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Another Fine Mess

Anastasiia /Adobestock.com

I am reading Jennifer McCartney’s book, “The Joy of Leaving Your (Expletive) All Over the Place: The Art of Being Messy.”

It is a humor book, as McCartney repeatedly reminds us, and it is not a self-help book, as McCartney repeatedly reminds us. I am laughing at it. But I am also finding it helpful! I hope McCartney will forgive me.

See, I am a slob. But not an unrepentant slob. Not an unabashed slob. I have repented plenty. I am plenty abashed. It doesn’t seem to do any good. 

I have read in earnest the books that McCartney mocks. They haven’t done any good either.

My home office looks like Nazis ransacked it looking for Dr. Henry Jones’ grail diary. 

My home office looks like the room that gave a linguist the idea to combine the words flotsam and jetsam. 

My home office would make Ellen Louise Ripley from the “Alien” movies say, “I say we nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.”

Even though it doesn’t present “a danger to myself and others,” my home office may, ever so slightly, resemble
the upended ballroom on the cruise ship, Poseidon.

How did it get that way? I could write a book. But it probably wouldn’t be as funny or as helpful as McCartney’s.

You can’t answer the question, “How did it get that way?” without answering the question, “How did you, Steve, get that way?” Since the second question can’t be answered, things aren’t looking too good for the first. 

So, let me instead delve into the kind of slob I am. I am not a hoarder. I generally don’t have any trouble throwing most things away.

My problem is organizing. I can’t do it. When I try to organize, I usually become so angry and frustrated that I end up pitching everything in the immediate vicinity, including things that absolutely shouldn’t be thrown out. 

After such a frenzied purging, my wife usually comes to me with a question like, “Honey, have you seen our rare parchment engraving of the Declaration of Independence?”

What am I supposed to tell her? That it’s at the bottom of a garbage bag? That John Hancock’s signature is probably covered with pudding? Hancock wouldn’t even understand our pudding. He thought pudding was cake. 

When my wife asks me questions of this nature, I usually play dumb. It occurs to me that it won’t be so easy to play dumb after she reads this. 

Now, when I say I can’t organize, what I mean is that I can’t organize the way other people organize. I may be a slob but I am one of those slobs who never loses anything. Ask me for a document, and I can tell you which pile it is in and how far down. Ask me for a needle, and I can tell you which haystack it is in. 

In high school, I carried around a pile of papers that had in it every paper I had touched, for academic purposes, during that semester. Kids mocked me for this. Kids were mean in the 1980s. But I persisted, nevertheless. It was the only way I could make sense of anything. 

If there has been a theme to my life, it’s “Barely, and often not quite, making sense of anything.”

In grad school, I “organized” things (assignments, bills, etc.) by using paper grocery bags. The wall of my bedroom was lined with paper grocery bags that had each been labeled with a Sharpie. My landlord said he would see those bags and feel sorry for me. 

I was so embarrassed that it didn’t occur to me to ask, “Why were you looking in my bedroom?” In hindsight, he should have been more embarrassed than I was.

Think about how much time you have wasted listening to people who should be more embarrassed than they are telling you that you should be more embarrassed than you are. 

“I’ll let you in on a little secret,” McCartney wrote. “You can put your stuff anywhere. It doesn’t have to be placed in a corporate-sanctioned bin.” McCartney doesn’t mention paper grocery bags, but I think it is implied. 

McCartney cites a University of Minnesota study that concluded messy people are more creative than neat people. Asked about the study, Kathleen Vohs, the woman who conducted it, said, “I think it makes people feel vindicated. There’s a multibillion dollar industry to help people de-clutter their lives … but there may be times being messy is good, too.”

As I have learned to be gentler with, and more forgiving of, myself about all sorts of things in recent years, I might as well add messiness
to that list. 

Just don’t tell Jennifer McCartney that I learned more than I laughed. 

JUST A THOUGHT

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