I often have very good advice
but very seldom follow it

I don't know how I got into the business of keeping other people's businesses together, and I can't seem to get out of it. I'm the corporate assistant, the office manager, the one who's job it is to make time for all the things you can't make time for, because, you see, your job is more important. It's some sort of disorder, I'm sure. I remember when I was very young and slept over at other people's houses, I couldn't help cleaning their rooms, in some way. One friend's mother was such a slob that I made the cleaning like a game, a gift for when she got home. My parents were mentally retired before I was in my teens, and I often found myself cleaning up after them because I just couldn't stand it. I made my own lunch and stayed in my room. I guess I needed control.

Even if what I do is neccessary, inherant to the order of order, I never get paid what I'm worth. I have taken a second job to pay the bills, because while I do like my primary job quite a bit, it simply isn't enough. And my second job is helping an older man organize the office for a store he runs with his wife. They make quilts. He uses AOL. Need I say more. I have to show him how to italicize in his emails, how to see what's on a Zip disk. I have to spoon feed him. He pays me well, though. I am sifting through his history of unpaid bills, notices from his underpaid staff that they're quitting, receipts so crinkled and palm-worn that I can't imagine what they need to be kept for.

And at home?

Every utility and company I've ever had to bargain with for serenity is represented in past due bills held limply to my fridge with all the magnets noders have sent me. If only they knew that maybe, subconsciously, I requested them because I knew I would need them to hold back bills, to keep the bills from eating me alive. There are two dead bananas in my fridge, sharing space with only a jar of minced garlic soaked in olive oil. The world is overdue library books and waiting, lots of waiting.

When your job requires you to be more organized than everyone else, and you can pull this off, your personal life seems to allow for more chaos, simply because you don't have time for yourself anymore. You want to believe you're doing a good thing, providing a good service, and you want to believe that people are sincere, because in general, they are.

Maybe it makes you want to break something, break out, break anything. Maybe it makes you numb. For me, it's having people land in my life, to drag me away from work's mess and my own, because frankly, somedays, that's all there is.

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