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pseydtonneI have another post that I was writing about the one-day French immersion class I attended on Saturday. This other idea is ready before that one.
When I woke up this morning, my brain was begging me to begin cleaning out boxes from the Scary Room. The room has four aisles of boxes with what ought to be three walkways between each aisle. However the middle aisles have enough stuff between them that there are only two walkways and only one of these has been navigable by fat dudes. I had concluded yesterday that it would be easiest to start with the aisle of boxes along the kitchen wall, which forms one side of the navigable walkway. As I cleared each stack of boxes (usually four boxes to a columnar stack), I could navigate even more easily and see my task shrink.
I grabbed a box and emptied its contents onto the dining room table. I had a box full of books. many of which I had forgotten I'd owned. Then I grabbed another sealed box and found even more books. Then I found a third box was full of DVDs and video games.
One heuristic I've developed during this organization process is that a box takes an hour to sort. It doesn't matter that a box may take only twenty minutes to handle: if I don't have a full hour to spare, I ought not get started on a box. The contents may take only ten minutes to sort but another forty-five to get into their proper places and clean off the table.
Most of these boxes are about the same size, as they tend to be recycled wine bottle crates or similarly sized moving boxes. Some boxes take less time because they have homogeneous content or pre-sorted content. Other boxes take longer than an hour because they contain bags of other stuff.
The worst boxes are just stacks of papers, each member of which requires a cursory reading before each can be sorted. The papers must unfortunately be sorted immediately because they take up the most physical and mental space otherwise.
Mental space? Let's say I come across a box of papers from six and a half years ago, which I did today. This wasn't just four apartments ago: this was when I lived with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
chaggalagirl and dealt with some of her finances as well as mine. I had to flip through old bank statements, make sure there was nothing important, and then tear apart everything. I had to fight off memories, avoid actually reading anything that might turn out to be a love note, and plow through the stack. I don't want to revisit this material in a couple days: I want it gone.
If I hadn't been in the right mood to do this, I would have fallen apart. I had to assert some robotic responses. That relationship ended nearly five years ago, but I can still feel like a schmuck when I think about how it ended. Going through these last boxes is setting free a lot of trapped energy about a time I'd frozen in my mind. I wanted to go comatose the day I broke up with her: I can still see the sun fading out the window and the aquarium next to the couch, the phone in my hands. I can still hear her yelling at me, as she did for two hours.
I still have to remind myself that I'm not a bad person for sending her home to get the care she needed, that I couldn't help her anymore if I wanted to stay sane.
Umm... I'm staring at the keyboard. "Lost in Germany" by King's X is playing and has become the only reminder that time is still passing. Dang, this was supposed to be a post about organizing, not about petit paralysis.
Maybe that is today's point: sometimes you will make amazing progress and then hit a wall. I'm hitting a wall now, an hour after I finished cleaning up for the day. If that happened while I was actually organizing, I would have collapsed in the chair for the rest of the evening. I have to accept that some of this process will stir emotions, even if they may be freed for good by the stir. I will no longer be carrying the last of these items from a previous existence. At least I didn't cry, but I sure felt something very strong that needed to be greeted.
In contrast, books are simple to sort: stack them by size and shelve them in the smallest shelf that fits the stack. DVDs are even easier to shelve since their boxes are all the same size. All the books and DVDs will get sorted in the Second Major Phase, which could start a couple weeks from now.
I thought I'd sorted through all of my books already. Instead I was staring at some good ones and some seriously lame ones. Between a lame trivia book about Boston and a stack of old magazines was a book I thought was still at my mother's house: Chambers for a Memory Palace. Two architecture professors write letters back and forth describing the constructs necessary to form memory palaces. Classical orators used these semi-mnemonic devices to remember their speeches, since 3-by-5 cards didn't yet exist and require literacy.
I picked up this book when I was in university. Though I never finished reading it, I loved what I had read and loved the line drawings of various settings. I integrated the ideas with my own experiences, which is how I remember what I want to write later.
I sorted through a couple more boxes, then headed tofangirl715's place for chocolate cake. We talked and got bummed about the cost of NINJA tickets. It's a dollar shy of a Franklin if one wants to stand in the pit and see 9" Nails and Jane's Addiction at Great Woods this summer. It's a lot cheaper at Jones Beach for mezzanine tickets, but then I'd have to trek out. Either option is still more than I can shell out when I need to live until I get a job.
Then I went home and resumed my Scary Room Excavation. I think I went through an impressive ten boxes today, although I ran out of steam just as I finished tossing stuff from the last box. I still had a sprawl of objects in two rooms: it took another hour before I had enough of the mess wrangled that I could excuse myself to the Internet. I didn't actually spend ten hours on the ten boxes, but I definitely spent a working day on the process.
I filled one and a half big garbage bags today. I still have another half a dozen boxes to sort before that first aisle is clear, the walkway is immense and the items along the back wall are in my grasp. Soon I will have seen all of my possessions for the first time in half a decade. I already own at least a third fewer objects than I did when I started and I can inventory my possessions far more easily.
-investing time to fight entropy, Ps/d
When I woke up this morning, my brain was begging me to begin cleaning out boxes from the Scary Room. The room has four aisles of boxes with what ought to be three walkways between each aisle. However the middle aisles have enough stuff between them that there are only two walkways and only one of these has been navigable by fat dudes. I had concluded yesterday that it would be easiest to start with the aisle of boxes along the kitchen wall, which forms one side of the navigable walkway. As I cleared each stack of boxes (usually four boxes to a columnar stack), I could navigate even more easily and see my task shrink.
