Fun with Files (and Coins)

"Is there something wrong with us that we actually enjoy doing this?" I asked Tiffany on Saturday morning as we sat on our living room floor surrounded by piles of file folders and stacks of coins. It was 6:30.

We were having a double-organizational session. The weekend before we'd purchased a brand-new (to us) honest-to-god four-drawer wooden file cabinet to replace the flimsy six-year-old two-drawer one we bought before we had any files. Now we had to transfer all our files into the new cabinet. We were also finishing wrapping three years worth of coins we'd collected in a gigantic flower vase.

Tiffany didn't hear me.

"Babe," I said, "seriously, is there something wrong with us?"

"Huh? Maybe," she said.

As you've read before (here, here and here, for instance), organizing is Tiffany's favorite task. She is a super-organizer. In an abundance of caution, she makes a file for everything.

Everything.

"I'm going to put the instruction manual for our bike rack in a Sporting Good Instruction Manual File," she said.

Organizing is not my favorite task. I'm actually quite bad at it. I believe in broad categories of files, like: Miscellaneous Financial and Important Documents. This is why I am unorganized.

"Do we have enough sporting good instruction manuals for a file?" I asked. "Or couldn't that just go in with all the other manuals in the Tech Manuals file?"

She stared at me, horrified, then shook her head as if to clear my ignorance from her brain.

We went about our tasks quietly for a few minutes.

Then:

"I don't have very much in my Joke file," she said sadly.

"Your what?"

"My joke file," she said. "My dad has one. You know, to stuff little jokes and things."

"Where do you find such jokes?" I teased.

Secretly, I admire the file. I have a terrible habit of never remembering joke punch lines. A Joke File might be just the ticket. On the other hand, forgetting a punch line and then asking my audience to "hold please" while I checked my Joke File didn't seem very funny either.

"This is my favorite," she said.

I looked up.

My girlfriend--who's been successfully self-employed for some time and markets herself here--held a file called Tiffany's Old Resumes upside down.

Nothing came out.

You Want to Put that Where?

Yesterday Tiffany actually had one-quarter of a weekend because she finished up her first chemistry class. One month down, three to go (don't worry, the blog will continue... under the same name too, even when she moves on to biomechanics or physics or American history or whatever's next...I mean, this is really a study of couple-dom and couple-dom is all about chemistry, right?).

Anyway. Guess what Tiffany wanted to do with that time off... organize. That's right. Nothing makes Tiffany happier than rolling up her sleeves and moving sh*t around. Well, almost nothing. I have to say, it was fun. We actually hung some pictures on the walls, which, in Tiffany's mind, means we now live in the apartment we've been occupying for five months. And we hung some Turkish lamps that my mom bought us and put little tea candles inside them. They look really pretty.

After a few minutes, though, the apartment began to look like we were moving out, which is sometimes what happens when an over-excited organizer bites off more than she can chew. We emptied out one closet and half of another, and then filled them back up with the same stuff, switched.

"You know, some things are actually okay where they are," I suggested as I reached for a box she was handing me from off a shelf.

"Huh?" she said.

"Never mind."

It was her day, after all.

"I was thinking I'd put your filing cabinets up here," she said. "When you need to get in them, you can use a stool."

"Filing cabinets" is a euphemism for the plastic Tupperware bins we bought when the filing cabinet we were sharing became too small for all the paper we're accumulating as we get older and more complicated.

"Up there?" I said. "But I file stuff in there! They need to be easier to reach, like they were on the floor in the corner."

"How often do you file stuff?" she asked.

"Twice a month!"

She burst out laughing.

"So, twice a month, climb up on a stool and file," she said.

"Okay," I said.

After a while, I left her to her bliss and went to work on notes I'd been meaning to put in the mail to people (Yes, I still mail actual mail.)

But every so often, she'd call out to me with a question from the corner of one of the closets and I'd respond without any expectation that she'd do anything other than exactly what she wanted to do.* Which is fine. Her day and all.

