Organized.

It's amazing how much stuff you can accumulate. This lovely lady, who has been my roommate for two years now, moved out of my apartment yesterday to go home to Alabama before she leaves on a mission.

(By the way, I'm pretty glum about her leaving. I've never been at college and not lived with her. I've never not had her around, and I'm not quite sure that I'm going to be very happy about this new development. But I'm happy she's going on a mission--she'll be awesome. She'll take the world by storm. In Spanish.)

Anyway, she had a lot of stuff. And my new roommate, this lovely lady,

brought all of her stuff here today. And she has less stuff that the other lovely roommate (which makes sense, because Kate had lived here for two years. More time to accumulate.) but she still has a fair amount of stuff. (By the way, isn't Jen--today's roommate--hot? I took this picture and I'm so proud of it. She'll probably shoot me for posting it. :) Better, she's just as awesome as she is beautiful. I know, hard to believe it's possible, right? Having Kate leave would be a lot harder if I didn't like Jen so much. Thank goodness for awesome friends.)

But back to what I was saying. Seeing the moving in and out of their stuffs made me think about my own. And how much of it I have. My sister always says that if everything has a place, you can keep things clean. But if you don't have a place for everything, that's when it gets easier to be messy and disorganized.

And it's true. After a few months of living someplace, stuff sneakily materializes in your room, and you decide that it would be a good idea to reorganize everything and switch to the other side of the room before the new roommate comes. Not to mention the fact that it will give you an excuse to go through everything--moving seven times in the past year just isn't enough for you and you might as well move again, even if it is just four and a half feet to the left. And then suddenly you find yourself on a Saturday evening with your belongings strewn all over both sides of your shared room, trying to figure out where on earth all of this stuff came from, and whether or not you actually need it all.

But then you find all those things you were always, always looking for: NINE (yes, nine) partial pads of Post-it notes, sixteen pens and pencils that decided to resurface from the abyss of the desk drawer and behind the bed, four quarters that will enable you to do laundry once again, a pair of shoes you could never find, your virtually brand-new packet of Sharpies, because they disappeared shortly after you bought them, and of course, an assignment that you thought you lost and had to redo...a week and a half after the semester is over.

But in the process of making all these discoveries, you feel sort of like a conquistadora--exploring new vistas, determined to conquer the unfriendly, treacherous wild, and when at last all is completed, you want to proclaim to all the world that you have claimed and conquered, trounced and triumphed, and that the STUFF is roped, lassoed, and hog-tied. Or something. (Conquistadoras love mixing metaphors with cowboys too.)

And you know, your room ends up looking something like a blend of this

 

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and this. Minus the vase of white tulips and the acoustic guitar.

 

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So I'm feeling pretty good about myself. You can call me Brunilda the conquistadora.

Now if I can just keep it this way.