I Am Messy…

According to the “cleaning lady” (so un-PC, I know) in my office building.  I typically cast my papers on my desk, and where they fall is where they remain.  Every few weeks I rearrange the papers into tall piles to give the impression of cleanliness and organization, but my kindly superiors chuckle as they all know it is merely for show for our clients.  Eventually my papers make their way into files; I then scrawl a client name on the file, and then I cast my files on the floor, and where they fall is where they remain.  Every few weeks I rearrange the files around the perimeter of my office to give the impression of cleanliness and organizations, but my kindly superiors chuckle as they all know it is merely a smart move to avoid twisting an ankle every time I open the door and venture inside my office.

Does the messiness culminate with papers and files?  Absolutely not!  Tattered mail sits atop the computer, precariously hanging on.  My second drawer holds a cornucopia of hygiene and beauty products.  My third drawer holds no less than three pairs of shoes, two sweaters, a skirt, and a year’s worth of personal financial papers that I swear I will organize and put into a binder any day now.

But the “cleaning lady” does not draw her conclusion of messiness from my papers and files and desk drawers. 

Today the “cleaning lady” entered my office to empty the trash and decided to extend her daily visit by lecturing me about my giant fern-like plant.  You see, sometime in the next 24 hours someone will be making the rounds with a vacuum, sucking up the monstrous pieces of dirt adorning my office carpet.  Apparently the “cleaning lady” has decided that my fern’s leaves droop too close to the floor and produce too much dirt (the plant is attempting to spread seeds — I cannot stop a natural biological act, so the seeds spread their way onto the carpet).  She told me to cut the droopy bottom fern leaves because “we want to keep things really clean here and they make the place messy.”

Huh.  I furrow my geeky brow, nod passively and pretend that the document on my desk is a matter of urgent life and death.

 But the “cleaning lady” is not done with me yet.  She then reaches over my desk to a small potted desk plant and grabs some leaves, crumbles them and pulls them off.  I ask her to just leave my plant alone.  She retorts “ah, I see that you are purposefullytrying to dry the plant out, ok.  It is very messy.”

Audacity.  My fern is beautiful in an odd way; I am not going to destoy a part that only one person finds ugly and inconvenient. 

Kingdom Come

I enter my fortress of solitude (literally – - I live alone), immediately remove my shoes and writhe out of my work clothes and into my “apartment clothes.”  The shoes line the walls, as there is no space left in the closets, and those un-boxed collect dust bunnies that I find baffling.  My kingdom is a tiny sub-500 square foot studio, with ample closets packed with a decade’s worth of stuff, a kitchen barely used, a bathroom with a grimy shower curtain and the oddly shaped main room.  The main room contains an assortment of furniture that appears as orm room cast-offs — (i) the bed crammed into the corner, (ii) the creaky IKEA dresser, (iii) the futon sofa with a rip, (iv) the tv stand from KMart, (v) the random shelving units bought at various points in time, and (vi) the tiny 2-person “table” that doubles as a desk and computer station.

 But my kingdom is my kingdom, and every month my hands write a check to my landlord for the typical New York City ungodly sum of money.  My kingdom I cannot leave.  The three closets.  The giant windows with a water view.  The oddly noiseless environment. 

A person is very much defined by his or her surroundings.  Conversely, the surroundings are sometimes very much defined by the person.  Has the hip city apartment assisted in defining me?  Or have I slightly changed the hip city apartment into something geekier?  Do I not cram pretty clothes into the closet, store expensive creams in the medicine cabinet?  But do I not keep physics books on the shelves and a scrunchie from 1985 on my nightstand?

 I have realized that I am a transient in my own kingdom.  Although my kingdom appears well-worn and filled to the brim with living essentials (and, ahem, non-essentials), every item can be thrown into a box at a moment’s notice and I can move to a new kingdom on a whim.  My furniture is of a transient nature; I fear my personality is of a transient nature as well.

Three cheers to Geekyorama

I am a girl.  I am a geek.  I am a geeky girl.  But, alas, someone absconded with that delicious name, and Geekyorama it is. 

 Being a geek doesn’t mean one wanders around, bumping into inanimate objects while laughing with snorts and pushing glasses up the nose with the pointer finger.  Being a geek doesn’t mean a body constrained by orthopedic shoes, plaid mid-calf skirts and dumpy cardigans.  Being a geek doesn’t mean a profession as an accountant or a tax lawyer or the creepy librarian in the middle school.

 But if you are a geek, you just know.

I am a self-professed geek.  I am a full-fledged geek and I am geek-alicious.  But superficially, you would not guess this to be the case.  Superficially, I am the girl with the fashionable clothes, the athletic body, the contact lenses, the well-maintained tresses, and the ridiculously expensive shoes.  I am the girl living in a non-geeky apartment in New York City, working at a non-geeky job (at least in my perspective), and eating at non-geeky restaurants.

But at night, those wire-rimmed glasses escape the case…. and I turn into GEEKYORAMA.

Welcome to Geekyorama, and enjoy your stay.