The Awful Truth

Nice weather after the storm moved out earlier this week.

I guess my memory is completely going, along with all my organizational skills. Now, when I need them ... .

Once upon a time, I had the neatest desk of any reporter at the second newspaper I worked for. I also had the biggest (in terms of sheer size) beat. I started out with the messiest desk, with only me knowing what was under which layer of pulp. I was literally snowed under by paper -- press releases, budgets, notebooks, the works. People laughed at me. I laughed at me. I was a joke.

Then, the person who had the beat before me just mentioned incidentally one day that she used only pencil for Rolodex entries (this was way long time ago, folks). It set off a brainstorm in my head. Forward organization -- what a concept! I flew into a new realm for me: I could create my own organizational system!

First, colored pens for different governmental agencies on the folder tabs (no hanging files -- the desks they had for us were nice, and used drawers spaced for Manila folders). Then, each agency got a file for the same subject all had to tackle -- budget, utilities, personnel, recreation, whatever. Then, each agency got special folders that were individual to them -- for particular "hot" issues, like "annexation."

Then, there were miscellaneous files, things I needed for my work. Then, there were files about general news subjects, and so on. Various colors or key words linked something in the file to or from something on the big desk calendar we all got every year. I spent a week when not writing stories just getting my Rolodex in order, using the same system above.

My Rolodex began to travel the newsroom; my calendar kept getting "borrowed" or copied, my desk was riffled regularly. I had to put my foot down. I got a 'tude about my desk, or "work environment." It won me no friends, but it kept me sane.

Once I began learning the broadcast news business, I took those skills to a new level. I had to: my first news director was a neatnik -- a nice guy, but a compulsive neatnik. Everything, and I mean everything, had to be in its place. At all times, unless you were using it, and then you had to put it right back.

When I got a job at a bigger station, I faced another challenge -- time. I had to remember to do certain things at certain times without having anyone to remind me -- having, in fact, lots of people to distract me. I missed several "feeds" before I learned the system I'd all but forgotten -- forward organization, but time-based.

I went through several jobs at different stations, and I ran into all sorts of organizational messes -- people just getting by on what little they could in some personal way that suited them for then, but, if something hit the fan, they would be lost. I always got the rep of getting things organized, because, over the years, I'd become obsessed with newsroom organization and I'd go around to organized people, just picking up tricks on getting things done. My last real day in the business was spent taking the entire file of news copy for the year (a huge pile) and getting them in perfect chronological order!

At home, I've always been the opposite. Stuff was where I laid it last. Or had kicked it. Total slob -- and I mean total. I don't mean I've been a "typical guy" about it -- I mean I've been a complete fracking pig!

Now that I'm home-based, I've never taken the time or made the effort to take the essential and basic and really easy-to-understand leap that I am going to have to get my organizational fetish-freak on, serious big time, at home! (I don't do slang well. Sorry.)

And I have got a pile of crap to dig out from under. A pile! What am I going to do?

Funny thing, all my files on my computer are very well laid out -- and my e-mails related to what work I've managed to get are all where I need them. But phone and snail mail and clothes and blankets (from the winter) and books and cards and freebie-gadgets and glasses and vids and CD's and back-up discs and old bills and receipts and -- oh, my .... What am I going to do? I've never had to actually get my actual life together before. NO NO NO NO NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

BTW: I looked at my little cache of vinyl LP's I keep as mementos last night. What I had was more than I thought. One just sat there laughing at my disorganizational stupor: Songs from Liquid Days by Philip Glass. Huh. Another one, some Monteverdi music conducted by Nadia Boulanger, a French music teacher who set up a school just for (I think) Americans in Paris. Glass, Quincy Jones, and even Aaron Copeland were among her students. Now, If I'd just kept that Don Cherry thing he'd done for JCOA and that blank-cover copy of Albert Ayler's Last Album ("Again comes the rising of the sun ... .") Those early Keith Jarrett's would have been nice, too. *Sigh*


LJ orig.: 05/11/07