Flying down the I-10

A couple of months ago while walking across my home office I skidded on a magazine and landed on my hip.  Had I been 75 I would most likely have landed on the operating table being pinned together by Scotty Haig. Although Doctor Haig would have been retired by then, unlike his 300-year-old father who is sharp as a tack and still visiting his patients at the hospital.

This is how dire my “saving” situation is.  I am getting injured.

I refuse to call myself a hoarder.  That is reserved for the gang on A & E. I certainly don’t want to call myself a clutterer. That is someone who lives in a space jammed with too many things, where every surface is littered with picture frames and objects de art. (Although I do have a little of that going on) No, I am someone who saves important stuff. Like clothes from the ’80s in the event I need to perform skits about my years crawling around the Limelight and Studio 54. Or my bag of answering machine tapes with voices I will not be able to identify.  But who knows? Maybe I could use them in a future performance piece. (If I was a performance artist that is). And the stacks of interior design magazines? There may come a day I want to collage in all my spare time. Which will be never.  Oh and I almost forgot (blocked out), lots of little piles of articles ripped from the other magazines I subscribe to, saved for a rainy day curled up on the couch.  Not happening. Ever.

Ok ok, I have a lot of crap. But really just in my office.  The dumping ground. When the kitchen table grows the latest round of charity campaign letters, credit card bills, and Bed Bath and Beyond coupons, they get transported down the hall to the processing plant. Once there they get sorted into piles, usually on the floor. Piles I was trying to avoid when I lost control on top of a 2003 copy of Town and Country.

In my defense, I am juggling three careers AND I am the official manager of my 95-year-old mother’s life. That’s at least three and 1/2 file cabinets worth of paperwork, bills, and receipts just for her! (If I could actually get them into the file cabinets).  I guess that doesn’t explain why I still have 150 magnets of my husband and me smooching on our wedding day 14 years ago. We were given 400 by my husband’s high school buddy Kenny at our LA reception six months after the real deal happened in New York. Two hundred ended up being given to guests. At least fifty ended up on random people’s cars (thanks to my three mature brothers-in-law) and five of those were driven to the home of their old high school principal and slapped on the back of his Prius. I wish I had been witness to the drivers on the I-10 who got to see the two of us wheeling by on someone’s car fuel door.

I dug up my copy of Maria Kondo’s book, The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing, that somehow ended up under my bed. Maybe this expert could help me get my act together, I thought. I felt like I was wasting so much time and energy looking for things that were out of place or under piles. Broken promise after promise that I would take the weekend to pull the office together and MAYBE let go of costumes for my future plays. Before I started Kondo’s guide to a lighter life, another accident occurred.

I foolishly didn’t do the transfer of mail, alumni magazines, spools of ribbon used to wrap a birthday present from the kitchen table to my office floor which resulted in me almost losing a toe.  I was in a rush, per usual, to frame an art piece for a client and instead of doing it in my studio, I chose my heaping kitchen table.  No big deal I thought, easy. And I am way too tired and pressed for time at this point to do it any other way. I began hinging two metal frame sections together that were teetering on top of four coffee table art books when BAM!!!!  Like a spear morphing into a miniature guillotine, one end of the half hinged frame came down with such force it almost severed my fourth toe. My husband jumped into triage mode, wrapping up my little blood spraying appendage in bandages.

“Listen,” He said calmly while wrapping up my toe. “This has got to stop. I am not interested in becoming a widow, although we both know I will have my choice of wake dates”.

That was the last straw. It was time for plan B. I would completely redo the office. Paint, carpet, new file cabinets. Start chucking. I would HAVE to get my act together, workmen would be coming!!  I had renewed energy as I limped around (I didn’t lose the toe but I did break it) moving files and papers into cardboard banker boxes that I bought at Staples.  I was cooking with gas.

As my office got neater and free of my smorgasbord, the tower of banker’s boxes got higher. Oh my God! I was creating a labyrinth of contained clutter!! Now what? I started reading Kondo’s book for the answer and was told to ask the items to pitch “Do you spark joy”?

Well, the magnet’s kind of do…happy memories of our wedding day, even with the DJ disaster and the drunk photographer hitting on someone’s husband at the end of the night. And all my papers, and folders and scraps?  I kind of like them. So what if I couldn’t let go of a box of matches from a bar I went to in 11^th grade?

There was only one thing left to do. Load it all up in my station wagon and drive it over to mom’s attic.  But please don’t tell my husband.