Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

mess

Work-Me and Home-Work

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My co-workers never quite believe me when i describe the state of disorganization in my home office in the same way that I don’t think any of my friends comprehend what a micro-managing clean-freak i am at work.

A typical day of work starts with my desk completely bare except for my water bottle and two pens (one blue, one red). The only disorder in sight is a few scant papers in my inbox; each of my projects lives in neatly color-coded folder organized by priority.

I start and end each day by writing down the next steps on each of my projects in my notebook. The sorting of my email is completely automated; my inbox has less than four messages in it at all times. I log every phone conversation into a tiny steno book so I can remember what I promised to people, and what messages I need to respond to.

A typical night in my home office starts with my searching for something through three layers of desk (and sometimes floor) detritus: a top layer of recently discarded guitar paraphernalia, a middle layer of mail that i have yet to sort or read, and a bottom layer of things that are on my desk because they have nowhere else to go. There are approximately five square inches of visible desktop, and typically no less than a dozen guitar picks, two ties, and three glasses of water.

I start each night futilely trying to clear a workspace and end it when I can’t think of another website to visit. My inbox is currently hovering near 700 messages, post-spam. I am famous for my call-screening and reluctance to return messages.

At work I hardly ever leave with a task left undone, and at home I barely complete one to-do a day.

Why the contrast? Is it the difference is the organizational tools provided for me at work, or the structure of arriving at a specific time and adhering to a certain dress code, or the hustle of other people working around me?

Today I spent a few hours working from home, and it was a strange dichotomy – my messy desktop combined with my well-pruned work email, my guitar within arm’s reach compared to my rapid response to voice mail. Even with my familiar distractions abounding I switched into corporate-mode without a blink.

When my work-time ended I promptly sat on the floor and fell asleep, face pressed against the crack beneath my door to catch a cool draft from the hallway.

Maybe the difference isn’t anything about the environment, but about how much easier it is to sustain effort without dozing off.

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In my room there are two heating vents and two windows. However, the primary heating vent and the draftiest window happen to occupy the same cubic meter of space, which has today left me with an interesting dilemma.

I can, and do, typically place a homo-sapien-sized pile of laundry in front of said window to absorb the intermittent chilling wind (yes, wind) that it produces. That same pile of laundry is also, unavoidably, sitting directly in front of the more functional of my two heating vents. I am wagering that eliminating both sources of temperature change keeps my room at a higher constant temperature than allowing them to cancel each other out. This morning i was beginning to fear not that i was wrong… not that the man-made hot air could overcome natures brutal breeze. No. That would be too easy.

Now i see that my trivial placement of soiled clothing can not protect me from the unending onslaught of cold that is this winter. If this makes any sense at all, my room is so cold right now that i think reverse evaporation is occurring… which, yes, i know is technically sortof condensation, but this is a lot more like water molecules diving out of the air and into my cappuccino mug because they too are freezing their asses off in here. There is literally an inch more liquid in the mug then there was when i went to sleep, and my previously dried tea-bag has generated its own puddle. Or, as i like to refer to it, refugee camp for displaced molecular structures.

In a similar vein, last night when most normal people went to sleep it was twenty, yes, twenty degrees warmer outside than it is right now. Earlier yesterday i was complaining that i skipped an entire week of going to work in favor of working on Vagina Monologues, but now i am starting to think that was just an excuse to be somewhere other than here — or the two mile stretch of outside that lies between here and any other place where i can get anything done. Because, well, since i don’t particularly fancy the stretch right now, here is the only place i plan to be going.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2003/01/90240014/

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I just narrowly averted doing the stupidest thing that i’ve ever done in my life… not ‘bad decision’ stupid, or ‘i can’t believe you just said that’ stupid. Just plain dumb.

I, of course, blame my mother.