"I'm about to throw this Christmas wrapping paper away," she said, holding up the "Ho Ho Ho" paper we'd used three years in a row. The red and green paper barely made it around the cardboard tube anymore and hung in tattered rectangles from where I'd cut around presents.

"But we use that!" I cried.

She waited.

"Once a year," I finished.

*Tiffany's organizational skills, as I've noted on this blog before, are superb. Our apartment is much improved.

A New (Dishes) Year*

Tiffany and I still haven't hung anything on the walls of our new apartment. We moved in five months ago. Also, we're still not satisfied with the way some of our very old stuff looks in our new place. In Tiffany's view, we are "not settled." In my view, we are "still settling."

In any case, Tiffany, as I've mentioned, loves to organize. To deal with not being settled, she sometimes just reorganizes everything to see if she can trick herself into feeling settled. Or she talks about buying new things. Very rarely--given my inherent resistance to buying new things--we actually buy new things.

Last night, we bought new dishes. Now, there was nothing wrong with our old dishes, per se. Tiffany's mom Patty gave them to us when we first moved in together. Still, after six years, they've begun to show a little wear-and-tear (but come on, after six years, what relationship... I mean, dish set... hasn't?) Anyway, the coffee mugs have rings around them, and not the red rings that circle the ceramic as part of the dish set's design. I'm talking about brown coffee-stain-rings. Even I could agree it was time to replace them.

So we bought our new dishes, brought them home, and promptly started bickering about what to do with the old ones.

"Okay," Tiffany said, dragging a stool over to the cabinet. "So we'll put these old ones up here, just in case."

"What?" I laughed. "We've never had just-in-case dishes before! Why would we all of a sudden need them now?"

"I don't know," she answered. "How could I know? That's what just in case means."

I stared, incredulous, as she balanced on the stool and raised our old, coffee-stained dishes--the ones she had been complaining about for months--to an empty space at the top of our cabinet.

I laughed again (at her).

"Babe," I said. "Now you've just taken up space we could use for something else. I thought the point of getting new dishes was to get rid of the old dishes."

"What are we going to use this space for?" she returned. "We've never used it before."

"It's just-in-case space!" I said.

Well, we made up--much faster than usual for, by my count, three excellent reasons. First, Tiffany started her weekend chemistry classes today. Which means we won't see each other except in the mornings and evenings every day for the next four months. No time to waste in a fight. Also, we were cooking a really lovely dinner (salmon, polenta and goat cheese salad), which we served on our nice new plates.

Finally, we made up because, guess what, it's a New Year. Let's start over. With new dishes.

And old ones.

Just in case.

*"Congratulations, you've just read a U-Pick blog post! If you know me (as most of my readers do), thank you for reading and feel free to suggest something you'd like me to blog about. If you don't know me, thank you for reading of your own free will and not out of a sense of obligation! Even though you're a stranger, feel free to suggest a topic, perhaps something you'd like to hear more about that you've read on my blog before. All suggestions must be made as comments on my blog (not on Facebook for those of you who find my blog via Facebook). I'll pick my favorite suggestion each week and blog on it within a few days."

Office Space

On Saturday, a few hours before I rolled the scooter over my right foot, Tiffany and I enjoyed our first weekend breakfast in our new apartment. We made eggs over medium and toast. Tiffany cooks eggs over medium. I scramble. So she worked the skillet while I took the bread out of the bag and put it in the toaster. We warmed the butter on the stove top in between the burners and, in a few minutes, it spread easily on the browned tops of our toast.

It was a lovely start to the morning. But before we finished breakfast, we began to bicker. Specifically, we bickered about how much of Tiffany's "office space" should be mine.

We don't have an office. But we do have a little space. It's between our couch and one of our windows. Forty-six and a quarter inches of space, to be exact. This has been designated Tiffany's office, which I fully support. We're selling the furniture from our old apartment that doesn't fit in our new apartment and that money is going toward a just-the-right-size desk for Tiffany, who works from home on her clients' programs and needs a place to study.

