I'm pretty inefficient.
And I’m cool with it.
Thank goodness.
At university I made attempts to
rectify what seemed at the time like an issue. Like any self-improvement attempt, this involved many trips to
Officeworks. All I found
was that I like to buy folders but not to use them, and that printing in the
evening makes me feel like a grown-up.
My first job out of uni was as an
administrative assistant for a fancy-ish kind of office where on casual days
the women wore polo-shirts and the men wore boat-shoes, as though the whole
office was going sailing after work (which to the best of my knowledge they
didn’t - unless they just didn’t invite me). I completed my administrative tasks
with no small amount of ‘hoo-ha’, and for the six months of my employment
genuinely wondered why, as a functioning adult, I couldn’t manage to put
the stickers onto folders in a way that was satisfactory.
It wasn’t until I left the job that I
realised it why.
Because I don’t care.
Thank goodness.
Sure, sometimes being efficient would be
nice. I’d probably put cds back into their covers and hang towels up
straight away. I’d have matching sets of bras and underwear, and an air of
superiority that comes with the knowledge that you’re matching under your
clothes. But alas, I remain mismatched.
I’d like instead to assume that that area of my
brain that others dedicate to folder-stickering and underwear-matching is taken
up with lovelier things. Like creativity. Or kindness. Or the ability to
make pancakes without a recipe.
Truth be known I am suspicious it is
filled with Hanson lyrics.
So I have a plan.
Thank goodness.
Lists are my
game. Lists, lists, lists. My
lovely lists are written in a lovely black book filled with lovely paper, which makes
writing them quite a lovely experience. Each list includes the ever-encouraging item ‘make list’ at the
top, to promote fuzzy feelings of achievement and faux-efficiency - and I am happily
fooled.
The friend of my black book is my red
diary, which is pocket-sized and satisfyingly weighted and tells me when to do the things that my
list remembers for me. And no I don’t use my iPhone for this.
Because I don’t like over-using my phone in
public.
And because it is
held together by sticky tape.
And thank goodness.
So all this listing and diarising basically
means I never have to remember anything ever again. Which is lovely and freeing
and gives me time to think about other, more interesting things. Like lyrics to Hanson songs,
presumably.
I must say though, it is all becoming increasingly problematic. Because in
effect, I have trained myself not to remember anything ever. And this is
particularly worrysome because I don’t just restrict the losing of things to my
brain. No, no - I like to lose things in real life too; Sunglasses, jewelry,
shoes, cardigans, cds... I’ll lose them all!
When I was in high-school I lost my school
diary several times a term. And because it had important things in it like ‘Go to Double
Helix Club’ and ‘make food pyramid’, you can see how this was all kinds of
upsetting. It would usually turn up unannounced and uninvited in my dad’s pigeon-hole (who was an
English teacher at my school) for him to return to me. This would have no doubt appeared
convenient to my teachers (who presumably couldn’t be bothered tracking me down
at lunchtime at in the science rooms during Double Helix Club) but happened so
frequently that eventually my dad started refusing to return it to me. (How this
complied with Sacred Heart College’s 'Personal Respect and Dignity Policy' I’ll never know).
So what happens if I lose my red and black
support team?
Recently I asked my anonymous and
wonderfully idealistic friend Anna what she thought the answer to all of this
was; searching for the kind of poetic symmetry that would feed my own idealism
and ease my growing inefficiency.
She suggested ‘iCloud’.
I was unsatisfied.
Thank goodness.
Two donkeys I saw on Gertrude Street last Friday while I was walking home from work.
