My ducks are never in a row

Are you organized? If so, I admire you. I love what organization does for a person's life. I think you can cram a lot more into a life that's organized, don't you?

I have been unorganized for my entire life. I am not dirty, mind you. In fact, I am exceptionally clean, personally. For years, I have attributed my harem-scarem habits to the fact that I can't see. Without my glasses, I am like a mole, just kind of feeling my way through life. For that reason, I can live among some messiness with no problem at all. Piles of papers, stacks of books, they're all just mile markers in my life. Without my glasses, I can't see specks of dirt on the floors in my house. Goodness, when I put my glasses on I am amazed at all the stuff that gets tracked in! So I take my glasses off.

I am unorganized in my work habits, too. That's not quite so easily fixed. When I am working on several stories at once, I have to be very careful not to confuse any of them. Seriously, I have to take notes and cross-reference comments in order to avoid misquoting people or facts. These types of things I cannot chalk up to my blindness. My brain is just all over the place, all the time. This is particularly challenging when working on a lengthy manuscript. You have to call characters by the same name throughout the book. You have to be sure their ages match up, the relationships stay on course. It's exhausting, really.

My husband, wouldn't you know it, is hyper-organized. Years ago, in my former life as a Marketing Director, he actually took it upon himself to organize my briefcase. I was lost for weeks, couldn't put my hands on anything. I scrambled everything back up and went on from there, business as usual. If I have messy stacks of paper on my desk – and I almost always do – I can put my hands on anything in any stack, as long as no one else has touched the stacks. That was fine, until I got married and had children. Nothing in this house goes untouched. I am always finding things in the house that I neither purchased nor found on my own. I don't recognize half the stuff in my house any longer. As I get older, I have fleeting moments of panic, wondering for a second if I wandered into the wrong house by accident, absent-mindedness or by blindness.

My office isn't even off limits to the comings and goings of family and friends. I will sit at my desk, glance up, and there will be a little piece of something, a little gadget or a CD or a power cord that I've never seen before. No one has any knowledge of where it came from, and I certainly don't. These unsolved mysteries inevitably lead to annoyance or irritation, which gets my mind off track, and there goes the muse, right out the window.

My husband got me a Daytimer. Looking at it gives me a headache, all those little slots and lines and boxes. I prefer to scribble on a blank sheet of paper.

So no, my ducks are never in a row. They run this way and that, randomly quacking and pecking and doing whatever ducks do in no particular order and for no particular reason. I like to think that that's where my creativity springs from, my loosey-goosey mind. Sounds good, anyway.