I need to tidy my room more often.
No, seriously, I need to tidy my room more often. Or at least, tidy it less superficially when I tidy it. Because if I don't do that, when I decide to tidy it properly and go deep, it's like an archeological dig.
The first layer, just below the Mundane Stuff (books and the like, stuff that gets moved around almost daily as I read, reread and move stacks in my constant book devouring) is the Study Layer. Stack upon stack of university course notes, photocopies, and books - most of which I no longer need, so it gets thrown in the garbage or, if I think it'll be useful someday, stacked on whichever of my shelves looks less full at the moment or just outside of my door to be brought downstairs, where all the Perhaps Useful Again study stuff resides. Most of it gets thrashed without regret, as you'll imagine, especially the notes and photocopies from classes I hated. But book photocopies stay: hell, I didn't spend all that time laboriously photocopying, page after page, an entire book just to throw it away.
And sometimes, upon finding something particularly interesting, I sit down and read through it, and when I look back up half an hour has elapsed - one of the reasons tidying my room usually takes me so long. Interesting Stuff is Interesting Stuff, and I can never resist the lure of Interesting Stuff, whether it's study-related or not.
The second layer is the Writing Layer. Notebooks everywhere, bits and pieces of paper where I noted story ideas, and pens. Lots of pens. Most have only a tiny bit of ink left in them, victims of my A Pen A Week syndrome. I write a lot of stuff.
I gather up all of it, and spend a couple of hours sitting on the floor sifting through it. I divide study notes (what little there is of them... there's a reason the notebooks are all in this layer, and it's that, even if my notebooks start out as Strictly For Studying, they end up having 99% of the content being story ideas and such) from story ideas, divide the ideas based on the setting (since I have several stories going at the same time), dig out my stapler from the mess that is my desk and staple together the pages that belong together, and at the end, I have a bunch of neatly tidied story ideas and several empty notebooks with more than 3/4 of the pages ripped out. I put the story ideas in a neat little pile on my nightstand (which is more like another, smaller-sized, desk than a proper nightstand) and I put the empty notebooks in a neat little pile on a corner of my desk (after shoving around stuff to make said corner free).
The third layer is the Random Stuff layer. Have I mentioned that I'm a bit of a packrat? Well, I am. I see something pretty, or shiny, or Perhaps Useful Someday, and I can't help but take it to my room and shove it somewhere. This layer is composed of lots of ribbons of all sorts (which end up neatly put away in a small box labelled "ribbons"), feathers of all sorts (some seagull feathers from the last time I was on a beach with seagulls and I found some feathers, and lots of feathers from my parents' sofa's cushions, which, when cleaned, have the habit of spitting out feathers by the dozen: all the feathers, no matter the origin, end up in a small bag labelled "feathers"), some marbles (which end up in the Big Marble Jar I have sitting in one corner of my room, to keep company to all the marbles from my childhood), some pretty pebbles I picked up the last time I was on a pebbly beach and bored out of my skull (boredom is dangerous), and miscellaneous Nice Stuff. All of it gets shoved into a box, which gets shoved into one of my wardrobes (for lack of a better place to put it).
The last layer is Stuff I Thought I'd Lost Or Forgot That I Had. This includes a bunch of Pokemon stuff (which I forgot that I had): all of it is Cute Stuff I managed to get mom to buy for me every time we went shopping, such as marbles (have I mentioned that I love marbles yet?), two sets of three stamps, a Mew figurine with wheels that moves its feet if you roll it on the ground. Also included are lots of doubles for a Magic Knight Rayearth Italian trading card set; the Sailoruranus and Sailorstarhealer keychains I bought ages ago while in Perugia and thought I'd lost somewhere; a light-up Pikachu keychain which was the first gift I ever got from somebody I met off the internet (this guy on a mailing list I was subscribed to... the guy's parents owned a toy shop, and he got a bunch of free stuff to give away, if I remember correctly); and the birthday card I got from my parents for my tenth birthday. There was also a very small Pikachu keychain I got for getting second place in a Pokemon trading card game tournament. No, I didn't spend money on the cards: my brother bought a pre-constructed deck for me because he wanted me to play with him, and I entered the tournament for a laugh. I then proceeded to kick the ass of all the kids who got their parents to buy them extra-rare cards with said pre-constructed deck. Bwahaha. (And if you wonder who beat me in the final, it was my brother, by chance... he used an attack on my last pokemon with his last pokemon, and it included flipping a coin to see if it hit or not. It hit. If it hadn't hit, I would've won.)
So. My desk and nightstand and room are finally free from the Evil Pile Of Random Stuff That Needs To Be Dug Through. What will I do now?
Well, I have to shelve the last pile of manga I got. Funny how quickly it piles up when you buy lots every month... I shelved every single manga volume that was in stacks around my room not long ago. (Have a look at the Stack From Hell, by the way. That's something like three months' worth of manga and videos, and it's more or less my height. I'm not short, either, 175cm. The stack would've been even taller, had I not already tidied some of the manga before I put it all in one big stack to force myself to tidy it in one sitting instead of sitting and rereading.) And I have to tidy my bookshelves, though that will take a while, and it's not something I'll do anytime soon if I can help it. (No, you can't see a picture of those. It's a pretty horrifying sight. Stacks, stacks everywhere, and lots of books in sight...)
