What a mess

[cjsmith]

Just before joedecker came over yesterday I spent perhaps five minutes in Emergency Tidy Up Mode. Ten or fifteen pounds of accumulated mail and other such junk went into a big box promptly shoved out of sight under my desk.

Now it's time to pay the piper. All the mail I received over the three weeks I was gone, PLUS anything that had been sorted and had been sitting on my desk when that pre-holiday storm blew through one window and soaked the whole area, is now in a big tangle in that box.

*sigh*

When will I get over the feeling that if every last piece of my mail is sorted, filed, answered, paid, thrown away, or shredded, as appropriate, then I will be a grown-up?

Comments

[sunnydale47.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, can I relate to that!! I truly sympathize, CJ. Handling mail is the bane of my existence. I can put the obvious junk directly into the recycle bin and put the bills aside to be paid, but what about all the rest of it? What do I do with the semi-junk (catalogs, store newsletters, ads for things I might actually be interested in buying) that I want to look at before I toss? And magazine renewal reminders -- do I really need to renew it now, or does the subscription actually run for seven more months? They never tell you on the notice, so I have to find an issue of the magazine to check the label, or decide if I really want to renew it at all or not. And all the other stuff that can be put off before it's handled? I've done what you did altogether too many times. Fortunately I haven't had it get destroyed, but I have put it away so thoroughly that I forgot about it ... until next month's bills came all marked "past due."

I've seen them on TV drying out library books after a flood ... hopefully you'll be able to at least tell what the various pieces were so you can request a duplicate for the important stuff. Good luck with it!

[harpwolf.livejournal.com]

I used to think I had some sort of obligation to my mail, then I realized I didn't. Now I'm ruthless. I own my mail, it does not own me.

There's a thing in the Hagakure about a warrior makes a decision in 7 breaths. I pay my bills the instant I get them. I keep enough in checking specifically for that. A "freedom fund" ... freedom from having to screw around with timing my payments against my paychecks etc.

The "semi-junk" I either handle immediately, or I discard because I know I won't look at it at all. Sometimes I keep "semi-junk" (why?) but it goes in a pile of only semi-junk. I ignore that til I'm tidying up.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I don't do well with it either. Vast quantities go directly to mixed-paper recycle, but frankly, that doesn't really help: if there's a nonzero percentage that doesn't, the pile doesn't take long to build up.

Fortunately my stuff didn't get destroyed, really, just minorly stuck together and all rippled. It looks kind of neat. :-)

[harpwolf.livejournal.com]

Yikes! My sympathies. Sounds like a Gordian Knot.

The Gordian Knot is a puzzle with a known workable solution :)

[lkeele.livejournal.com]

I think you're a grown-up when you can look at yourself, say "God I'm a slob, why did I do that?", laugh, and get on with life. I'm still working on that last part, though. ;)

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Yeah: I am a grown-up when I am at peace with who I am. Or something like that.

The majority of the people I square dance with are old enough to be my parents (some old enough to be my grandparents, although that number is dwindling) and yet it's surprising how, even given that age group, very few people I know are grown-ups in that sense.