First, thank you all for the comments and emails and facebook messages after my last post. I love you all bunches and bunches and if I could send cookies through the Internet I so would. My insomnia seems to be leaving, as I'm sleeping a bit more each night. Shockingly, this is also improving my mood. I know, right? WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT? Anyway, now we shall talk about something else, yes?
One of the most annoying things I've had to learn to live with since moving in with T is clutter. STUFF. My parents may be reading this and puzzling over their memories of the trash heap that was my bedroom from the time I was eight until I went off to college. But really, as an adult I like things to have places and be put away. If I'm in a cranky mood the best way to get out of it is to pick up the kitchen or fold the blankets in the living room. I don't need things to be spotless by any stretch of the imagination, but I am a much more pleasant person if things are picked up and reasonably neat. This is why I got rid of thirty or so garbage bags of STUFF earlier this month. And I loved every trip up and down the three flights of stairs to the garbage/recycling/garage.
Since I'm running out of things to throw away, and sometimes I just have to learn to live with 8,345 of her crochet projects floating around the living room, I often channel my obsessive need for organization into other areas, like our TiVo. I get a completely unreasonable pleasure from hard-deleting items from our "recently deleted' items folder and deleting shows I know we won't watch. I don't know why a nice, short TiVo list on the screen pleases me so, but it really does. I do the same thing with my email. Both my personal email and my work email rarely have more than a couple of urgent emails sitting in my inbox; the rest are stowed away in folders or deleted as soon as possible. T on the other hand probably has something like 400 emails in her inbox, 100 of which she continues to leave marked as "unread", which means I can never look at her computer for fear my head will explode.
Another outlet for my obsessive digital organization is our Netflix Queue. We currently have 120 DVDs in our queue, and I am positively ITCHING to get home and force T to listen to me read them all off and see what I can delete. I'm not opposed to having a queue of movies we want to watch, but she seems to be of the opinion that any movie we might want to watch again in the future someday should be stored in our queue, lest we forget it exists. Which...no. I see no reason why we have Marry Poppins in our queue. Cute movie? Sure! But we've both seen it, we don't have kids, and as far as I can remember neither of us has expressed an interest in watching it again anytime soon. And if we have the sudden urge for a spoonful of sugar sometime in the future we can always add it to the queue then, bump it to the top of the list, and voila! Why does it need to sit there taking up space in the queue all the time? Clearly she is trying to kill me.
I solved this problem by re-creating my own queue with only stuff I actually intend to watch. At the moment that is composed entirely of Dawson's Creek (...shut up), which I intend to use as entertainment while I exercise. Because nothing motivates me like reliving teenage angst through dated television shows. Awesome.
Now I just have to resist the urge to create separate Netflix profiles for different types of movies, and different priorities...this organization thing could get out of control. Maybe I should just go back to deleting stuff from the TiVo.
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P.S. Immediately after writing this, I signed into our Netflix account and set up a separate profile for the horror movies I want to watch. The over-organization is starting! I have the will-power of a...um...something without willpower.
