it only took a year but i finally have a desk.
i live at home like all bad-ass twenty-four year olds should and upstairs, mom has two desks in the room i have recently dubbed the "common area." One was actually a functional space; it was where she had her computer hooked up. but the other...well...if our common area were to be compared to the afterlife as the Catholics define it, the other desk would be that place between life and death. that desk would be limbo.
its where mom puts everything she doesn't use in her daily existence but cant bear to throw away. but maybe "puts" is too mild a verb. it doesnt give the right visual. shoves is preferable. or throws...
piles. casts aside. thrusts. pitches. chucks. heaps. stacks. drives. forces. mounds. rams. flings. stockpiles. discards...
basically, its a desk full of junk. junk that is not used but can't (for whatever reason) be abandoned. junk that has been accumulating for over 10 years. random pictures from every point of my life in no apparent order, empty printer cartridges, sharpie markers, unsent greeting cards, unlabled CDs, mechanical pencils, 3 pairs of scissors, a graphing calculator without batteries, return address labels for a house nobody lives in anymore, my mom's resume from 15 years past, 7 half empty boxes of staples, scotch tape refills, an 8x10 piece of autographed Chinese calligraphy, elementary school yearbooks, a tera cotta pot painted in valentine's day colors (probably a second grade art project made by my sister...she was the creative one back then), dried-up glue sticks, USB cords for God only knows what electronic devices, push-pins, and thirteen dollars and seventy-four cents in change.
it's a wooden vessel set aside and ordained for the most sacred purpose of housing mom's plethora of useless stuff. its almost like the ark of the covenant except mom's desk isnt made from gold plated shittim wood. it's oak.
i have a laptop. a beautiful, wonderful, fantastic macbook pro that i love with my whole life and spent all my savings to get. for the amount spent on it, i probably should have gotten a desktop but i'm still a relatively mobile human being and i like to look like the mysterious writer in the corner of local coffee shops. this is significant to my story because it is the reason i dont have a desk of my own. i was in college and after that i spent time alternately working dead-end jobs and traveling. a desk wasnt necessary...a laptop was. this begs the question then, if i had a laptop but no desk and my mom had two desks but was using them both, where did i work?
usually i chose the floor.
it was hard on the back, but it was really my only option. the people at It's A Grind begin to look at you funny when you transport your entire home office to their establishment in a messenger bag and set up shop attached to their free wi-fi for half the day in exchange for a three dollar and fifty cent latte. at some point you begin to feel like you're taking advantage.
last year, when i started doing more work from home, i begged mom to let me use one of the desks. It seemed fair enough to me. Really, she only needed the one...the second one was just an indoor suburban landfill. all she had to do was let me throw everything in the second desk away. i'd move her computer over there and hook it up (the dump desk was actually the better of the two) and i'd take the other one. it seemed like a great plan. she didnt have to do any work and id move from the floor to a chair. the potential upward mobility made me practically giddy.
one problem: my mother's nonsensical attachment to the crap in those drawers.
i have a personal policy. if i dont use something for two years, i get rid of it. i donate it, give it away, or trash it. thats just how it is. exceptions made for the limited sentimental nick-nacks scattered about my room, completed journals (you dont use them anymore but throwing them away defeats the purpose of writing one in the first place), and the books in my library. but everything else gets the ax. i always have a bag in my closet and every now and then i throw something in to be given to goodwill...as soon as its full i drop it off. its how i keep myself from being a clutter collector. my grandmother was a clutter collector and she passed this genetic trait onto both of her daughters. when my family had to move my grandma out of the house shed spent the last half of her life in and into the assisted living facility, we were left wading through a waist-high 40 year old collection of clutter. in the massive great big heap of junk that comprised my mother's childhood, i found a wig my mother wore in high school from the time when wig wearing was the style. it was still in the blue and white box labeled "dutch boy." i was so fascinated by this i took it home and hung the box on my wall with the wig still inside.
this is when i decided to never be like my grandmother and so the goodwill bag is always in my closet. but my mother is her mother's child and even though she hadn't seen the contents of those drawers for years and years, she insisted that i could not throw their contents away and that she needed to go through the drawers before i could move her computer and take over the lesser desk.
"how long will it be before you go through them?" i would ask
"soon" was always the reply
"how long is 'soon?'" i would counter
"soon sydney leigh. im busy and will get to it when i have time."
"soon" never actually means anytime in the near future in my family, so i wasnt surprised when a few weeks passed and i was still working on the floor. but when a year goes by, "soon" is no longer acting with elasticity...its not even being interpreted loosely..."soon" is being redefined altogether.
mom is a teacher with the school district. her school went year round this past year and she just went on track break. "soon" was going to mean soon once again. i bugged her about the desk again after a few months of reprieve telling her that my friend, hope, offered to fly down to vegas and set the desk all up for me as a christmas present. hope is a secretary and could have my home office scenario remedied in half a day if left to the task. i think my mom knew this and recognized the threat this posed to her promise. but my threat was only half true. hope actually said she would fly down if she had the money, but she didnt and she couldnt so my threat didnt really hold water.
but wouldnt ya know...it worked anyway.