I grabbed a box and emptied its contents onto the dining room table. I had a box full of books. many of which I had forgotten I'd owned. Then I grabbed another sealed box and found even more books. Then I found a third box was full of DVDs and video games.
One heuristic I've developed during this organization process is that a box takes an hour to sort. It doesn't matter that a box may take only twenty minutes to handle: if I don't have a full hour to spare, I ought not get started on a box. The contents may take only ten minutes to sort but another forty-five to get into their proper places and clean off the table.
Most of these boxes are about the same size, as they tend to be recycled wine bottle crates or similarly sized moving boxes. Some boxes take less time because they have homogeneous content or pre-sorted content. Other boxes take longer than an hour because they contain bags of other stuff.
The worst boxes are just stacks of papers, each member of which requires a cursory reading before each can be sorted. The papers must unfortunately be sorted immediately because they take up the most physical and mental space otherwise.
Mental space? Let's say I come across a box of papers from six and a half years ago, which I did today. This wasn't just four apartments ago: this was when I lived with
chaggalagirl and dealt with some of her finances as well as mine. I had to flip through old bank statements, make sure there was nothing important, and then tear apart everything. I had to fight off memories, avoid actually reading anything that might turn out to be a love note, and plow through the stack. I don't want to revisit this material in a couple days: I want it gone.If I hadn't been in the right mood to do this, I would have fallen apart. I had to assert some robotic responses. That relationship ended nearly five years ago, but I can still feel like a schmuck when I think about how it ended. Going through these last boxes is setting free a lot of trapped energy about a time I'd frozen in my mind. I wanted to go comatose the day I broke up with her: I can still see the sun fading out the window and the aquarium next to the couch, the phone in my hands. I can still hear her yelling at me, as she did for two hours.
I still have to remind myself that I'm not a bad person for sending her home to get the care she needed, that I couldn't help her anymore if I wanted to stay sane.
Umm... I'm staring at the keyboard. "Lost in Germany" by King's X is playing and has become the only reminder that time is still passing. Dang, this was supposed to be a post about organizing, not about petit paralysis.
Maybe that is today's point: sometimes you will make amazing progress and then hit a wall. I'm hitting a wall now, an hour after I finished cleaning up for the day. If that happened while I was actually organizing, I would have collapsed in the chair for the rest of the evening. I have to accept that some of this process will stir emotions, even if they may be freed for good by the stir. I will no longer be carrying the last of these items from a previous existence. At least I didn't cry, but I sure felt something very strong that needed to be greeted.
In contrast, books are simple to sort: stack them by size and shelve them in the smallest shelf that fits the stack. DVDs are even easier to shelve since their boxes are all the same size. All the books and DVDs will get sorted in the Second Major Phase, which could start a couple weeks from now.
I thought I'd sorted through all of my books already. Instead I was staring at some good ones and some seriously lame ones. Between a lame trivia book about Boston and a stack of old magazines was a book I thought was still at my mother's house: Chambers for a Memory Palace. Two architecture professors write letters back and forth describing the constructs necessary to form memory palaces. Classical orators used these semi-mnemonic devices to remember their speeches, since 3-by-5 cards didn't yet exist and require literacy.
I picked up this book when I was in university. Though I never finished reading it, I loved what I had read and loved the line drawings of various settings. I integrated the ideas with my own experiences, which is how I remember what I want to write later.
I sorted through a couple more boxes, then headed to
fangirl715's place for chocolate cake. We talked and got bummed about the cost of NINJA tickets. It's a dollar shy of a Franklin if one wants to stand in the pit and see 9" Nails and Jane's Addiction at Great Woods this summer. It's a lot cheaper at Jones Beach for mezzanine tickets, but then I'd have to trek out. Either option is still more than I can shell out when I need to live until I get a job.Then I went home and resumed my Scary Room Excavation. I think I went through an impressive ten boxes today, although I ran out of steam just as I finished tossing stuff from the last box. I still had a sprawl of objects in two rooms: it took another hour before I had enough of the mess wrangled that I could excuse myself to the Internet. I didn't actually spend ten hours on the ten boxes, but I definitely spent a working day on the process.
I filled one and a half big garbage bags today. I still have another half a dozen boxes to sort before that first aisle is clear, the walkway is immense and the items along the back wall are in my grasp. Soon I will have seen all of my possessions for the first time in half a decade. I already own at least a third fewer objects than I did when I started and I can inventory my possessions far more easily.
-investing time to fight entropy, Ps/d
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no subject
Date: 2009-03-31 07:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-31 11:29 am (UTC)A lot of bodywork has the same effect. Somebody'll be massaging ya, and all of a sudden ya feel like cryin', and ya end up in a totally different place after the massage than before.
No point to that statement. Just a connection in my brain.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-31 12:12 pm (UTC)-- still working: geecko
?
Date: 2009-03-31 02:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-31 03:20 pm (UTC)How much are tickets at Jones Beach and how long does it take to get there?
no subject
Date: 2009-03-31 07:01 pm (UTC)I need to motivate to do similar. Send some organizational vibes my way please. :-)
no subject
Date: 2009-03-31 08:39 pm (UTC)The cheapest Jones Beach seats are $52 or $65 before fees. However, Jones Beach is on the south shore of the middle of Long Island, so you either have to take the ferry from Bridgeport (another $51) and drive about three and a half hours or take the long way around for five hours and change.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-31 09:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-31 09:07 pm (UTC)