On Slobbiness

This weekend is like the weekend after Final Exams are done. I have no groceries, all my clothes are dirty, and my living room is strewn end to end with things that are just lying when they fell when they stopped holding my interest.

Also, I've been staying up way past tiredness doing things like read all the comics on XKCD.com, hitting "Refresh" on my Gmail and Facebook homepages, and watching three episodes in a row of The Dog Whisperer.

But I do realize that it was ever thus. I got a message recently on LinkedIn from a work colleague that I haven't seen or talked to since I left that job, which was in January 1999. She asked how I was and I mentioned that my boxes are still not unpacked, and she wrote back, "If I remember right, you didn't like unpacking boxes at the best of times." She knew me just after a move from Newcastle to the Central Coast, and thinking back I remembered - the office was the main problem. I have a photo of me sitting at the computer amidst such chaos that it looked structurally unsound, I think there was a mattress kind of wedged in and half-suspended on all the boxes and desks and computer boxes and whatever that was in there. And yes, thinking back, it did stay that way for a really long time. My recollection of the house was when it was cleaned up, but we were there for three years and it was clean perhaps only in the last one. So I was probably complaining about that way back then, and for the whole time she knew me.

In that house also, our fridge was too big to fit up the stairs so we kept it downstairs just inside the garage. In the morning you'd have to open the garage door with the automatic opener we kept upstairs, go out the front door, down the stairs, underneath the patio across the mud and grass, in the garage, open the fridge, take out the thing, then across the mud and grass again back, up the stairs, in the door, and etc., and to take the thing back to the fridge you'd have to do the whole circuit again. It reminds me of the film Little Miss Sunshine, which I've seen the second half of a few times recently on HBO. The Greg Kinnear dad character is following a business plan which includes the rule "Winners never quit." And they don't - they careen across the country in this van they have to push-start, and survive adventures which would cause any normal person to turn back. Any normal person wouldn't have tried to do the trip in the first place, which is kind of the point of the movie. You get used to things, you work around them.

I gaze to my right and see a scene that I might photograph and post somewhere and call it "Still Life With Belongings, Feb-June 2008". There is a stack of boxes that are just where they fell on a day in early February, more or less untouched since then (except for the heroic efforts my sister made when she was visiting on the books and kitchen stuff). I can sit here at the computer for hours and hours, and weeks and months, and not notice them, but they do bug me. Once they get sorted out my memory of this place will be of it all settled, as it is of the Killcare house. But in reality, I have to admit that for the bulk of the time I'll be living here, most of the time it will really be like this.