Order

I just rearranged my closet. I put the really nice clothes (suit, dress shirts, etc.) in a less easily accessible place, and put the t-shirts in their place. Made a place for all the unused hangars. Moved the tie/belt rack to a less crowded location. Now, from right to left, it’s t-shirts, hangars, tie/belt rack, collared knit shirts (in color order), other collared shirts, long pants, suit, then long-sleeve shirts.

I think I have some occasional compulsion about cleaning – sometimes it hits and I can’t stop. For example, Amy’s relatives from out of state came over, and our house was a mess, and had been for months. This was mainly because of a water leak we had in the front bedroom, which necessitated removing the carpet and everything else from the room in order to fix the problem. So, as there was a bunch of boxes and crap in the hallways, we didn’t clean for a while.

So, two fridays ago the house was finally back together – the carpet got replaced, and we had no reason not to clean up. In the days that followed, Amy did a lot of the house, while I dealt with taxes and cleaned the toilets, hung pictures, and organized and cleaned my office which was frankly a sty. I had paper everywhere, computer parts and other random stuff throughout. Now it’s clean, and I like it so much better – I feel like I can get work done faster now that there’s order. The weird thing is that until I was done, I had monomania – I would pick something up, and until it was in the right place, I couldn’t put it down. Unfortunately, sometimes “the right place” for things was after doing work on them, which I had to stop myself from doing when the work was paperwork that would take a while to do.

Order energizes me, and lets me be sure of myself. I still have a lot of the previously mentioned paperwork in piles on my desk, but at least it’s in slightly more order than before.