My Addiction to Rearranging

I rearranged my desk tonight—and actually—it's not something I do rarely.

Whenever I find myself cleaning, I start to rearrange things. I seem to do that to relieve stress. The cleaning, not the rearranging. If say, Django's kicking my ass, I'll go ahead and do the dishes and wipe down the counter, maybe even vacuum to get the nerves down. It's relieving in an odd way. Well, I have a hard time not thinking about things, especially if said thing is troubling me. Things like, the rent being due, but not having any money. Or, the rent being… wait I said that already. Anyway, I digress.

Let me give you a run down of the events. Jen scored a new hard drive today, and we ran out of outlets. So, I grabbed the nearest surge protector and proceeded to trek under the desk to connect said drive. Once I got down there, I immediately thought of another way to rearrange the cords so that Jen would use one surge protector and I would use the other. I also thought that if I put the router, modem and stray cords behind the desk, that the cats wouldn't be able to rip up the carpet under our noses. Thoughts like this quickly turned into disconnecting everything, pulling out a few twistie-ties to try and quell the inevitable entropy. Before I knew it, my desk was cleared, my widescreen monitor had been turned sideways and my MacBook Pro's screen was open once again even though it was sitting closed just an hour prior.

As of late, I seem to be getting better at predicting my own actions. So when Jen came to sit back down (she had been vacuuming), I looked at her with a smile and said:

I proceeded to laugh, but I was quite truthful. If my desk didn't return to normal, it would probably be rearranged into yet another productivity test.

So now, you can see why I redesign so much. If you're looking at me like—o_O?—then let me explain. The conclusion I can make from the above monologue is the fact that I change or rearrange things when the opportunity presents itself. I can't simply iterate, or in this case, move a speaker. I have to move the whole damn system around. I get addicted to the process until I'm satisfied. Bringing that back to designing, you could say that I get my kicks out of developing things, not maintaining them. I can even admit that every time I decided to add or tweak a feature of Avalonstar, it would more than likely get redesigned.

It's probably a consequence of the fast-paced environment we're in or just the mere fact that I'm never satisfied with what's on the canvas after leaving it alone for a week.

There's always something that can be done differently, always something that can be placed to the left instead of to the right. Again it's that snowball effect. If I change one thing, I have to change another. This has happened so much recently that I've stared to depend on an "accident" to happen to jump-start the process.

Sometimes I wonder if it's unhealthy, but I gather, might as well use the nerves now before I lose them all. ;)