Awesome Joolie

I finished deep cleaning my home office this afternoon. Before the pandemic, I would frequently go in there before I had to leave for work in the morning to grab something I needed or spend a few minutes on a project, and I would linger in the doorway on the way out for a moment. The room has a north and an east window and looks great in the morning: sunny brightness from the east cut by the soft, diffuse light from the north window, barely green from being filtered through the leaves of the pecan tree outside. It's very inviting and conducive to creative work when it's like that. I would look at this light and sigh and think it would be so great it I could spend the whole day in there all the time instead of getting in my stupid car and driving on the stupid highway to my stupid office building; god, could I be retired already so I could do that? And then I would clomp down the stairs to the garage, chiding myself to not be one of those miserable people who wishes for her life to speed up and be done with so as to be through with the less appealing parts of it. But somewhere, a cursed monkey's paw must have curled a withered finger and waited patiently for circumstance to catch up, because soon enough I was working from home every day in that room, often well into the night and on weekends too, driven to agitation by endless Slack notifications and goggle-eyed from glaring at a computer monitor while my unfinished personal art projects taunted me from the adjacent table. Womp womp, bitch. 

So the deep clean was cathartic if also a little traumatic. I wiped up all the grime, threw out a ton of papers and crap, and found a place for everything else, even if that place happens to be a teetering stack of stuff in the back corner of the closet. It looks great in there now, and I can't wait to start cluttering it up again; for the time being, the ratio will skew more toward the personal projects than the professional. Eventually we'll go back to the office at least some of the time, and I can start messing up that space again as well.

Really, I would like a black hole of some sort where I can stash the things I don't need right away or don't feel like dealing with quite yet without actually having to allot any physical space to them. Don't tell the monkey's paw I said that, though. I'm pretty sure it'd get things all twisted up again and I'd end up living at the edge of a quasar, cursing my luck. And even there, somehow, I'd still have to respond to those fucking Slack notifications.