can i function without clutter?

I’ve been a really half-assed blogger recently. I apologize and blame the heat. We’re having a helluva summer here in Dallas. Yesterday hit 107 and more of the same is expected today. I try to leave the house as little as possible and my brain is sluggish.

I bought Jack a wading pool yesterday but haven’t got him in it yet. He mostly just drinks from it.

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My latest endeavor in my quest to tame my monkey mind is clearing visual clutter from my office.

Some of you old timers may remember my blog posts about organizing for your learning style. (You can read them here and here.)

In one post, I wrote:

I also realized that I have my office set up all wrong. I have always had lots pictures and tsotskes around my desk. My idea was that lots of stuff around me would be creatively stimulating. Wrong. After this panel I realized that one reason I've been working on the living room couch so much is because the room is less cluttered. All the visual stimulation in my office feels oppressive. It turns out that just as Tom can't tune out bad music, I can't tune out visual stimulation. I am aware of it all the time and it jangles my nerves. So as soon as I get caught up on everything I need to catch up on, I am going to take down most of the photos on the wall by my desk. I removed a lot of the tstotskes last week and can breathe easier already. Who knew?

I wrote that on July 18, 2007 and I finally got around to a full-scale desk flotsam purge this weekend. It looks great but I feel a little anxious about it because I even took down the bulletin board that hung over my computer. I’ve never worked at a desk without a bulletin board.

It’s not that I used the bulletin board for reminders and important information. It was mostly a repository for photos, cartoons, postcards, ticket stubs and other junk. I rarely changed the display out, but would put stuff up there and watch it yellow and curl. I had the last Calvin and Hobbs cartoon posted since the day it ran in 1995. (Yikes. I didn’t realize it was that long until I just looked it up.)

When I told a friend who used to work at my desk while dog-sitting for us, she said she liked looking at my bulletin board, that it was full of interesting stuff. I do like the idea of other people looking at all my flotsam and thinking about what an interesting person I am. But maybe that’s an exhibitionist side of me I don’t need to indulge anymore. I yam who I yam. What have I got to prove?

Instead of flotsam, I have filled up one shelf of my desk hutch with books about writing. Surely those will be more inspiring than the little plastic figurine of a girl on a telephone. Or even the little wooden acorn.

We’ll see. I feel a little anxious about all this. I still have the bulletin board leaning up against my bookcase in case I crater and must return to my flotsam ways.