Oh no... everything is miscellaneous

               I don’t think this was a good week for me to read “Everything Is Miscellaneous.”  I consider myself a pretty organized person and like order and structure in my life.  I would like to say both my classroom and my apartment are organized with some logic behind them.  In fact, I would even go as far as to say that in some aspects, I pride myself on my organization.  So, in my hectic, busy schedule (full time teaching, carnival planning, grad school attending, paper writing, grant writing, cleaning for family coming into town next weekend) I did not need a jolt in the organization of the way my brain functions.  But alas, that is what happened when I read this book.

                I began to second guess all different types of organization in my life, and began to wonder, “Why is this organized this way?”  “Is this the best way to do it, or is it just because it has always been done this way?”  I looked at my files at school.  I looked at the books in my classroom.  I looked at the “organized” piles of mail and stuff on my kitchen table.  I looked in the refrigerator.  I even looked at my files on my computer, and the clothes hanging in my closet.  I feel like this book sort of drove me nuts.  It brought up interesting points, and had many interesting examples… but as I read, I couldn’t help but relate it to my own life (which I guess means I thought it was a good book, right?). 

                I suppose I just can’t grasp the fact that ‘everything is miscellaneous.’  I want there to be a right way to do things, and I want to do it that way.  While reading this book, it became quite clear that information is lumped, classified, split, grouped many different ways… some more popular than others.  Maybe if I would have read this book during the summer I wouldn’t feel so overwhelmed and defeated.  I might have read it and thought, “Interesting… to an extent, everything is miscellaneous.”  But I didn’t leisurely read it during the summer.  I powered through it during one of the busiest times of the school year.   Instead of a quizitive response to the book, I was left with more of a “WHAT???  Everything is miscellaneous??  If this is true… then what is the point in even trying to straighten it up?  It’s a lost cause!”   I’ll be interested to hear what other people have to say about the book tonight in class.  Maybe I just completely over analyzed it and added undue stress to myself.  Or maybe this is just a realization that I might be a tad anal retentive…