A room of my own

Yesterday, I spent the first blue sky sunny day in a loooong time indoors organizing my desk. That is the spot that is always last in line for any type of houseworkerly attention and it had accumulated crap to a dangerous degree--it usually becomes the free cell when I’m cleaning the rest of the house. I don’t have any before photos, but suffice it to say it was scary. (I had cleaned every inch of the house before my parents visited--except the desk, which collected everything that I cleaned up from everywhere else.

As part of the effort, I cleaned out my drawer in the filing cabinet to eliminate the dust-gathering archives and make it a more usable space for storing and retrieving papers I use on a regular basis. In the cabinet, in addition to all my college papers and high school swimming ribbons, I found a journal I kept while on internship in Idaho and after reading it I wish I’d written more while I was there. I also found a journal from my sophomore year in college and after skimming through some of it, I wish I’d written less--it is filled with impassioned budding-environmentalist rants about meat-eating and general earth destruction, budding-feminist rants about how women don’t need men, alternating with agonized soliloquies about unrequited love for a certain male member of the student body, and a fair amount of vague dissatisfaction with life and time lines trying to chart my course and figure out what I’m going to do with my life. This latest appears to continue to be an affliction of mine. I hope I don't look back on my blog posts in 15 years and feel the same degree of nausea (I also hope my writing skills have improved along with my handwriting).

Anyhoo, back to the desk--it’s not a room (it's in a corner of the living room--the first thing you see when you walk in the door), but it is a space and I am determined to not let it become the crap-piling-up-place again. As you can see in the photo, it now holds only tools I need for writing: a lamp, a cup of pens, my writing technique books (for inspiration) and my notebook at a jaunty angle in the middle. Down on the floor, I placed a stolen toy basket and put pending craft project materials in it, so I have no excuse to not knit that fabulous Noro yarn. I usually write in bed, and will probably continue to do so (although this weekend I had the opportunity to write on a park bench overlooking Rockland Harbor and it was lovely) but now at least I can’t use the chaos and disorder around me as an excuse to not get to work.

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New post up today at Capital Walks .