sleeping in the room of the ancient wallpaper, the palimpsest of which is still, but only barely, visible on our soon to be vivid walls.

Thoughts on order.

Since my grades got finished (by the grace of God, a pinch of pixie dust, a sturdy set of rubrics, a malleable set of metrics, and a fair amount of cursing), I have accomplished the following:

• picked up books on hold at the public library
• paid slightly sad amount of library overdue fines so I could check out the above
• found loads of books I purchased from Amazon etc. during bouts of stress-induced online buying
• straightened up my study.

I don't really wish to discuss my method for straightening, since it's more like "moving things off my desk into other locations, such as boxes," but the surface of the desk is tidier, more expansive, slightly more without stuff, more conducive to creative work, which is what I'm after. (Also, my soul feels a little freer, even if I know I'm kind of lying to myself about the true extent of the tidiness--this is my particular bargain with chaos, and I guess I'm sticking to it.)

ANYHOW. I was reading an article in the Innovations edition of The New Yorker, an article about this engineer, Saul Griffith, and his work with renewable energy. Here's the writer's description of Griffith's lab:

Griffith seems to operate on the principle that excessive orderliness is inefficient, and that neatly putting things away is more time-consuming, in the long run, than searching through piles.

If only I had won a $30,000 prize for my innovative invention at M.I.T. when I was a student there (I went where I went, okay?), and then won a MacArthur Genius grant--I could totally be this guy.

Back to work.

Tomorrow, the historian goes back to work and so do I.  This week, I intend to sort and organize and give away and re-engineer and make my chaos submit to order or know the reason why. Possibilities:

1. Give some books and/or cds away.
2. Give a whole bunch of clothes and shoes away.
3. Ruthlessly get rid of a LOT of paper artifacts.  Maybe without even looking at them.  Much.
4. Move the big chair where the desk is and vice versa.
5. Contemplate how things got to this state of affairs.  Try to do this without sinking into despair.

Why have I not done this during the past week, you may be wondering, the week in which I saw six movies and barely cooked and only started to clean stuff up yesterday.  The answer is that cleaning up my nonsense is private.  Which is why I'm talking about it on my blog but not showing you pictures.  I am just not sure that anyone besides me and my dog needs to observe me sorting through the pile of shirts I have accumulated, or watch me in my deliberations, or listen to me mutter to myself.  Significantly, I feel this same way--that it should be private--about shopping (ah! see #5 above).  

Somehow, this blessed rage for order (O pale Ramon!) is connected with what I am imagining will be a storm of productivity in my projects.  Actually, I have a lot of faith that this will be so.  Some amount of order will be the result of this organizing mania.  And that amount of order will be exactly what is necessary for me to feel, even if this feeling is ephemeral, that I am on top of things enough to create, to write, to make.  So tomorrow, when I feel all sweaty with the effort of streamlining the stuff of my life, it will be good sweat, the kind that makes me feel that I can do almost anything.  

Lisa's Stuff:  Watch your back, because I am about to kick your ass.