A bit of Benjamin Button in us all?

I have been feeling a bit Benjamin Button this week.  Well, strictly speaking I am not a creepy man-baby turning into a disturbingly good looking pensioner, but I do have this eerie feeling that I am progressing and regressing at the same time.

I am particularly concerned about my ability to communicate.  Five years ago I had no trouble writing and speaking in complete sentences.  I used proper punctuation, capitalisation, and real words that could be found in a dictionary.  Now I find myself using some bizarre txt-speech not only when txting (see I can’t even spell out “text”) but in other aspects of my life.  Am I 20? I have also noticed my clothes have changed since giving up my real job and going back to school.  Of course I don’t wear skirts and jackets anymore, but now I seem to only wear a single pair of jeans which I keep on the floor when they are not being worn.  In the morning before I dash off to school I search for  the jeans which I know are too dirty to wear when I find them cowering under the bed (think Dr. Seuss and those pale green pants with no one inside them).  So am I 12?  No, because I also wear crazy mismatched coloured tees and tops like a founding member of the Red Hat society.  Am I 80?

I guess I really shouldn’t be concerned whether I am coming or going or evolving or devolving and just enjoy the ride (for as long as I can remember it at least).

At last I’m organised, she sighed and died

I remember my mum used to have a little tombstone on her desk with those words.  I have the feeling that organisation will never come for me, but at some point what does it matter?  I do keep trying though.  Sometimes I think that I switched to an academic career in hopes that people would become more tolerant of my disorganisation.  I guess I am hoping for that absent minded professor aura.  Although, somehow I doubt that constantly being late (and unprepared) for meetings and trailing bits of paper as I walk down the hall is ever going to be endearing.  Annoying?  Irritating?  Perhaps, but being disorganised is only a loveable quirky personality trait in the movies.

What’s worse, I think my disorganisation is spreading from my habits to my thinking (was it the Wizard of Oz that said, “You, my friend, are a victim of disorganised thinking”).  When I write, its a mess lately, so I am really beginning to take this organisation thing a bit more seriously.  So how does one get seriously organised?  [drum roll] – you buy a diary.  Because if life has only taught me one lesson, it is you can buy/consume your way out of any predicament.

So that is how a found myself in the stationary store this morning as I walked to school.  Because if I only had a paper diary to schedule my life (electronic calendars don’t count), then I would be completely organised.  I did find a few flaws in this line of thinking, though, as I went down the diary aisle.  One big problem is that apparently stationary shops have a bias against disorganised people and only carry stock for organised people.  This came as a shock to me as I perused the shelves looking for a 2009 calendar, only to find that they are only stocking 2010 calendars.  What?!  Don’t tell me that I am the only person in Dunedin who has waited 10 1/2 months to buy a diary!  There are still a good 80 odd days left in 2009.  Who wouldn’t want to pay for and carry around an extra unused 280 pages?  Hmm… so what options do I have?  Wait for 2010 (appealing, but seems contrary to my goals…), no I did the only reasonable thing I could think of as I realised that I was late and need to get something quick and dash off to school.

I bought a blank book.  You know, so I could fill it was my hopes and dreams… yeah, right.  I bought a blank book so I could print my Outlook calendar and tape it in to it and spend the rest of my life trying to synchronise them.  Fun.  Now what did I do with that diary?  What happened to my tape dispenser? Who took my printouts off the copier? Where’d I leave the keys to my office….