Tongue in Cheek, Pen in Hand
Sticky Note Explosion
Jennifer Gabrielle
Issue date: 11/3/05 Section: Features
- Page 1 of 2 next >
Every year at Smith I dream of a clean room. Before arriving, I devise a system to keep myself organized. This usually involves a trip to Staples, where I select items like storage bins, desk drawer organizers, sticky notes, and containers to hold pencils, folders, and other extraneous clutter that inevitably monopolizes horizontal surfaces. I have a place for everything and a wholly unfounded notion that I will be able to keep everything in its place. As soon as I establish a regular schedule of classes and work and activities, my desire to clean will plummet, and I will be forced to toss aside my silly perfectionist fantasies for a real world where I don't spend my free time arranging paper clips or sorting my folders by color.
My two biggest problems are clothes and those darn sticky notes I keep buying. As I write this, I have three or four piles of clothes on the floor; my current excuse is that I am sick and can't be bothered to fold things when my head feels like it's stuffed with a giant cotton ball. For the past few days I have shed garments like a reptile, dropping them wherever I happen to change before crawling into bed.
I'm only slightly neater when I'm not sick. I don't generally keep clothes on the floor, but I do drape them over the back of my desk chair every night. A large and precarious pile of pants, shirts, sweaters and things I'm too lazy to hang up in my closet accumulates by the end of the week, and I have to sit on the very edge of the seat to avoid disrupting the balance and knocking everything over. Unfortunately, the inconvenience of working at my computer with a threatening mound of clothes behind me is not enough to break the habit. I have instead created a new habit of occupying as little of my chair as possible, which I find myself doing especially in the dining hall where I share my seat with a coat and a backpack.
But this seems trivial compared to my other problem, which is nothing short of an explosion of hot-pink sticky notes. Somewhere along the way, I decided I needed to keep a stack of sticky notes on my desk for all my jotting-down needs. Phone numbers, important dates, story ideas, my class schedule, websites, inspiring quotes-I've got them all floating around on my desk, as if some strange tree above has lost its pink square leaves, and I have yet to rake. It's become such a habit to write things down and stick them to my desk, I now have layers and groups of notes, and I've even started hiding them in obscure places.
My two biggest problems are clothes and those darn sticky notes I keep buying. As I write this, I have three or four piles of clothes on the floor; my current excuse is that I am sick and can't be bothered to fold things when my head feels like it's stuffed with a giant cotton ball. For the past few days I have shed garments like a reptile, dropping them wherever I happen to change before crawling into bed.
I'm only slightly neater when I'm not sick. I don't generally keep clothes on the floor, but I do drape them over the back of my desk chair every night. A large and precarious pile of pants, shirts, sweaters and things I'm too lazy to hang up in my closet accumulates by the end of the week, and I have to sit on the very edge of the seat to avoid disrupting the balance and knocking everything over. Unfortunately, the inconvenience of working at my computer with a threatening mound of clothes behind me is not enough to break the habit. I have instead created a new habit of occupying as little of my chair as possible, which I find myself doing especially in the dining hall where I share my seat with a coat and a backpack.
But this seems trivial compared to my other problem, which is nothing short of an explosion of hot-pink sticky notes. Somewhere along the way, I decided I needed to keep a stack of sticky notes on my desk for all my jotting-down needs. Phone numbers, important dates, story ideas, my class schedule, websites, inspiring quotes-I've got them all floating around on my desk, as if some strange tree above has lost its pink square leaves, and I have yet to rake. It's become such a habit to write things down and stick them to my desk, I now have layers and groups of notes, and I've even started hiding them in obscure places.