My study is again a ruin.

Today I washed the holiday tablecloth. I lit the Christmas tree for what I hope will be the last time, although I really can't say for sure. I still have a little gift bag that has three bottles of glitter and a glue pen, which I used again today to inscribe a birthday card for a one year old boy.

However, the truest measure of whether the holidays are over is my study, which is a disaster. Just as it is every January.

That's because when it was December, time to get the rest of the house all gussied up and sparkly, it happened also to be Old Semester Season, when all sorts of mad Old Semester work needs to be accomplished. Uncoincidentally, that means that there's a massive and ever-increasing accumulation of life-stuff, like bills and magazines and papers and books, occupying surfaces such as the kitchen table and the living room, which have to be moved somewhere to make space for the sparkly. Do these things have actual places? Where they, you know, belong? Probably, sure. But to put them in those places requires thinking, and--at least as I remember it--we were in a big hurry to get that damn sparkle on.

I've been reading--well, at least it's on my bedside table--The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. I have in mind a life-changing bout of getting rid of things, and then after that, a life-changing bout of organizing. Life-changing, you see, not just figuring out where three bottles of glitter and a glue pen go. In the matter of resolving the ruin that is my study, I will settle for nothing less than total transformation!

Which is why I will be working on my syllabus and an educational comic and a re-narration of a screencast and another syllabus in squalor tomorrow. Because total transformation takes time, and January is New Semesterville. New Semesterville will be here in a red hot minute, so total transformation will just have to wait.