Not All Who Wander Are Lost

So I'm spending the night at my mother's house with Willow while spouse and baby spend the night on Martha's Vineyard (see previous entry).

We're in my mother's bedroom, trying to wind the little one down towards tiredness after a long giraffe-less day at the Franklin Park Zoo, and there, on the floor next to the bed, are two copies of It's Hard to Make a Difference When You Can't Find Your Keys: The Seven-Step Path to Becoming Truly Organized .

Two copies.

For exactly the reason you'd expect.

See, she bought this organizing-principle book a while back, thinking she could really use a book like that. But the moment she got it home she put it down somewhere in the disastrous mess that is her entire house, and promptly forgot she ever bought it.

So she bought a second copy, thinking she could really use a book like that...

I kid because I love, of course. But humor is also in the familiar. And, to be fair, I've inherited her tendency towards total entropic chaos.

My students make fun of me for losing their papers on my classroom desktop.

We actually own a car that should never, ever be locked, because we lost the keys a couple of years back and have never bothered paying someone to core the locks and make a new set.

Like my mother, I used to have an entire room in my home that was totally unusable due to a floor-to-ceiling disaster of papers, books, and other randomalia. We cleaned the room when we needed it for our first child, and, with my goodwife's evergentle assistance, have managed to stave off that particular level of disaster since then.

But it's good to know that, if I ever decide to go the seven-step route towards organizing my life, there's a spare copy of this totally useful book somewhere in my mother's house.

If only she can find it.

In related news: I have a dim recollection that Mom lent me a book on ADD self-management a few years back, but I read a few pages, got distracted, and never finished it. Now I can't find it. Maybe it's in the basement under all those boxes and laundry.

Comments:

Great story BH...And a great blog...
I love that header more every time I see it...

Hey from China...

L

# posted by

Lonnie : 12:18 PM, February 24, 2006

Hilarious that your mom bought the book & forgot she'd bought the book. I do that a lot with food & then I also do the opposite, forget cuz I think I already bought some.
I bet the zoo was fun! Thank you for visiting my blog. It's interesting how the most normal of people go thru struggles we otherwise would have never imagined.
I'm sure you must know you've given me hope. Thank you.

# posted by

jane : 4:53 PM, February 24, 2006

I found out abot good book for people with ADD to get organized. So I looked it up at the library only to se that 3 of the 5 books have been considered "lost" by te system One of the books is for in library use only. Never let an ADD self help book leave the library if you eer wnat to see it again!

# posted by

Anonymous : 11:09 AM, March 04, 2006