des-sanity

Background information:

Our couch was uncomfortable. It was an unfolding-futon type, which is basically a pile of cushions without a frame. This would become painstakingly obvious in less than the normal 2 hour span of a movie, during which we would have to stop the movie, re-adjust the couch, and sit back down. And it still wasn't very comfortable.

So we bought a new couch.* Actually, a futon. One of those wooden frames with a big fat cushion that goes click-click-click and turns into a bed. Or, as in our case, goes click-click-click and half unfolds, leaving a lounge chair. That is basically the feature that sold it for us. That and the comfy-ness. Hooray! The couch was delivered yesterday while I was at work.

My normal Friday plan is to go to the gym directly after work. So I lug my gym bag to work with me yesterday. But then Craig thinks he has a plan to keep both couches** if we re-arrange the entire house. So I should skip the gym and come home and do that. That will be my workout. I pick up some takeout on the way home, we eat, then we get to moving.

After several large furniture moves, including dis-assembling 2 bookshelves in the living room and re-assembling them in the bedroom, we decide that his Grand Plan will not work. The old couch must go. Fine. Once everything else is settled, including a temporary home for the old couch, that only leaves the books on the floor.

The problem:

Over 30 cubic feet of displaced shelf-space are vacant in the bedroom. The books that used to fill this space are lying in the living room, stacked in random piles on every available surface, including the new couch. We can't even walk through. des gets very cranky and begins to freak out. des realizes that she can not have this magnitude of disorder in her space. (This is different than Artists' OCD, btw.)

I realize that this is why I keep my cubicle at work so organized. When I am surrounded by piles, even if they are neat piles, I get in a bad mood and people start dying. Now, I'm not saying that my house is spotless - far from it. There just has to be space. If I pile everything up and push it in a corner, that's so much better than having things all over the place. Somehow, the piles in the room begin to pile up onto me and I feel squished and cramped and claustrophobic. Which is weird because I can be in a tight space like a box or something just fine. But throw some disorder in there, and I will freak out. In a bad way.

So while I freaked out and went to sit on the kitchen-couch, Craig moved all the books in the bedroom where even though they were still in piles, I didn't have to look at them. Until this morning when I woke up. But that was easily solved - I just went into the living room and sat on the book-free new couch. But the computer is in the bedroom. And all my bead stuff. And all the books. So I freaked out more. Lovely Bunny put a good portion of the books on the shelves for me. They're not in any order, which drives me a little insane, but less so than when they're on the floor. At some point, I was calm enough to help put the books away, using my Tetris skills (which is surprisingly easy with books) to fit as many books into as little space as possible.

I've given up on putting the books in order***. They were in order when I first moved in, but since then so many new books have been purchased that the order quickly necame a moot point. And books will continue to be purchased, especially once I start back in school.

Point is, I don't "handle" random piles well. So if you ever want to completely disable me, put me in a room full of unorganized crap. If there's enough of it, I will get very angry - like Hulk style angry - and smash the room. If there is only a little bit, however, don't be surprised if I quickly but efficiently put the crap into some kind order. Oh yeah, and the order might only make sense to me.

Yeah, it's a bit of a neurosis.


* We could afford it because Criag thought he might go to FL again for spring break, then decided against it. Then we used the money he would have spent on his trip (some of it, anyway) and bought the couch. If you can follow that backwards logic. Point is, we needed a new couch, and he needed a reason to justify it.

**This is a problem for us - we buy things to replace old things, but then don't get rid of the old things. That's why we have so much damn crap.

***I've also given up (a long time ago) on putting the cds in order. There are just too many of them. The DVDs, however, are in alphabetical. But if we want to find a book or cd, god help us if we need to do it quickly.