Bekki tagged me to do a meme entitled, “Where do you do your most active thinking?  What does your area say about you?”  Now, this is making a big assumption that I actually DO any active thinking!  In that vein, I decided to do a “then and now” pictorial.

I’ve always done my schoolwork best at a desk and got my first full-size office desk when I entered high school at the age of fourteen.  Even when I wasn’t in school, I spent a lot of time at my desk, writing letters, writing short stories, reading, eating my lunch, etc.  There have been times in my life when I’ve lived at my desk!  The picture of the cat on my desk represents how relatively neat and orderly my life was in 1980.  The desk was the very same one I had gotten for Christmas as a 14-year-old.  This photo was following final exams during my second year of college and the desk was cleaned off and neatened up.  I see that the boxes of Christmas cards were out, and that had to be the project currently in progress at the time this picture was taken.  Mandy was helping herself to some of her favorite salty snacks.  The two of us used to munch at my desk a lot!  Note the IBM Selectric typewriter on my side table.  All of the papers for my first college degree were written on an IBM Selectric.  We didn’t own our first computer until 1985.            The second picture is of me heavily into studying for final exams in November 1982.  Books and notes were scattered around the desk, but there was still a sense of order.  Only what needed to be out in front of me was, and the files next to me were orderly.  Probably in preparation for this study session, I had taken everything off my desk, dusted and polished it, and then felt mentally prepared to sit down and study efficiently.  That’s how it used to be done.

Okay, it is now 2008, and this organization no longer exists.  I still have the desk depicted in the second picture, and this is what it now looks like ALL the time!  There are scraps of paper, receipts, junk mail, printed emails, catalogs, books, pictures, assorted other crap laying around everywhere.  Last year’s tax return (filed) is still in a pile of stuff to my right.  The shelf above the desk that has numerous cubbyholes is full of every conceivable kind of crap known to mankind.  I can’t find anything if I wanted to!  This is what my brain feels like these days, too.  I can’t find anything in there if I wanted to.  It’s cluttered and full of useless trivia and nothing is organized and where it belongs anymore.  I should be asked WHEN I did my best thinking, not WHERE!

This is the area where I do quite a bit of thinking in my own way.  This is our “TV Room,” although the TV is rarely on unless we’re watching a DVD.  It’s a comfortable room with a very inviting sofa (known as the Slouch Couch) against one wall and an easy chair with hassock in the other corner.  I park it here a lot of evenings after work, either reading a book or working on a crossword puzzle or Sudoku.  That pile on the table is my sudoku book and my plastic bag of colored pencils that I use on my own designed sudoku sheets to “mark up” the puzzle and figure out where the numbers should go.  Underneath the coffee table are a variety of reference books on various subjects, including a book on the Billboard Top 40 from 1955 to present and a video book that lists all the movies released with their casts and directors listed.  These things are good when one is debating with one’s spouse on an issue of trivia!