Around our house, domestic assignments follow a logical rubric … most of the time.
For example, my wife has a real job, so she gets our bedroom closet; I have an imaginary job, so I get Irish coffee on weekday mornings (tough chore, I know, but that handle of Carolan’s isn’t going to drink itself). I find a certain Zen-like satisfaction constructing colorful, well-balanced meals in tiny, BPA-free plastic containers, so I pack our kids’ lunches; my wife actually cares about personal hygiene, so she makes them bathe.
She wraps presents, I shovel the driveway. She remembers people’s names, I retrieve items lost down the toilet. She loads the dishwasher, I go back and re-load it.
See? Logical. Our chores fall well within our respective skill sets — even the kids, who pretty much do nothing, which they both excel at (and I’m not just saying that because I’m their dad; they really are precocious slackers).
But for some reason, even though my organizational approach borders on pathological hoarding disorder, I’m the one in charge of the family’s paperwork.
For these purposes, “paperwork” includes: an accordion folder marked “Stuff N’ Crap;” a standard-sized file cabinet jammed with legal-sized files and, of course, my desk inbox, which is less a box than it is a teetering stack of loose papers, empty envelopes, old report cards, even older tax returns and, for some reason, a Men At Work record. I think my birth certificate’s in there somewhere, too — I know our marriage license is.
Now, as long as I’m able to produce vital items, say the checkbook or vaccination records or a Men at Work record, this chronic archival neglect usually proves benign.
But I’m also responsible for our mail, and therein lies the trouble. I’m talking specifically about what I call the “denial pile:” an ever-expanding mound of bills, forms, statements, summaries, applications and anything having to do with insurance.
I remember when mail was fun — birthday checks, Ranger Rick magazine, personalized BMX license plates you sent away for after eating 25 boxes of Cheerios.
These days, mail is the bane of my existence. It’s like it just keeps coming and coming, every day. And it’s full of reminders about things I’d rather not be reminded about.
Ask my letter carrier. I never look in the mailbox, terrified of what’s inside. This works to my advantage, because by the time I finally do check the mail, most of it’s rain-soaked and disintegrating. This means I can toss it straight into the outside trash.
Anything actually making it into the house, however, meets a different fate. Usually, I cull the magazines, the Cabela’s catalogue and the LL Bean catalogue (which are essentially red state-blue state analogs of each other). I’ll also fish out the fetish porn guides and mail-order weapons listings the previous owner still receives at our address; I find these both hilariously frightening and frighteningly hilarious. Ditto any material he gets from the Donald Trump campaign.
Once I recycle the junk mail — or, to the delight of my children, torch it in the woodstove (that’s where all the Trump stuff goes; so satisfying) — all the leftovers head straight to the denial pile, which, interestingly enough, consists entirely of items requiring timely action.
Now, I’m both lazy and a procrastinator; if there’s anything I dread more than having to do something, it’s having to do it at that precise moment. So, by the time I get around to attacking the denial pile, it’s mostly overdue. This now requires even more immediate attention, which I’m even less likely to give.
It’s a vicious cycle. Thus the denial pile never shrinks: it simply moves from place to place. Of course, it can also split off to form satellite denial piles. In fact, at this moment, we’ve got a whole constellation of them: one on the counter, one on the bookshelf, one by the phone and one on the workbench (which bespeaks the amount of “work” I do there). And let’s not forget the one in the car wedged between the dashboard and the windshield. That particular satellite is growing into a primary denial pile itself, with its own sub-satellite piles in the backseat, glove box and center console.
Still, week after week, “denial pile” remains on my to-do list, long after I’ve completed such other odious tasks as cleaning the fridge or removing hair clogs from the shower drain. I’d rather do taxes, even.
Why, then, don’t I cede paperwork duty to my wife? Great question. Although an even better one might be why she doesn’t wrest it from me, herself, considering her organizational skills, by contrast, border on obsessive-compulsive disorder.
I suspect this owes to two factors. First, it may just be because that’s how we’ve always done it. Really, that explains why most people do most things.
More fundamentally, however, we’ve learned to embrace the chaos — after all, how boring would life be without a little chaos?
I mean, you should see the backlog of unread messages I’ve allowed to stack up in my gmail account. That’s right — there’s an “e-nial pile,” too. Only that one I can’t use to swat mosquitos.
• Geoff Kirsch is a Juneau-based writer and humorist. “Slack Tide” appears every second and fourth Sunday in Neighbors.
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