When I was a sophomore in high school, we used to joke about our American History teacher’s compulsive habits. If you moved the stapler, the three hole punch, or the pencil sharpener even slightly out of alignment, he would immediately notice and put them back. For awhile we tried moving them around to mess with him, because these kinds of things are hilarious when you’re fifteen, but he just inevitably and without comment replaced the objects exactly as they had been.
The game quickly ceased to be amusing, and anyway the teacher proved himself to be a pretty cool guy. Eventually I got to know him well enough to remark that he must be an incredibly organized person.
“Oh, not at all,” he said, looking surprised. “You should see my house. The reason why I need everything in its place is because I’m so disorganized.”
At the time, I found it hard to believe that a fellow chaos demon could possibly be organized, at all, ever, in any way. These days, it makes a little more sense. For instance, today my partner asked me to pick up a library book for him. I felt myself getting stressed and irritated and cursey. Dammit, I thought, the library closes at 5:30, and that mean’s I’ll need to leave for my art lesson early, and that will just screw everything up…
Because I get ready to leave for my lesson at 3:30. This allows me time to pack any supplies I need to bring, change into paint clothes, find my shoes and keys, get out the door, and make the 15 minute drive to my student’s house, and be ready to start the lesson at 4. As long as I start getting ready to go at 3:30, I’m fine. Tuesday afternoons. 3:30. That’s it.
If I have to run another errand before my lesson, I need to leave even earlier. How much earlier? I have no idea. When I manage to be punctual, it’s because I’ve figured out the hard time at which I need to start getting ready to leave. This takes a tremendous amount of mental effort, and once I’ve expended that effort, I can’t tamper with it or it the whole system dissolves.
So, today, I tried to get to the library, but in spite of my best efforts I couldn’t start getting ready until 3:30. I didn’t make it to the library, so I’ll have to run a separate library errand tomorrow, which of course is another disruption.
To disrupt my day even further, my partner’s birthday is this weekend, so after my lesson I had to go to the mall, which I hate, to get his present … and as long as I was there, I really needed new bras, because I’ve lost weight and the crappy ones I got at TJ Maxx don’t fit right and I haven’t been fitted properly in years … so I went to Nordstrom, which I’ve heard has expert bra fitters. And it does. But that was another couple of hours, and my whole evening was shot.
Did I mention that I hate the mall?