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Confetti

I'm a fairly organized person with a certain amount of tolerance for clutter. Over the past few years, that tolerance has turned to blindness and denial. When I stop doing school for the day, I basically collapse with my iBook, some Scotch, and whatever banal drama is running on TV Japan. Filing bills, tidying up the office, picking up books and putting them—where? I've got no more room in the bookcases. I guess I'll just stack them here on the floor in the pile with the binders of notes for my sad, neglected writing projects and the magazines that I'm going to read as soon as I finish up this YA novel.

However, the leaning tower of unfiled bills, bank statements, and unopened statements from the mutual fund people has gotten too unstable. It's been growing since the filing cabinet became too stuffed to accommodate any more paper and is over eight inches high now. The filing cabinet (obviously the culprit here) contains filed bills, bank statements, and opened statements from the mutual fund people going back to 1998 when I last purged the files of ancient and unwieldy quantities of paper.

In the spirit of New Year's Cleaning, I decide that today is the day to do some filing. Purging the filing cabinet is kind of fun. I find the receipt from a luxurious weekend at The Homestead (1998, back when we were making money and BES (Before Engineering School)), some papers relating to a court case that I never did contract to translate (Small World Alert: the plaintiff turned out to be the father of the girl who sat beside me in my first calculus class at Reynolds), and various "Why did I even file this?" sorts of papers. Some stuff goes into the trash, but anything with a credit card number or account number goes into a bag to be shredded. This bag gets rather full.

Then I sort the stack of unfiled papers. I even open my mutual fund statements and find that things aren't as bad as I feared. Then I file things and take out the trash. It's actually rather satisfying to have brought order to a corner of my office.

I sit down and push paper through the shredder till it jams. I fix the shredder. I think, "Given that I broke my washing machine this morning, maybe it's time to quit for the day." I now have a grocery bag half full of white confetti and I wish that credit card companies and banks were more exuberant in their choice of paper colors.

432 words | January 3, 2005 10:28 PM | Real true story