I think I’ve just been interventioned (intervened?).
I’d gotten to my office with intentions of doing a few small tasks and writing up my blog and, within seconds of checking my email, found myself in a drowning-no-land-in-sight-can’t-breathe sort of a panic. You know that feeling, don’t you? You have three or four little things you need to deal with, but in the process of dealing you suddenly find yourself facing additional chores that seem to spring up like skeleton warriors from hydra’s teeth or weeds in a newly tilled garden (take your pick of the metaphors—it’s feeling a bit more like the skeleton warriors to me just now).
In my desperation, I phoned my friend Ellen, whose office is just around the corner from mine. “Sarah-Hope,” she said, “we have got to make your office a place you like to be.” Moments later, she showed up at my door with posters, postcards, even a bobble-head, and started pointing at things. “What’s that? Is that recycling?” “What’s in those boxes?” “Is that box empty?” “If this says March 8, why do you still have it?”
I confess, my office has been a bit disorganized. At one point several years ago after shallow, but repeated flooding, I finally got the university to take action by contacting the occupational safety folks. For the most part, the results were great—new floor, repainted walls, and the added benefit of no more standing water under my desk. But one unfortunate side effect was that everything in my office got tossed into boxes willy-nilly that I have never have never been unpacked. (If any of my students are reading this, note how the use of passive voice allows me to avoid responsibility for a mess of my own making: it’s not that I haven’t unpacked; it’s just that the unpacking hasn’t happened. Pay attention and you’ll find politicians and CEOs using this trick all the time.) Then I got this new job, which brought with it an entire file cabinet and half a dozen boxes of densely packed files.
When Ellen showed up and started asking questions and unrolling posters, my first impulse was to curl up in a fetal position and sob, “No, no, no, no, no, not one more thing.” But she didn’t give me a chance to. And only a half-hour or so later, things looked much improved.
I still have a stack of boxes, but I’m down from twelve to eight. All the recycling has been taken out. Sitting at my desk, I now look across the room at a poster of Randy Winn. To my right, I see Noah Lowry in mid-hurl. On my left a Benito Santiago bobble-head crouches near a postcard of Oscar Wilde. The whole arrangement may lack thematic unity, but it’s quite comforting.
Definitely not candidates for a “separated at birth” spread.
So the skeletons warriors (aka: work-related tasks) are still taking swings at me, but I’m feeling much calmer now.
In knitting news…
I’ve knit up Coco out of the Fleece Artist Marina I got at Stitches West.
The marina is the one in the middle.
This is a fast knit—and a clever pattern. My one disappointment was that the yarn, which is two-ply, had six or eight spots with split plies, so I’m worried about the longevity of the finished piece. I’ve never heard anything but good about Fleece Artist yarns, so I’m wondering if I got an atypical skein. Has anyone else used this yarn? Did you have similar problems?