I’m not lazy, I’m a creative thinker! OK, I’m also lazy.
December 27th, 2006Just as we at Divinest Sense always suspected - messy people are super cool, laid-back, and creative, and neat, fussy people are, I believe the quote is, “humorless and inflexible prigs, [that] have way too much time on their hands.” Tongue-in-cheekery from the New York Times. Also:
Mr. Freedman is co-author, with Eric Abrahamson, of “A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder,” out in two weeks from Little, Brown & Company. The book is a meandering, engaging tour of beneficial mess and the systems and individuals reaping those benefits, like Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose mess-for-success tips include never making a daily schedule.
As a corollary, the book’s authors examine the high cost of neatness — measured in shame, mostly, and family fights, as well as wasted dollars — and generally have a fine time tipping over orthodoxies and poking fun at clutter busters and their ilk, and at the self-help tips they live or die by. They wonder: Why is it better to pack more activities into one day? By whose standards are procrastinators less effective than their well-scheduled peers? Why should children have to do chores to earn back their possessions if they leave them on the floor, as many professional organizers suggest?
That’s what really bothers me about organizational systems - the false morality associated with neatness, and the guilt that is supposed to accompany messiness. Why can’t we just look at these things objectively? Why all the persecution?
When I was a 7th grader, our school hit upon the brilliant idea of hiring a professional organizer to come in and help out the students with special binders and dividers, assignment logs, and individual counseling. I can understand now why they would do such a thing - this was a very tough private school, and 7th grade marked the beginning of “getting serious” about one’s academic performance and extracurriculars. This was the year that the culling and sorting began. High scorers on math tests went into pre-algebra, computational dullards were stuck in “regulars” math. Promising young philosophes and raconteurs continued their study of the noble French language, while those who could not differentiate “et” and “est” were shuttled off to learn the peasant language of Spanish. (This was in Texas, where there are certain attitudes about Spanish speakers.)
Just as we were beginning to understand that the difference between an 80 and a 100 on a test was not simply a determinant of how many appreciative smiles we could win from our teachers but a prognosis for how successful and worthy we’d turn out to be, the seventh grade faculty, exasperated from years of giving lukewarm grades to kids who really ought to be doing better, decided that bad organization was unfairly holding us back–causing our homework to be late, our pencils forgotten, our handouts lost, our attitudes sullen. Perhaps a professional organizer could remove these barriers for us and help us realize our full potential.
But here was the problem: I had no potential, and I knew it. Not that I was stupid or uninterested in learning - in fact, I was pretty sharp, and got sorted right away into the honors track. I had just spent a great deal of my young life thinking about my purpose in it, and had recently come to the conclusion that life had no meaning. Religions were false. People were mean, petty, selfish, and destructive. There was no such thing as magic. Life was messy. People didn’t love each other for who they were, they loved the things that they could get other people to do for them. Certainly nobody loved me.
I’m not sure where this tide of negativity came from, but I’m sure I wasn’t the only thirteen-year-old to ever feel such things. The overwhelming sentiment, even among the robotic miss perfects who always had crisp paper and neatly-lettered filing systems, was that none of this school crap really mattered.
Enter Ms. Travis, the organizer. Ms. Travis was a slim, patrician woman in her fifties with a stiff platinum-blond bob and unbelievably white skin, set off stunningly by ruby-red lipstick and immaculate jewel-tone suits. She sent a letter to our parents before the school year began, asking them not to purchase looseleaf binders for us, because she would provide special binders that would form the basis for our new system of organization.
The binders were slick, flexible plastic with no pockets. Pockets, explained Ms. Travis, represented a deadly temptation to collect hoards of unfiled papers, thus leading to unacceptable rumpling of edges and unseemly shuffling when searching for a particular handout. Everything was to be immedately hole-punched and filed in the appropriate divider of the binder, one for each subject. Within each divider papers should be filed in chronological order, with handouts first, assignments second, quizzes third, and so on. I don’t remember exactly what the program was, because I followed none of it.
The keystone of the binder system was the assignment book, which was a hole-punched affair neatly clasped in front of the dividers. It was a simple unmarked calendar grid, and we were directed to write our assignments for all classes into the block for each day. This was really just fine, and at first I dutifully wrote down as many assignments as I could remember to write down. I relied, however, on the stack of papers and handwritten notes that I kept in another folder to remember what my assignments were. It seemed like a pointless step to write “Science: handout due monday”, with no real explanation, when I could just look at the handout itself, saved in my pile of important stuff.
But my lackadaisical approach to the recording of assignments was not pleasing to Ms. Travis, who would make her rounds during study hall, demanding to see our binders and chastising us loudly for not making full use of the system. After being shamed in this manner on several occasions, I became defiant and rather than promising to try to be a better person, I decided it would be more constructive in the long run to make a complete mockery of the whole system. No, screw that explanation–I was angry and filled with contempt. I saw Ms. Travis as an embodiment of the universe, which was clearly not made for someone like me. If the whole point of life was to be as neat and clean as possible and to wear houndstooth skirts and yellow silk scarves, then what was the point of living?
Doodles began to appear around the edges of my assignment book pages, little spirals and vines and quotes from Pink Floyd songs. Then they began to spread, sprout blossoms of vivid color quite outside the approved ballpoint blue and black, and inevitably broke the rigid bonds of the gridlines to explode fully across the page. Diagonally across December was scrawled “Why be normal?”, the W illuminated by pictures of galloping horses, twisting vines, arrows, bits of cross-hatching, greek borders, irises and pupils and shiny teardrops. Pretty soon the entire book was full of these hieroglyphics of defiance.
Ms. Travis exploded at me during her study hall rounds. My teachers met with me to find out what my damn problem was, citing my excellent work in French and English classes as reasons for their confusion. More talk about my “potential” and my lack of concern for it. Tearful tirades from my parents about how my attitude problem was ruining all my chances. More data to support my theory of the inherent absence of love and joy in the world. In response, I did only the assignments that I cared about, and let the others slide. I erected impenetrable fortresses of papers in my locker. I wore tie dye and wrote poems about loneliness. I was pretty convinced that nobody had my interests in mind, only my production capacity. Then one day the assistant principal, one of the people I loathed most of all for his neat desk, short stature, and creepy concern about possible “problems at home”, made the decision that changed things - “I’m enrolling you in painting class with that new teacher we brought over from the arts magnet school.” From then on, things got better.
