My Internet service provider comes with a guard against unwanted e-mail. It does a very good job of filtering out spam, though it may occasionally dump an e-mail that I wanted to receive. I scroll through the headers on the “Junk” file before I empty it to make sure I’m not missing any goodies, mildly curious about my spam. It runs the gamut from “dating” opportunities, overseas financial opportunities, to (ahem) help to achieve a more vigorous dating experience. I chuckle at them all, then empty them into the ether.
I saw a recent “Crackbook” post — I know: I need help — about a “junk drawer.” The poster passed on someone’s comment: “Is having a junk drawer in your kitchen just a Midwest thing? Because when I say ‘look in the junk drawer’ to someone who is not from the Midwest, they look at me like I’m crazy.” I have a long-time friend for whom I will house-sit when she travels. (Actually, I dog-sit. The house is a secondary concern to the little white Maltese.) She has one of the most immaculate houses in the history of Obsessive Compulsion Disorder, and I feel like a Charles Shultz’ drawing of Pig Pen whenever I am alone in it: I imagine that I am surrounded by a cloud of debris as I walk, and I can see my friend Swiffering behind me.
I pulled out the junk drawer at my friend’s house and found what I remembered from many other visits: rows of neatly organized dooddads, gadgets, and tools. She has a set of screw drivers in there, aligned in size order (left to right) from large to small. There are spare batteries, a tape measure and other, neatly organized items. In my daughter’s junk drawer, you have to have seen the item that you’re looking for to find it again, for it is mostly an impenetrable tangle of — junk.
As for me, my whole apartment serves as my junk drawer. I suffer from a condition called “piles.” No, not the condition more medically known as hemorrhoids, but a tendency to leave stacks of junk piled upon the tables, chairs, bookcases and about the floors. When I receive a piece of mail that does not fit a certain stashing demographic — bill, summary of benefits, trash-the-pre-approved-credit-card-solicitation — I place it into a pile of slightly similar things, for later, more in-depth consideration. Later never comes, and the pile grows, falls over like a slinky, and thence, creates a new one. They are self-propagating, my piles.
Often, when working on my laptop, I am sitting up in my bed; on my right, there is a storage-unit-slash-nightstand, which has a 16” high stack of 22 books, interspersed with cards and miscellaneous papers and topped by a small pad of 1½ x 2” sticky notes. I’ve managed to avoid knocking that pile over for about three years. Directly in front of me, on a desk-slash-TV-stand is a small stack of 10 notebooks and sketchbooks, a plastic bag of electronic device wires, a carpet of papers and some plastic containers with thumb drives, coins and New York City subway tokens.
The Crackbook post continued on to say, “Homie if you want a screw driver, scissors, zip tie or a birthday candle, look in the dang junk drawer.” This is good advice that applies to my whole apartment, and I feel sorry for my children, who will not be able to “empty junk folder,” and will one day have to decide if my apartment contains precious and special historical documents and mementos, or if it is just one big junk drawer.
Guys: It’s my precious and special, big junk drawer.