desk cleared

I did a modicum of research on the next paper - on Hunter S. Thompson and the ideology of objectivity in journalism. But before long I had an uncomfortable feeling, a feeling like something was wrong, something needed to be done. I looked elsewhere in the room, at Lauren looking up how to make her own skin-care stuff from household ingredients, at the guitars, at the cat sleeping peacefully, at the stack of ungraded papers.

Then I realized what it was that needed doing: my desk needed to be cleaned off. The need arises largely due to my method of keeping organized, which I call the "stacking method." In the stacking method, I put long-range items (like proposals for conferences in 8 months) in one stack, and urgent items on top of those items. Then there's things I've just finished (like conferences a month or two ago), which I put - um, let's see, uh - on that stack with the long-range and urgent items. Receipts go... on the stack, um, with grocery lists and bills - bills?! Is that the gas bill? Shit.

The stacking method is excellent for putting in front of me everything I need to be concerned with at one time or another. But it sometimes makes for unwieldy stacks of things that have little in common other than geographic location (it's sort of like Yugoslavia used to be). It becomes necessary, from time to time, to go through the stack and sort things out.

I do this just about every three months, usually when I have papers to grade. One might imagine a correlation.

In any case, I spent about 45 minutes going through the stacks today. Notable discoveries:

• a half-roll of Tums
  
• 5 guitar picks, including two medium picks (I don't use medium picks)
  
• the plastic cap for the power cord for my iBook
  
• a Stockton Thunder inaugural season program, from the game we went to in January
  
• four pens, two pencils, four pads of paper
  
• a library book on Habermas that I forgot was there
  
• my attorney's itemized invoice statement
  
• cordial invitations to have TurboTax do my taxes this year, to a conference I already went to, and to a CFA meeting I can't make it to, and to support Capital Public Radio
  
• another stack of papers I haven't graded

So, dammit, I should read the papers.

Ooh! Guitar!