Account Me Out

There are some things in my life, that I wish would come easy to me, but they are incredibly hard. Keeping my desk clean can be a nightmare, especially when I'm working at it. I have to force it upon me to remedy little piles of chaos all the time. Clearing up the desk is equivalent to keeping my mind clean which is the basic requirement for any other kind of activity. It has to be done.

One of the other sad little things I toil away on is book keeping for the family business. There are piles upon piles of papers, I never find what I'm looking for, and as I'm looking I forget what I was looking for - finding other stuff instead - subsequently I have to start the frantic search again and again, and a vicious cycle of failure unfolds. I don't have a system, I refuse a system, I'd rather get angry for not having a system, than invest the time to make me a system.

Pretty paaapers, where aaare youuu?

I knew that, I knew back when I started, that this would not be a joyride. I swore to high heaven that no matter how difficult it would be, and how much I would despise it, I would get better at keeping the books. I did that once before. In school I used to be horrible at math, underdeveloped, I was even kept back a year because of it, up until university and the day I consciously decided to make statistics my specialty. I became good at it because I was fed up sucking at it.

This accounting matter would be no different, I told myself. I would be ambitious to become better, be the apprentice, and eventually the wizard of book keeping. Unfortunately not a bit of it has happened. I'm still as reluctant and nauseated as I was in the beginning, inept at picking up new things, if picking up things at all.

There are all kinds of problems to be dealt with in the new year, social security statements, tax filings, and a whole new chance to be neat and tidy.

I tried being tender to those ring binders, I tried giving pet names to the documents, but they bore no kindness in return. I told myself that it shouldn't make a difference, that usually, I like all things paper, written things, stories and such. Unfortunately it worked just as little as calling them honeybun. They have no soul.

And it is not the things written on them, it's the paper itself that is the problem, bone-dry and dusty, like a haggard old lady with grey hair and a bun, mirth-repellent, stapled, lecturing me to get my act together. Be more serious it tells me. Surrender to being more responsible. And it's true. I do, however, feel that shredding them should also do the trick.