My life, as drawn by Sandra Bell-Lundy in today's "Between Friends."
And it's worse than this.
The best part of telecommuting is that you can sit at your computer all day in your sweats. And, since everyone who knows your work is hundreds of miles away, if you need to go out and buy groceries, you don't have to shave or even change. You're not going to run into anyone.
See where this is leading?
Add the fact that the only family within drop-in distance is large enough that my little apartment is too tiny for them to come hang out in. If there's any visiting going to happen, it's going to happen at their place.
Rita Rudner's line that men who live alone are just "bears with furniture" doesn't begin to cover it.
Okay. Now, here's the other half of today's odd coupling of conceptually linked cartoons:
Terri Libenson of Pajama Diaries points out the futility of imposing physical organization on an unorganized mind.
This portrayal, you will understand, does not motivate me to do a lot of picking up and sorting of the masses of paper, books and unsorted ephemera that surround my workspace.
(I keep it pretty dark in here, so the mess isn't visible)
Brilliant touch, by the way, for her to have Jill completely permanently and forever ruin her daughter's life rather than to simply misplace an important paper or blow a client deadline. Nothing better than adding parental guilt to the frustration of organization gone awry. When they get together for Thanksgiving, 20 years from now, Amy will say, "Remember the time ..."
Again.
Getting back to "Between Friends," I'm not concerned with the ecological balance of my apartment so much as its archaelogical integrity. I don't have a very good sense of spatial awareness and so, while the bed is in the bedroom and the pots and pans are in the kitchen and I have desk drawers more or less dedicated to different categories of papers and disks, my main system of organization is memory.
And the enemy of memory is putting things in a safe place, because (A) putting everything in one safe place is called "throwing it all in a pile," which does no good at all, while (B) putting something in one of a number of safe places simply breaks the context with which it is associated.
Example: Last summer, I went out to Denver for some workshops and, on the way back, gave up my seat on an overbooked plane, took a later flight and earned a $400 travel voucher, which I intended to use to visit my distant grandchildren this summer. The voucher was very specific that they would not replace it if you lost it, and that it ran out in one year.
So I thought to myself, "I must put this in a safe place."
Yeesh.
So this spring as I began to plan the summer, I remembered that, and began looking in all the safe places for the damned voucher. Which, of course, wasn't in any of them.
So I started ransacking the apartment, and I dug out all my notes from the workshop and, tucked in among them, found the boarding passes for my flights that weekend. But not the damned voucher.
It wasn't in a safe place.
And it wasn't in a logical place.
So, after about three weeks of impending gloom at the thought of finding it a week after it expired in July, I realized that trying to think of where it ought to be was not working, and I needed, instead, to think about where it was.
I took a deep breath and sat myself down for a good memory probe. And came up with it.
Tucked inside the cover of the book I had been reading on the plane.
Don't mess with the archaeological layers. They may look like chaos, but, in fact, they are what protects us from chaos.
Also falling under the umbrella of odd coupling:
Wiley Miller drew this Non Sequitur today.
And Alex Hallatt provided a clue for Wiley's would-be Lothario in her Arctic Circle today:
And now for something completely different:
Never mind the cartoon itself, which is rather good, but which I'm reposting here because Steve Benson has therein done what I consider the best Obama caricature ever. This is wow-level work.
Just a question of interpretation -- Is Amy upset at missing (or almost mmissing) the soccer banquet, or at having to go to it after all?
Posted by: Danny Boy (London Derriere) | 05/12/2012 at 10:25 AM
She didn't RSVP and it's probably in 20 minutes anyway. This was the biggest, most important party of the season, all her friends from the team will be there, her life is now officially ruined. Ruined. RUINED.
And it's all Mom's fault.
Posted by: Mike Peterson | 05/12/2012 at 11:39 AM
Memory is, indeed, the key. And putting things in "safe, logical" places destroys the link.
Plus - how many times have you looked where you KNOW somthing is, not found it, torn the place apart, then out of desperation gone back to where it HAD to be - and there it is. Did it go off with your socks for awhile? Visit the Mother Ship? What?
Posted by: Mary in Ohio | 05/12/2012 at 04:30 PM
It's a shape-shifter kind of thing -- you remembered it was blue, but forgot that the cover was green. Which, dammit, it WASN'T.
Okay, maybe it was.
Posted by: Mike Peterson | 05/12/2012 at 05:32 PM
It's all about the strata ... until someone else messes with it, and then it's not my fault anymore! And stuff visiting the Mother Ship - boy, does that explain a lot. I'm totally stealing it. Thanks, Mary!
Posted by: Lori B | 05/12/2012 at 10:56 PM
Always glad to contribute to the advancement of Science!
Posted by: Mary in Ohio | 05/13/2012 at 06:04 PM