Robert Manners

My Messy Little Life

My room is such a mess right now that I can't find a foothold between my door and my bed, nowhere I can stand safely without stepping on some piece of clothing...which might or might not conceal a CD jewel case, a sharp instrument of some kind, a stray piece of jewelry, an open book, or money. I have plenty of clothes to wear, but I have to smell them to know if they are clean...after my last laundry run, I didn't fold all my clothes, and then didn't put any of them away, so the clean are scattered all over along with the dirty. Every book or magazine I have opened in the last two months is still opened and lying in the place I last looked at it. There are boxes of stuff I have to sort through before I can store them away, but they have been there so long that they have developed an alluvial deposit of dry-clean-onlies and blankets and empty mailing-boxes from eBay and HSN. And, horror of horrors, the whole place is starting to smell a little naffy.



When I leave my room (the rest of the house is comparatively quite tidy, with the exception of the closets and my Grandmother's end of the dining table), I get into my car...the car where there is still a small pile of broken glass from two months ago when someone broke my passenger window to steal my $17 portable CD player, along with the leaves and dirt and wrappers that cling to my shoes when I enter the car; there are hundreds of ATM receipts, empty water bottles, crumpled napkins, discarded Dorito bags, CD cases, fashion magazines, a complete change of clothes (including shoes, all dirty) scattered around the backseat and trunk, and a big box of envelopes that I keep meaning to bring back into the office and put away, but don't.



Then I get to work, and sit in the middle of this sty:

I'm amazed that I know where anything is. What amazes me more is that I am almost fastidious about personal cleanliness and tidiness. People never realize what a frightful slob I really am until they get a gander at any of the mises-en-scènes where I live and work.



So anyway, I took the above picture around Christmas time, I was thinking of using it as a graphic on this page..."Where Mannersisms Are Born." When I was reading Ernie's page earlier, I followed a link to see pictures of other people's desks, and was quite impressed by how tidy and trim people's desks were...and reminded yet again that I am an unregenerate jackdaw and should be walled up where my mess can't escape and ensnare innocent passersby. I thought about sending in my desk picture, but to scale it down to the required size made the picture look kind of icky and pixelated (if I may coin a word...or if I may not, I will anyway...YOU CAN'T STOP ME!)



So anyway. It's a quiet afternoon, all our members are busy with their finals and so the phones are silent. I can utilize this time to either clean up my desk, or go look at porn. Guess which one I'm gonna do?