Some people’s parents are deadbeats, weekend warriors, or dirty hippies. My mother is a middle-class shopaholic. She is too good to shop in bargain department stores, but would hardly know what to do with herself in an honest to goodness designer outlet. Somewhere between those two poles falls her two current vices: Walmart & Old Navy

::shudder::

Though i definitely live in fear of any location that involves that disturbing foreshortened version of ‘market,’ the former is innocent enough; after all, where else can you buy laundry detergent, cereal, Christmas decorations, and tube socks all in one shopping trip? I can’t begrudge those luxuries to a working woman, but the latter is infinitely more bothersome.

Apparently, everyone’s favorite low-rent Gap ::shudder:: decided to set up shop just three blocks from our house which, you know, is just beautiful for all those South Philly children who had previously been forced to schlep all the way to a mall for their fleece hoody pullover fuck-if-i-cares. Of course, within three months my mother had an Old Navy credit card. Yes, that’s right, plastic especially dedicated to going into debt to the company who uses the losers from American Idol as its spokespeople. And Morgan Fairchild.

As a result, she is constantly trying to buy me the low-quality logo-bearing crap that the store is packed to the gills with. So far she’s succeeded in buying me exactly one piece of clothing, of off which two buttons have already fallen. Honestly, i think she’s really reached the Middle Age when she starts conversations about how cheap she can buy sweatpants and wouldn’t i love some soft sweatpants, wouldn’t i?

No mom. Anyhow, mother issues aside, all this means to her poor collegiate son is that all of her wonderful care-grams come wrapped in a plastic Walmart bag inside of an Old Navy shopping bag, regardless of their source or content. Mail? Eggplant Sandwich? Girlfriend’s Christmas gifts that i had been hiding at home? The aforementioned tubesocks? New discman so i can survive my yearly plane ride to Florida, plus my electronic plane ticket for said flight? All presents delivered in her unique idea of gift-wrap along with, if i’m super-lucky, a tale of what she original brought home in the bags.

Of course, being a college student, all of these bags typically wind up dumped out in the middle of my floor, at which point they are promptly used to throw trash into. Term papers, tissues, pop-tart packages, and all the other things lying around on my floor. Also due to my lazy college nature, said bags typically accumulate into a pile numbering about a half-dozen before it occurs to me that they can be safely expelled from my room. The pile of Walmart and Old Navy bags containing collegiate trash had today grown to the size of a dozing Bengal Tiger, and in my fear that it would awake and pounce upon me in my sleep i decided it was time to throw them out

And, out they went. Hours ago. However, it wasn’t until just a few minutes ago that i began looking for my new discman and my nonrefundable electronic airline ticket that i realized i had rid my room of all those sinister blue plastic degraders of Earth and their paper-handled brethren when i took out the trash. All. Of. Them.

For those keeping score, that’s upward of $420 dollars in prizes that i put out on the curb, along with a bag of tube socks and a four-pack of batteries.

Down the stairs i went. Out to the curb i ran. There, i was faced with two identical bags that i had casually tossed into trashcans on my way to have margaritas with Amy & Isabelle earlier this evening. One bag contained a dead rodent complete with shavings and q-tips used to examine her bizarre ailment, and the other was full of neatly tied shopping bags full of innocuous trash and one bag that was worth nearly half-a-grand. And, faced with my poor dead rodent or some fabulous parting gifts, did i pick the right bag?

Of course i didn’t. Why the hell should i? So, after gingerly re-twisting the twist-tie of poor Stoli’s proverbial plastic coffin, i then made off with the second bag, which i promptly dumped in our vestibule and kicked until i made contact with something that felt like a fairly expensive Sony discman, at which point i scooped all of the other nearly sealed non-dead-rodent-containing bags back into the momma-bag, put it back on the curb, and slunk back up the stairs to my room to open my early Christmas gift.

How i managed to tell this story before the story about the drag queens in Walmart or Gina and I shopping for toys in Target i can’t tell you, but rest assured both are in the works. And, yes, i blame my mother for the entire thing, and as a penalty have taken her lovely Sage & Citrus scented Christmas gift for my very own.

