Critical Creig: In which Creig embraces a messy life

CREIG P. SHERBURNE

There are a lot of words one can use to describe me. “Clean” and “tidy” are not two of them.

On my desk at work as I type this is a coffee cup filled with some of the worst coffee I’ve ever made, papers, notes, pens, electronics, cords and cables, some Legos, two spoons and — and I’m not joking here, Aaron will confirm it — a dozen eggs.

Most of this stuff accumulates in stealth mode. It sort of just creeps up on me. I’ve got a home for all the pens and spoons and stuff. And I know intellectually that if you rinse the coffee cup out, it won’t turn moldy and horrible later on.

But the papers. My goodness, the papers. There are papers people have sent me which have press releases written on them and there are papers I’ve used to take notes or write down phone numbers (rarely do I write down a phone number and a name; it’s a failing of mine) with the genuine intent of calling people back.

At home it’s pretty much the same except the desk is also dustier behind the iMac because, let’s face it, I’m a horrible lazy bum.

There’s more. Upstairs in the bedroom, despite the fact that my wife fixed all the laundry baskets by taking their lids off, I somehow manage to miss getting my dirty socks into them.

Now, I promise I’m not actually avoiding cleaning or being deliberately slobbish. Mostly, it’s just a matter of priorities. Cleaning takes time, and if the area immediately around my keyboard and mouse is tidy enough for me to mouse around and type, well, good enough.

And I don’t let it pile up too much. Once things are too messy in any given space, I tidy it up, but I’ve got so much stuff I just don’t know what to do with. At home, I’ve got this horrible teal-and-yellow box my daughter made me for Father’s Day. It’s ugly as sin, but she made it for me and, from all accounts, put a ton of thought, time and effort into it. I can’t throw it away or donate it, so what do I do with this weirdly flat, 8-inch-square box? I let it sit there with a camera, bottle opener and used Field Notes notebook sitting on top of it, that’s what. Perfect.

I think the big deal is that I am going to die some day and I know it in my bones. There are things I have to do in order to keep on living — I have to work so I can buy food and shelter, but when I’m honest with myself, I’d much rather be independently wealthy and spend every day learning new things and lifting weights and training for triathlons and thinking about new and more creative ways to spend time with my wife and daughter and the rest of my family.

Actually, when I think about it, that’s the answer to a question my dad likes to ask as a method of you focusing your life: “if you had unlimited funds, what would you do with yourself? Well, you don’t have unlimited funds, so how are you going to do that thing you just said?”

I have to work, so I have to fit exercising in between working and reading books to my beautiful kid and building things with my beautiful wife. Lifting weights takes at least an hour per session. A decent run is — at the bare, not-quite-satisfying minimum — half an hour. A good ride is 90 minutes, not counting suiting up and filling the water bottle and picking up the gels. A good swim is half an hour; fortunately it doesn’t have much overhead.

And that is to say nothing about reading books, blogging, going to see live music, working on bicycles, grilling food, watching Doctor Who and all the other things that constitute living life.

So when I think about all the things I want to do and all the things I have to do and then factor in that I have a fixed number of hours left in my life, maintaining a spotless desk gets pushed not only to a metaphysical back burner but really, it gets shoved out of the kitchen entirely.

I don’t think I’m trying to convince anyone of anything here. If I were to presume to give any advise on the topic, it would be to remember that even in the best of times, life is short. Don’t spend it miserable.