Living in the Clutter

Today I had a sneaking suspicion that everyone -- even the most clean among us -- have one place or space in their lives that are utterly void of organization, and perhaps, cleanliness.

I think it's human nature.

It's what separates us mere mortals who claim to be OCD-esque in nature from those who truly have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. (No matter how much you think you are like Adrian Monk from, well, the TV show Monk, you probably don't have OCD.)

And that utterly unorganized space in your life? Well that's just proof that you're human.

I started thinking about this when I walked by my coworker Josh's car this morning. Despite maintaining a cubicle that tops the office in terms of organization and feng shui, his car had to have at least half a dozen empty plastic water bottles in the passenger seat, bowling shoes in the back, and I have his word that up until a week or two ago, his tuxedo from the David Johnson Chorus had been in the back of the car since the end of their performance season in April.

For geography professor Dr. Mark Simpson, it's his UTM office that is catastrophically cluttered. The man is a meteorology/climatology professor, but it looks like a tornado might be sneaking through his windows at night. (No offense, Dr. Simpson.)

For The Pacer staff, it's pretty much the entire office. Everyone's desk space mimics that of former Pacer managing editor Will York to some degree. Now that I'm gone, I think cleanliness will fall even further from the priority list.

My mom has her scrapbooking room, a room for creative clutter (though I'm sure she'll tell you it's not that bad).

My sister and her husband have...their entire house. OK, maybe they don't fit into that "most clean" category I mentioned at the beginning of this post. Rachel has a nasty habit of rearranging every four to six months anyway, so whatever works for them...

But for Karen and me, it's our "office" or "study" at home. The office is the one room we have yet to fully tackle in our new half-duplex. Nevermind the dishes in the kitchen that never seem to stop piling up (our dishwasher is small). It's the office that I can't stand.

Maybe we just have too many things going on in there.

For one, it's home to our music, and that means a keyboard on one wall and my bass guitar rig next to it in a corner, not to mention our extensive collective sheet music library scattered in boxes and bags everywhere. We need a filing cabinet. Badly. I keep thinking to myself that if we could just get that done, then the rest of the room might fall in place. I think we're going to buy a filing cabinet or something from Wal-Mart or look at office product stores in Jackson this weekend.

It can't wait any longer.

Then there are our desks. I bought mine for (get this) $15 on Craigslist.com and it's a very nice desk. Karen's came from her mom, and it, too, is a nice computer desk. But there's the problem of drawer space. Not a single drawer on either desk. This is a problem, especially when you consider that we both "moved desks" from our apartments in the University Village, which came with three-drawer desks and an upper shelf in the provided furniture. Most of my "desk stuff" is in two shoe boxes on my desk's shelves; everything else is clutter and crammed on top of the desk. Karen's stuff is everywhere, from the floor to on top of her desk.

We never spend much time in the office. Why bother when you can hardly see the floor? I don't even use my Macbook much anymore, though that's partly to blame because I sit at this computer at work seven to eight hours a day, plus there's the iPhone in my pocket. E-mail, Twitter, Facebook, and the rest of the Internet are in my pocket, so why bother climbing through the office to use my laptop? I blame this for my lack of posting pictures to Flickr, by the way. I'm so far behind on that. I think I've uploaded six or seven Costa Rica photos out of several dozen, then there are plenty of photos of our puppy, and the Tennessee Safari Park from last Saturday...

It seems never ending.

So what should we do with this office? There's no where else in the house to put stuff; we've finally improved the other rooms of the house to the point that they are livable and the floor is visible. We've thought about putting shelves in the office as one possible solution, and certainly the music library going into a filing cabinet will help, but what are your thoughts?

Such a Bum

Man, it's hard to be a blogger.

Well, OK, it's not that difficult if you're someone like a fellow Weakley Countian, newscoma, who worked for the local newspaper and blogs a ton. She could probably pull off making a living just through blogging if she set herself up with the right amount of advertising or paid subscriptions, or whatever. (Hey, it works for Dooce, right? In case you don't know, Dooce makes a living blogging about being a mom and other stuff. I don't read it, but Karen does.)

But I'm not going to go into the monetizing of online content spiel, because I'm not in a mass-comm-discussing mood.

So anyway, I've had my iPhone 3GS for just under two days now. I feel that my productivity has shot up quite a bit, now that I have the Internet in my pocket. There's no way I will ever go back to going without a phone with a data plan ever again. I'd give up cable way before giving up a data plan. Seriously, Karen and I pretty much watch three or four channels in our 70+ cable subscription. Animal Planet, ESPN/ESPN 2, and Fox Sports South (when they carry the Cardinals games). Aside from Animal Planet, following sports is pretty easy with the iPhone, not to mention MLB has an application which lets you watch games on your phone. We've mostly used our TV to watch movies, which is more fun anyway. Before we became obsessive with the iPhones over the last 48 hours (and I'm sure it will subside, at least a bit) we were reading more than watching TV.

Wait, didn't I say that I wasn't in a mass-comm mood? Maybe I was just kidding myself.

Since I'm on an iPhone kick anyway, I may as well post some of the more interesting applications I've downloaded to increase its functionality. Granted, not all of these are really great or anything, but all but one have been free so I'm taking that trade-off.

• Twitterific (For following twitter updates)
• Stanza (eBook reader with several libraries of free books)
• Facebook
• USA Today
• Lose It! (A food/exercise counter similar to NutriMirror)
• AT&T myWireless (account manager and bill pay)
• e*Trades Mobile Pro
• Shazam
• Remote (iTunes remote control)
• Yelp
• Restaurants Nutrition
• 8 (a "glasses of water" counter)
• iFitness (the only paid app, has 100's of exercises demonstrated, plus user workouts)
• Instapaper (Downloads Web pages you don't have time to read so you can come back to them later)
• Bible
• Barnes & Noble Bookstore
  
• Flixter (movie times, trailers)
• Amazon.com
• WebMD
• Free German Essentials (a trial version with only 130 or so vocabulary words; the full version has 1000's of vocab to learn)
• Currency converter
• Wikipanion (Wikipedia search)
• AP Mobile (though I'm liking USA Today better, might get rid of this one)
• Wi-Fi Finder
• Mancala
• myLite (flashlight plus some other cool things like strobe light)
• Harry Potter 6 (interactive game, haven't looked at it yet)
• iSniper lite (Free trial game, kinda boring)
• iHandgun (Sound emulator)
• Lightsaber (Sound emulator)

See what fun can be had! Why do I get the feeling that some of you are criticizing my productivity...