DESKS

I thought I might take a little time to ponder my three desks. I work two jobs, and although one is predominantly field biology, I still have a desk.

As you can see, pretty sparse, a couple sheets of todo lists, old notes, and a tired little Dell workstation. This desk says, “My owner is never here, and might not love me, so you’ll excuse me if I weep silently here in my corner” which is pretty much true, except for the corner bit.

My other job is as a web developer / gis data manager / surly computer guy in a landscape ecology lab. Yes, that is an Apple Cinema Display being used to display Windows XP, shock, horror, moving on. This Dell doesn’t suffer from neglect so much as mistreatment. “Why are there so many peripherals plugged into me?” it moans. “Why are there so many processes running? Why are these stupid desktop widgets wasting my precious cycles? Why is one of my hard drives filled with Ubuntu?” And so on. There are several other typical work leavings here: a blue, late, recently remembered time sheet. My cast-off sun glasses, soon to be forgotten. I flier announcing a class I had intended to audit and never did. Printer dross on the walls announcing my allegiance to Pastafarianism, The Perry Bible Fellowship, Robot Jesus, and Google’s Earth. CS2 looms over me, forcing me to wonder why I am writing bad shell scripts instead of making pretty pictures.

My desk at home was acquired way, way back when I was living in the Panhandle in San Francisco. There’s another section to it, and a corner piece, so it’s been very adaptable to my many apartments out here. I actually took those attachments off and relegated the remaining bit to a corner in the hope that I might spend less time wasting time on my computer if it didn’t occupy such a large physical space, but for naught. Here are even more telltale leavings: an opened field guide, and intro Java text, my field notebook, various trinkets and curios recalling places and people, a gross used tissue. Several important documents regarding school and personal finance carefully stashed behind a lamp, never to be inspected until much, much too late. Perhaps I should be embarrassed to admit this, but the thing hanging on the wall to the upper right is one of a couple chocolate bar wrappers I’ve saved. I, uh, really like chocolate. This desk says, “I am so, so sick of staring at this guy’s midsection.

You’ll notice that all these spaces are pretty messy, haphazard, unorganized, which is a fairly accurate representation of my mind when I am occupying them.