I thought half the desk might be mine, when we get it. Tiffany didn't think so.

"I need my space to be organized," she said.

I bristled.

"I am..."

I paused.

"Okay, so maybe my side of the old desk was messy but your side was just as bad!"

I think it's a commonly-known tenet of therapy not to make accusations in a fight. But Tiffany and I aren't in therapy, and accusations slide so easily off the tongue, even between bites of perfectly cooked over-medium egg and beautifully buttered toast.

This particular jab was a low-blow. As you may have noticed in previous posts, Tiffany takes great pride in her organizational skills. Organizing is one of Tiffany's favorite tasks.

Aware that I had escalated a simple disagreement into one of those you-are-so-wrong fights, I stormed off to wash the dishes. One strategy I often resort to in such moments is to do something totally helpful because it's so obviously irritating. Running water also provides cover for under-the-breath cursing.

"I can do those," Tiffany seethed between her teeth.

"No, it's fine," I huffed, swooping in for her plate and swiping her unfinished mug of coffee.

Thankfully, it only took a few minutes for us to come to our senses. We remembered that we love each other (and even like each other too!). I promised to be neater and admitted that I do not need 23 and one-eighth inches for my checkbook, address book and stamps. Tiffany conceded that, given the fact we do not have an actual office, I might need to sit down at the desk once in a while. Having resolved the matter, we huddled in the 46 and a quarter inches together and considered whether the couch could move closer to the radiator to stretch the space to a full four feet (It cannot.).

Piles and Piles

I made a mistake," I told Tiffany, looking up from a pile of anti-itch cream, Vitamin C chewables, cold-and-flu relief pills and generic Tums. I had dumped the contents of our "medicine cabinet"--a little bag that a box of stationery came in four years ago--onto the floor outside our bathroom. Let me spell it out for you more clearly. At a time when nearly the entire floor of our new apartment was covered with things from our old apartment, I had chosen to litter the one-square-foot of free space with things we had no immediate use for.

I had already put away most of my clothes in the dresser and on hangers and organized the Tupperware in a drawer in the kitchen (Tiffany promptly reorganized it, but I did do it). I needed something to do to feel productive. There were plenty of existing piles to work with. But Tiffany was organizing the hall closet, which is next to the bathroom. I was tired of being in different rooms, so I sat down with the bag and dumped it out next to her.

She looked at me. I knew she wouldn't be mad because she felt bad for undoing my earlier Tupperware organization.

"Why don't you make piles," she suggested. "That's what I'm doing. Then we can find a place for each pile later."

I half-heartedly moved the two anti-itch creams together and put the cough drops with the generic sudafed. The thermometer (which Tiffany makes me pull out every time she has a cough) was its own pile. I didn't think we needed the bulky boxes the generic tums came in, so I started pulling the foil-wrapped pills out of the open box and...

Tiffany turned. It was as if she sensed my incompetence.

"It might be a good idea to keep pills with their original box," she said diplomatically.

"Oh, I know," I fibbed. "I was just going to put them all in one box."

In reality, I thought the pink chalky-looking tablets would be easily recognizable even years from now when we would again reorganize the medicine cabinet-bag and throw everything out because it had expired (I had an expired pile going too). I stuffed the pills from the opened box into the formerly unopened box. It wouldn't close.

And then I gave up on organizing. We had been at it for hours and were in a work-week-liveable situation, in my view. We could pass through each room in the apartment and the shower curtains were up. We were sore and tired and an hour or so earlier we had both stubbed our toes in the span of a minute. Our first overnight guest (my mom) wouldn't be arriving for three weeks. It was time to stop.

