I decided today that it was time to tackle the filing that I have let pile up for… ahem. A while. (I have no idea how long, but if I ever make it to the bottom of the pile, I will probably be embarrassed by the answer.)
It was a strategic decision: when everything needs to be done and cleaning is feeling overwhelming, start with one corner, then move on.
I got maybe halfway through. Maybe. Could be closer to 1/3 through. Then I decided that I needed to go do something else for a while, because it was causing sensations of impending doom. Do you have ever that feeling that life is completely out of your control and that your feeble attempt to keep track of stuff is throwing rocks at the incoming tide? Yeah, not my favorite feeling. And the reality is, who cares if the filing is done? I could take that entire pile of stuff and pitch it in the trash right now, today, and nobody would ever notice or care. Except maybe me when it came time to do my taxes and I didn’t have any receipts.
I just wrote a long ramble about things that pile up and then deleted it because it was possibly the most boring thing I have ever written. That’s a tough bar to reach, frankly, because I have written some boring stuff in my day. I used to write press releases and while one tries, of course, to make every word scintillating, a press release is only interesting if you have some intrinsic reason to care about the topic. For most people, they’re barely skimmable. My thoughts on dog hair (as a substance that really piles up amazingly) were about the same. But writing a blog post is my current justification for not returning to that pile of filing.
In my other writing, I seem to have gone colon and semi-colon crazy lately. I’m blaming Uprooted — I noticed on my third reading that Naomi Novik was quite profligate with her punctuation and it did not in any way impair my reading enjoyment, so I guess maybe it rubbed off. My run-on sentences are all my own fault, though.
*sigh. This is the kind of post that involves much staring into space and the eventual realization that I’m just procrastinating. There are so many useful things that I need to be doing — laundry and dog walking and yes, filing — that I might as well get on with them. But I think I need to reward myself. No food rewards and nothing healthy pretending to be a reward … Ah, I know. But I need help!
What movie/television show, preferably on Netflix or Amazon Prime, should I watch as deserved entertainment when I finish the filing?
I recommend Elementary. I love that show.
Punctuation is one fun thing about paradelles. In those jumbled lines I can throw them anywhere.
Only a writer would think of that as fun…
I think I watched the first season of Elementary but I haven’t seen it since. I will check out the later seasons. Thanks for the recommendation! And yes, punctuation can be fun, but I usually fight my instincts and try to keep it simple. Not lately, though!
Elementary was good last night — Watson is so sharp! And naturally, the show left us with a cliff-hanger for NEXT week. I do have trouble understanding Sherlock — he talks too fast and at the same monotone level that it’s hard to distinguish his words. But I’m addicted — what can i say?
Oh my gosh, you sound like me — as I sit here staring at a stack of monthly file folders from last year. At least my dining room table has been cleared of Christmas decorations so I can sort/stack on it. Then I have to take said stacks and file them in my filing cabinet, pulling tax papers out as I sort. I’m tempted to call our tax person right now and ask for a filing extension. I truly don’t want to face it right now. I don’t want to face the filing cabinet that’s already packed to the hilt with papers/records from I don’t know how many years previous. But you know what I mean, don’t you??? LOL
Oh, I sure do! LOL. Yeah, I haven’t even tackled the cleaning out of the old files. I did a good job on that last year so I can skip a year, right? As for Elementary, have you tried watching with closed captioning on? I do that with a lot of shows, because I seem to be better able to pay attention when text is involved.