Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Words, Words, Words

Against my better judgment, I actually cleaned (sort of) my apartment, today. I've been putting it off and putting it off because 1) I don't like to do it, especially since it usually has to occur on one or two of my two days off. Quelle drag. And 2) It just gets dusty again, and the stacks of library books and the New Yorkers and Vanity Fairs continue to lay one on top of the other in precarious towers. Heck, I even did laundry. A thorough job, in my own way, was done. I even cleaned out my desk and the piles of paper and what not piled up underneath and beside it. I was on fire, I tell you. In putting away letters and notes from family and friends that had been lovingly shoved into the desk, I got caught up in reading old correspondence. That, my friends, is the highway to the danger zone. Very difficult to come back from there. I could read old letters for hours, lose complete track of time and look up to find it is Friday, and time for me to go to work. What happened to Thursday?

I used to work in a cubicle, and that is where I truly discovered the wonders of e-mail. I knew it existed, but I hardly used it and felt sure it would be the downfall of human communication (I think the jury is still out on that one). Well, at my little cubicle job, I suddenly got the whole notion of sluffing off at work while appearing to be o-so-very-busy. I wrote a lot of e-mails and received a lot, too. I printed most, if not all, of these electronic communiques out. I have a large binder with all of those and, so I see today, a box of them to boot. I don't really print my e-mails anymore. I find that I rarely write lengthy ones or have lengthy ones written to me. Wonder what happened? I also think that I have convinced myself that I don't need to print them. They will always be there for me to read whenever I want to sit for some hours and meander through my past thoughts and those of my friends on my computer. Perhaps I am naive.

All that ink. All that paper.

Come to think of it, printing them at the cubicle farm was a hell of a lot easier since it wasn't my ink or my paper. Maybe that's when I stopped? When the output was costing me, personally. Ahhhhhh ha.

3 comments:

Paige said...

And the fact that you cleaned "against your better judgement" - that's funny!

Paige said...

OK, I also left another comment, but I don't know if I acutally put it through. (Notice I started that other one with 'and' - it was a continuation.) Anyway, in more words, it said something to the effect of, "This sounds so like me, I could have written this exact blog myself." It's true :)

Anonymous said...

A toast to all those who can clean and not stop in the middle to reread all of those little notes and pieces of life we throw around! They have cleaner homes than I!