Like any good American, I have too much clutter. My mother often said, “A place for everything and everything in its place,” but I have not mastered that skill.
My office has piles of stuff that need to be weeded methodically. Not long ago, I had a stack of paid medical bills for which I could get reimbursed if only I did the tedious task of filling out the paperwork. Now, it’s a haze of chaos that needs to be reordered.
The second-floor landing at our house has become a repository for everything that eventually needs to go somewhere else, to the office (but where?), our bedroom (ditto), or the attic. Meanwhile, the cats jump onto the pile and knock over loose items that end up on the floor.
Our sofa is a sectional, so naturally, more items that one could think would be humanly possible reside there.
When I’m on the laptop, I have so many tabs open that I don’t always remember what I’m working on when I’m interrupted by a phone call or something more pressing.
e-pollution
But the greatest clutter might be my email. A lot of it is things I purportedly will take some action on, though they become so numerous that I occasionally fail to do so promptly.
In the middle of the month, I spent over an hour deleting items I didn’t want anymore. Some are receipts I wanted until I received the item. I might use some news feed articles for the blog, but I decided against them. Vendors who I used one time keep trying to sell me stuff.
But by far, the bulk are solicitations from political campaigns seeking my contributions. I did not ask for the vast majority of them; my information was passed on from someone else’s political action committee. Even though I unsubscribe regularly, the spambots are more efficient than I am.
You’d think that being retired would make this easier to deal with. You would be wrong.