After two months of unemployment and slowly drained savings, I checked an online jobs listing morning, noon and night. I’d checked more often than that some days until I found a halfway decent job to apply to every day for a week. Part-time, full-time, telecommute, entry level, writing, editing, teaching, tutoring.
Welcome to the gig economy.
The next week, I had four interviews. I was nearly dizzy, keeping up with who wanted what. And still I applied to more jobs just in case. After getting two part-time jobs, both telecommuting, I threw myself into two intense trainings. One I had to drive 40 minutes out of my way and cram procedures into my brain, the other I had to watch online videos and refresh my basics on English, reading, math and science.
Then I had to do some real heavy lifting—as in rearranging my bedroom furniture. None of that feng shui shit. My desk had to be closer to the Internet outlet, which meant moving my bed. The surprising amount of dust I vacuumed from under the bed was actually less than the dust I wiped down from the surface of the desk. That was the easy part. Organizing the desk was the real battle.
One thing I discovered was, for the rest of my life, I never needed to buy another box of staples. I uncovered so many boxes of staples, I embraced the idea of creating art with them. I will certainly never need that many to actually staple anything. I cannot even remember the last time I’ve stapled anything.
Setting up that desk to function as a desk rather than a convenient flat surface to pile shit on top of and breed dust bunnies, created a clean spot, or should I say, an uncluttered zone. Suddenly, I wanted to be free of all the clutter, starting with the dead spots in my bedroom. And I was serious. After moving and vacuuming under my bed, it remained clutter free to facilitate weekly vacuuming and prevent the growing of dust bunnies.
I employed large trash bags to recycle stuff I thought I needed to save at the time, but over time, had grown obsolete. Then, I used my second favorite piece of office equipment besides my laptop, the paper shredder. It’s not enough to close long past chapters of my life, but to turn them into paper pasta and toss into a recycling bag enhances the sense of closure. Even the sound of shredding my past brought a smile to my face. Let the heavens ring with disrupting sounds of cleansing!
The top of my dresser was next. What had taken years to clutter up, took mere minutes to repurpose into a clean surface where I neatly stacked the reading material that I’ll eventually work into my active stack of reading material on my nightstand.
Next, my attention turned to two file boxes, one plastic and the other fireproof. Before I could even open the plastic one, I had to first go through the foot-high stack of loose papers on top of it. Things that I’d convinced myself I’d one day file, found their eventual demise in my shredder. Life had passed them by while they languished, waiting to be filed. Another week would past until I mustered up the energy on a Sunday afternoon to go through both file boxes.
I set my laptop on my bed, continued playing the Netflix movie I’d began, pulled up a chair and cleaned up my files. The ol’ school way. Starting with the fireproof box, I shredded things that no longer pertained to my life. The running theme was most of those papers no longer reflected my life and didn’t have to be kept.
Tackling the contents of the plastic file box, I found yet another box of staples! And a real treasure, a red Sharpie. And it still worked, unlike the bottle of white out. Two tall kitchen bags of recycling later, my files were purged. I’m not sure if the energy now flows better in m bedroom, but my mind’s no longer preoccupied with the existence of that clutter.