The desk as a stumbling block

I’m thinking that my designated writing place (DWP) is not really the best place to write. My DWP is my office, which is my sole domain – people and children are only allowed in with permission – but it occurs to me that once I get in here, I don’t get a lot of writing done.

For one thing, the chair I’m using is my son’s old desk chair. I set it at its highest setting, but within 15 minutes it has lowered itself way down, so that I am looking up at my computer screen instead of facing it directly. And screws keep coming out of the bottom, so I’m not sure what is even holding the seat onto the frame. Every once in a while I flip the chair over and replace the screws, but they just pop out again – about one per week. And it’s not that comfortable a chair anyway. I’m using it because my desk chair died about a year and a half ago and I haven’t gotten around to getting a new one.

My desk, which I bought specially at Wal-Mart and put together, is a cute little cherry number. However, the graceful lines and subdued styling are obscured by the junk I have piled all over it – kid photographs, bills to be paid, miscellaneous pieces of paper I think I need to act on but need to read again, program CD’s, two old cell phones I need to get the pictures off of, etc. My desk is a standing to-do list that distracts and stresses me.

I’ve been working on clearing the desk off, but it’s slow going. In order to clean it off, I have to find a place for everything, and the room has other clutter issues, like a bookcase that is overfull of graduate school writings, books I got from my mom that I haven’t weeded out yet and a whole shelf of photos to go into albums; four boxes of junk from my daughter’s room when we cleared her some space, plus her writing table and doll house; and two filing cabinets, one in daily use, the other just hanging around. I have been telling myself that this room needs to be cleaned up, but putting all this down on (electronic) paper just fires me up to get it all gone and out of sight. I did get rid of the collectable dolls that had been stored in a moving box for the last ten years, so that is progress. Now I need to clear some more space and get all the non-writing stuff out of sight.

The other non-writing issue I have is that I like to sit down at this, the writing computer, and surf the ‘Net, download my checking account info and generally goof off. So far my bedtime deadline has kept me writing the blog, but I’m going to need a longer-term solution for the personal writing. I think the proposed solutions for that are going to have to wait for another blog. One thing at a time so my brain doesn’t explode.

Look, 500 words. Excellent. Talk to you tomorrow.

~Noelle 07/08/08