I've been having a hard time with distraction today. We have been trying to get the house in a state where I have a space to stretch out, to write, to get some quiet.
It's getting there, but not quite. There's simply too much stuff in the house, and the sort of housecleaning that needs to be done around here is torture, all the going through items of every variety and deciding what to toss or go. I love throwing things away, to tell you the truth. I am at a point in my life where clutter in my house just makes me feel like my mind is just as cluttered. It's hard to think straight when you're trying to not trip over your laundry.
My stepson has been crashing at our house and sleeps on the futon. His computer is in the office for now. Every other room is over packed and largely unusable. There's only two rooms that can be comfortably used to do anything: the main living area, and the office.
Tonight, the sound of gunshots on my husband's video game is too much to let me focus in the main living area, and my stepson is camped out in the office again. I know I could kick him out, but at the moment I'm just too tired to do it without being a dick. It would go something like this:
"Dude, seriously, do you pay the mortgage or for any utilities? Did you clean some house? Did you even put your dishes in the dishwasher? Please don't tell me that you were baked all weekend and are subsequently going to take two days to get your shit together again. Get out of my office and go find something else to do."
It boils down to me being too frustrated at everything at the moment to ask for the space. The unfortunate fact is that this place is a 2100 sq ft can packed with sardines. I frequently end up with nowhere to go, and I suspect this is a huge factor when it comes to writer's block.
My husband and I are working on it. He's hugely supportive and well aware of how bad the crowding is. We cleaned out a room for my stepson this weekend, and hopefully will get him entirely in there soon. Then the office becomes my domain again, which is going to do a world of good for me in general. I'll get to sit at a really comfortable desk, have nice big monitors, a good chair, ergonomic keyboard, plenty of room to put stuff, and I can get some decent light in the room during the day. It's a flower lei and a palm tree away from paradise as far as I'm concerned.
In the meantime, I'm holed in the disaster bedroom with one of the cats. There's this really weird pile of laundry in front of me, I covered it with a towel to keep the cats from laying on the actual clothes, but it looks like some kind of purple Pac-Man ghost that's been sitting on the couch and eating all of the potato chips. A bit of a dumpy Pac-Man ghost.
It'll get better, if for no other reason than sheer determination, and a refusal to solve the issue by nuking it from orbit.
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