Goodnight.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2002/12/90065737/

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Today was a day wholly without purpose until 11:57, which is not the time that i would suggest that you set when it comes to acquiring a purpose — not just in the sense that technically the day ends a scant three minutes later, but also because it clearly means you wasted a whole gaggle of useful hours doing absolutely nothing. Which, and i’m not going to split hairs about it, i did. All day. In fact, i almost decided not to wake up; at the time it seemed like a conscious decision that i could make and stick with. Just… don’t open my eyes. Turn over a couple more times. Wake up on Monday, check my email, and go to class.

Please excuse any incoherencies that emerge as this rambles on. It is an experiment.


The two things that occurred to me at 11:57 were really one thing with another bigger, fatter thing sitting on top of it. The primary thing was that i almost surely had a paper due within the next two days, and that i should figure out which of the four papers i have due this week it was. The hulking thing that was standing in the way of this was my room. Or, more specifically, the mess therein.


My room is/was a mess; i do not attempt to deny it. I am the only person that has to live here, and ostensibly the mess makes it impossible for me to bring anyone home with me from a party because i might lose her on the way to the bed. I don’t necessarily mind all the stuff i have scattered around, but at the same time i somewhat enjoy order (and an unobstructed view of freshly vacuumed green carpeting). Thus, cleaning commenced shortly before midnight.


With me, cleaning is a circular exercise… it’s never just one thing or one place i have to tidy up. Instead, one thing leads to the next and the next until picking up a penny turns into my unearthing my desktop from the mess of cds and bills that it was submerged in. So, it’s not as though i could just find the paper that would tell me the relevant facts about my papers so much as that i had to circle (like a starved vulture over a decaying hunk of carrion) my room until it turned up. And circle i did… and circled and circled.

(This is where i skip over the part about my learning that the Latin American Lit paper was due tomorrow, the Theory one on Tuesday, and the incredibly daunting one on International CopyRight and the Internet due on Thursday. I’m sure you can imagine how fun it was.)


Dr. Ibieta asked for a 750-1000 word paper, and i intended to deliver one. However, around 845 i found myself getting a wee bit weary … both of staring at my monitor and of being awake. Contrary to what you might expect, such weariness motivates me not to quickly reach a summation in my academic wanderings, but to instead blather in a more circuituous route until i finally run out of steam altogether and wind up ending in an unceremonious heap wherever i fall. That’s what happened. To further prolong my weary misery, i decided that i wasn’t just interesting in writing the paper, but also in the paper making some small amount of sense, so i endeavored to read it back to myself. Upon attempting such a feat i discovered that even with my reading glasses weighing in heavily on the bridge of my nose i was basically seeing the screen in triplicate, and that my only hope in untangling the web i had woven with words was in reading it aloud to see if it made a single lick of sense.

My next discovery was that my mouth had stopped working at some point during my typing-spree. I read and re-read my hulking paragraphs, but all that came out was a weary drone that increasingly lacking ennunc- and pronounc- iation. I tried to force my lips to comply with the onscreen syllables, and i was rewarded with a feeling akin to the hinges of my jaw weeping. The proceeded to weep through three consecutive readings of my paper, during which i combined several paragraphs and excised 200 spare words that i had accumulated along the way. The result is a paper of perfect size and shape with a somewhat tenuous grasp on its own narrative (which isn’t a very good thing, since its supposed to be a paper about narrative)…

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/11/7405813/

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You know, i’ve gotten really far away from posting about the simple nuances of my daily life. For example, my room is an utter mess. By now i think you should’ve figured out that everything in my life is always a mess, so it’s not as though this is a huge surprise. However, for once i’ve managed to contain my mess to my room and areas directly adjacent to it, so i can escape my room and pretend that my life is in any kind of order. But, really, it’s not. It’s a wonder i pay my bills and pass my classes. Hmm… what else about me is boring that i used to talk about… time to hit the archives…

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/11/6976249/