Not long ago, I decided to do something about my desk… or, rather, the walls around my desk.
When we moved into this apartment in 2001, the walls in the larger bedroom were somewhat trashed. The previous owners had raised two sons in there and they had–among other things–driven a blue ballpoint pen into the drywall, dozens and dozens of times, leaving a couple honeycombs of blue punctures. There were lots of holes from hung objects, too, and a few chunks of adhesive that would, if removed, surely rip out even more.
Easily fixed stuff, but painting that particular room wasn’t a priority, so I just continued the trend, putting up my bulletin board in the corner where my desk lives and proceeding to stickpin or sticky note whatever I wanted to see on or around it. And then, when one photo or note got old and I had something more current, I’d put up a new one overtop.
Over time, the sedimentary layers built up. And I have this picture that my great-grandmother Phil did, that I’ve been wanting to put up… my grandma Joan gave it to me on one of our visits to Onoway, and I had it framed and have been sitting on it for ages. (We’ve been wanting to redo our pictures for awhile now, and just haven’t managed to do it, so tackling this constituted a symbolic Start of sorts.)
So I did a good winnow, tossed the bottom few layers of images, sorted the rest, hung Phil’s picture and created some free space for new stuff. It’s still essentially a jumble of images with a computer at its heart, but it was an enjoyable way to spend an afternoon, and I’m pleased with the result.
As I write this, it occurs that this is the second lunge I’ve had at the office lately; I also recently rearranged the closets. I have fantasies about disassembling the shelves and desks that dominate this room one day, taking every single thing out and making a huge pile o’ stuff in the living room while we patch (and patch, and patch some more) and paint the walls, and then, possibly, doing a radical rearrange of the space… but this will do nicely for now.