I left Tiffany with her piles and mine and wandered into the kitchen. I made a bunch of turkey burger patties to freeze and kept one out to cook. I made our peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for our Monday lunches and mixed up some brownie batter. Then I got in the shower. When I got out, the hall closet was organized and the medicine bag was in the recycling bin, its contents dispersed. I cooked some frozen french fries and our burger and put it all on an unpacked plate to share. I put the brownies in the oven for a later-night treat and made my way to the living room, skirting around our potted plants and empty bookshelves. While I was in the kitchen, Tiffany had hooked up our d.v.d player to our t.v. More importantly, she had cleared the space between our t.v. and our couch: we sat down on it, watched a movie and ate.

Girl(s) On The Move

Last night, as I dragged two suitcases full of books past the stinky pee corner by the 24-hour grocery store, trying to navigate each set of wheels around anything that looked like it came from a human body, a man startled me from my concentration.

"Girl on the move, huh!" he yelled, as we passed each other on the narrow sidewalk.

I smiled, then stumbled, having clipped my own heels with one of the bags. Passing a window, I glanced at my reflection to see what he saw. In fact, he probably thought I was a run-away. I was dressed in a pair of baggy BU soccer sweats, a long-sleeved tee and a red vest my grandmother gave me several years ago (yes, if you know me and have spent more than three consecutive days with me, you've probably seen me in this exact outfit). I looked 14 or 15 years old, suitcases teetering along as I descended one of Nob Hill's famous slopes en route to the new apartment for which Tiffany and I just signed a lease (unfortunately, for those not familiar with the area, the further "down" the hill you go, the more stinky pee corners there are, hence my careful steering).

Indeed, we are on the move, and, actually, we are sort of running away--fleeing the tap-tap-tap and thump-thump-thump of the pairs of feet that live above us; headed toward a top-floor slightly sunnier, slightly smaller, slightly cheaper place that happens to have a gigantic built in bookcase (of course, that sealed the deal for me--our own library!).

The move--only three blocks--is a cure for the temporary insanity that overtakes me whenever I hear the feet of the people above us in our current apartment. And it is a cure for the temporary insanity I cause Tiffany in my temporarily insane state. Fed up with waking in the middle of the night to find me poised, broomstick in hand, waiting for the next foot-fall so I can jab at the ceiling (yes, if you know me and have spent more than three consecutive days with me, you've probably seen me in this exact pose), Tiffany kindly told me we needed to move in order to preserve our happy-coupleness.

So, for our first official day as top-floor lessees, I'd crammed dozens of books into our carry-on wheelie bags. Everything else would slowly make the trip over the next two weeks. Since it was a special occasion Tuesday, I packed a bottle of Tiger beer and a can of Dr Pepper in the backpack I was wearing, nestling them between the Windex, the 409 and the roll of paper towels.

When I reached Tiffany, who was waiting outside our new front door, I could see she was giddy at the thought of the organizational task ahead of us. In fact, as soon as we finished cleaning, she started alphabetizing the books on the shelves.* I, on the other hand, was relegated to merely passing the books from the suitcases to her outstretched hand.

Tiffany pulled a special occasion treat out of her backpack too--our favorite children's books: my copy of The Little Prince and her copy of Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb. Her treat was neater than mine. Literally neater because I forgot to bring a bottle opener, and so, as we struggled--eventually successfully--to open her beer on the handle of one of our cabinets, we spilled some on the kitchen floor. No matter, that's what paper towels are for!

We toasted ourselves and sat down for a while in the place where our bed might go. I promised to try not to let the new noises that surely will accompany our new apartment bother me. Tiffany promised to use my money to buy me a pair of those gigantic padded headphones and push play on "Enya" if I break my promise. Then, on the move but not yet moved, we walked back up the hill for dinner.

*Please note, it has been brought to my attention that the title of my blog might make my beloved seem "nerdy." I wonder if this alphabetizing sentence might be further fodder for that line of thinking. Personally, I think the fact that my girlfriend is studying-- chemistry, anatomy, physiology and all the other sciences that I long ago learned did not come naturally to me--is awesome. That she loves to organize, alphabetize and sort--adorable.**
**I realize this makes me definitely nerdy.