Let's Get Organized
Organization is definitely something I’ve got to work on if I have any chance of surviving in high school.
When "getting organized" means roughly the same thing as "hide everything" or "mass throwing away" there’s a minor problem. The only reason that makes it problem is that it’s so time consuming and more or less boring. I always feel like I could be doing something more productive, like watching TV.
My parents obviously recognize this fault too easily. (Like father like son I always say.) One of them (they take turns and keep track on a calender) will come tearing into my room and start ripping everything apart like it’s not already in order, or some crazy reason like that. Then I’ll have to spend hours cleaning up my room while wonderful reruns whisk away across the TV screen.
The dreaded parent in this drill is my father. He’ll bite his tongue and start this insane humming, opening every drawer and pulling its contents on the floor while I watch in horror. This action is repeated until my room looks like the Smurf’s village after an earthquake and no one can take a step inside. Then he utters the "O" word (Organize) and I set out in the never-ending quest of putting my room into order.
My mom uses a completely different approach. She just starts out saying, "You can’t go anywhere until you clean and organize your room," and progresses until I’m not allowed to eat unless my room is shiny and clean. But that’s not so bad because there’s never any food to eat around here anyway.
When my room finally is in order, I can never find anything because it’s where it should be. So for weeks I wander aimlessly around my clean room looking for objects like my bed and bookcase until I find their new location.
My brother has no problem whatsoever with organizing. His room is always neat and tidy, with the occasional shirt on the floor. That room stays clean for months until it turns into a pigsty when two shirts are laying on the floor. By that time my room has been quarantined for weeks as a national landfill.
Unfortunately, school is the exact same situation. On every first day of school when I neatly load my books into the locker, I make this promise to myself: Okay. My locker will stay neat and in order all year, and I’ll will try to keep it clean at all costs. Yeah, right.My locker never stays clean for more than a couple hours, max. Notebooks are thrown in, books are stacked in different areas, and my coat and bag are squished in between.
One time I had to bring the janitor’s dumpster to one of my Buker lockers because of the nice smell and strange things it concealed like moldy oranges and ancient permission slips. Don’t expect anything different this year because when I started school again on Sept. 2, it was already messy for me.
