I may have mentioned before that whenever I can, I watch CBS Sunday morning. Although I slept in this morning sans alarm clock, I was still up in time to catch the last couple of segments on the show.
Alas, I haven't found a video posting of the segment reported by Bill Geist regarding messy, cluttered offices, but I did find the actual article of that report. You can find it here: I'm especially fond of Mr. Einstein's comment featured at the end of the article. Good guy, that Albert.
Actually, I'm finding that my tolerance for the clutter in my office is diminishing. Too much clutter actually has begun to stress me out; I find myself a victim of those piles of...whatever. And, instead of knuckling down and beginning a process of dealing with them, I find it far easier to walk past the office door, promising myself that I'll get back to it a little later...after I take a nap, for example. Isn't it true that if you can't see the clutter it doesn't exist?
Damn. If I didn't run into walls so easily, I could keep my eyes shut all the time and pretend that by not seeing it it would actually be gone.
Today I woke up with one heck of an interesting story-left-over-from-a-dream. It was so compelling that I even wrote three pages of notes, descriptions, and potential ideas and character development so I WOULD NOT FORGET. In longhand, even.
And, then I looked into my office and saw the mess. I mean I really looked at what has grown in my office. Even with Geist's comforting story, I won't be able to concentrate fully on this new idea until I get rid of some of the office blight.
Have I really spent that much money supporting the stockholders of Barnes and Noble? It looks like it. What is it about voracious readers anyway? Why do we have such a need to physically touch paper? Even more so, why do we think we need to keep every bit of it? Hell, there are books that I'd never read again even if they were the only books left, yet they are in my office, scattered on the edges of overcrowded bookshelves, or piled sporadically here and there on the floor. I love the whole idea of bookcrossing.com, yet I can't seem to get my little tags put in the books and the books in the Jeep, and then distributed around during my travels.
What if this story idea is the one? What if it's my Pulitzer Prize in Literature and I can't get it written because I can't focus on the screen ahead of my eyes, but only on the peripheral edges of stacks of stuff?
It's enough to lay in a large stock of dark chocolate for mood elevation.
Mr. Geist, if you happen by this blog, please know that I loved that your office along with Martha's and Andy's looked a lot like mine, but if you would, could you please ask CBS if you can have an assistant to go with you on your field assignments? I'll take the job, really. But only if you will let me have a little time every day to sit with my laptop in a mostly clutter free area. Or, if that won't work, would you at least take me on an assignment with you to say...Amish country? I could probably buy some blinders to keep my eyes focused ahead without the peripheral clutter mocking me from the sidelines.
3 comments:
My office is always a huge war zone of clutter and debris. We used to have shelving for all of it, so it was organized clutter, but the shelves finally broke down. (think it had something to do with the massive amounts of weight they had to hold?)
Lately i've noticed that the clutter is creeping out and into my livingroom via table tops. Not a good thing, i'm thinking!!
I hope you can find a way to conquer the clutter AND work on your story idea :)
Maybe this is why JK Rowling likes to write in coffee shops?
Hubby can work in chaos, no problem. Youngest kiddo is like, one chromosome away from being a Tasmanian Devil. She likes when I undo the whirlwind damage, though.
I can have stuff around, but I like it to be useful and aesthetically arranged. Once I was studying notecards, and I had to stop and make a cover for the box I had them in. When that was done, I was happy. Procrastination in haute couture.
I like JK Rowling's idea. A steaming cup of some sort of coffee-with-chocolate would certainly inspire my Muse to stick around, I think!
What I should do is begin a series of photos of this office den of chaos and update it as I clear through the rubble. But, right now I'm pretending that it's far more important to finalize cleaning the kitchen table so R and I could actually eat a meal at said table. That is, of course, should we decided that we don't need a daily fix of Wheel of Fortune while we eat; gotta keep the grey matter from letting the Alzheimer's monster in!
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