Saturday, August 9, 2008

Maybe just (kinda sorta) a little bit manic

I'd like to say that I'm joking, but sometimes I really worry about this. Maybe I'm just a psychiatric hypocondriac, if there such a thing. Maybe I should just be happy that I got something monumental done today, but I can't help wondering where these bursts of energy come from. Like the night I stayed up all night long researching a year's worth of Girl Scout field trips. Or today, when I cleaned my desk.

It might not seem like such a monumental thing, but let me put it this way, I moved into this house 361 days ago. The same day we moved in, the guy was coming to hook up the internet. Can't be without the internet you know. We literally had just gotten the desk and the box with the computer stuff off the truck when the guy arrived. I hastily set it up so he could do his thing. I didn't even bother to run the wires to the speakers behind the desk. Later when I came to the boxes with the rest of the desk stuff, I haphazardly put it all on the shelves, to sort out LATER.

LATER is a bad word for me.

Here we are 361 days later and guess what??? Everything was in exactly the same place. The speaker wires were still snaking up from under the desk, around both sides of my monitor, and in front of the shelf that they sat on. The piles on the top of the hutch nearly touched the ceiling. The top of the desk was cluttered with the detrious of daily life, and I had this little one foot wide tunnel with which to see my monitor and type. There were two large boxes filled with bills, bank statements, and other correspondence that needed filed shoved under my bed. The filing cabinet sat empty, serving only as a handy stand for my printer. Two other boxes sit adjacent to my desk filled with crap that I have at various times in the last year dumped off the edge of my desk to deal with, yup, you guessed it, LATER. I won't even get started about the size of the dust bunnies that were living in the midst of all this.

Now maybe you have a hint of why this is such a big deal for me, and how I might wonder where the energy came from to tackle this task that I haven't been able to face for four days short of a year. How today, I looked at the desk and said, I think I'm going to clean this today. Spent the next four hours clearing it off, putting everything on my bed so that I would have to finish it or sleep on the couch, and then tackled it, bit by bit. Sorting through all the envelopes, filing all the contents. Using up every last file folder I owned and filling a trash can with the empty envelopes. Dusting off the dust bunnies and returning all the cd's to their cases. Finding things I borrowed from people and desperately need to return. Culling all the kids crap and giving it to them to go clutter their rooms with. Ignoring everything else while driven to complete this task.

That's the thing, the opposite of LATER is NOW. I can't seem to do anything in between. I either do something or I don't. I can't work on something, set it down, and come back to it. This is what happened the last time I tried that.


Maybe, hopefully, this is just one of the ADD traits, and not a sign of a label much more ominous, but I still worry. I wish I had taken a picture of the desk before I started, but here is a picture of the end result. I am just a little proud of it. Note the fact that no wires are hanging out in front of the shelves and I have a nice open space with which to work. YAY.

2 comments:

Bethalea said...

I always think of you as neat. How funny, huh? But this is totally they way that I work, too. Lately, I've been trying to do one project every couple of days... clean the crazy corner of the kitchen counter, where everything collects, etc. Seems to be working...of course, now that I say that, I'll never do another thing. Ever.

LenaLoo said...

Well, sounds like the ADD to me :) I am just like you... finally got my house cleaned (had to call in the mom-in-law force to help though, how humbling)... Glad you have a pretty clean desk now :)