Project: Desk
Part 3 – Emptying the Drawers
So I embarked on my next installment of Project: Desk – cleaning out my drawers – with great hope. It was a shiny clean day. I had a pot of tea ready. I would celebrate my birthday within 24 hours. I had a mind full of purpose after conferring with professional organizer Angela Kanatarellis, who has great tips about where things should go and what to toss and keep.
I didn’t take a lot of my dad’s things when he died. He was also a writer, with similar organizational issues to mine. I did keep his Electrolux letter opener, a silver pen and a pair of black-handled scissors, and found all those in the chaos of my drawers. The discovery felt like it was his way of saying “happy birthday” to me from wherever he is now.
Then my proverbial sky started to darken. I was horrified to see that somehow I’d accumulated about 200 pens and magic markers, half of which were functional. Three of them had feathers and/or lit up. Two of those didn’t work: Winnie-the-Pooh in a drag boa, and the green feather pen that appears to have escaped from a bordello. I did keep the pen with a light-up pig on it that I got for enrolling my husband in the Bacon of the Month club.
I had three bags and two boxes for separating what would be kept, relocated, recycled and trashed. I was in my groove of testing pens and putting cell-phone chargers from three phones ago in the e-waste bag, when I was toppled.
I felt excruciating pain from a lump on what we will just call my upper thigh to keep it simple. I ended up in urgent care, getting the thing poked and drained and learning that I had some kind of staph infection. Upon being released from the clinic, my husband took me out for chicken soup. And it was either that or the Vicodin that made me too high and sleepy to complete the desk reorg project for the week.
Hoping to use that letter opener today on a birthday card or two, though.