Indy (not Indie) Girls

Back in college, I had a dear friend named Mandy. She was quietly odd, which is one of the things I loved most about her. We lived on the same floor in the dorm, a floor full of other quietly odd girls (I went to school in Indiana. Quiet oddness was tolerated much more so than exuberant weirdness). One day, Mandy told me a strange story. She came home one night; her roommate, Carolyn, was already in bed. Mandy climbed into her lofted bed and burrowed in. But...huh. There was a strange lump. Soft, not painful, but not comfortable, either. Mandy reached down in the dark, thinking maybe a balled-up pair of shorts or something had gotten tangled up in the sheets. She pulled out a balled-up pair of socks, shrugged, and threw them to the floor. Turning over, she felt another lump. Another pair of socks. And another. "What the...?" She dug out and threw down several more pairs...about a dozen all told. In the dark, Mandy heard the not-so-asleep Carolyn start to giggle. Mandy snapped the light on. "What the hell is with the socks?!" Carolyn progressed from giggles to guffaws.

Turns out, another floor-mate, Jessica, had stopped by earlier, looking for Mandy. While chatting with Carolyn, Jessica--for reasons known only to her--casually rifled through Mandy's sock drawer, pulling out rolled-up pairs of socks and stuffing them throughout Mandy's bed. (It's worth noting at this point that this is the same Jessica who used to leave yellow chick Peeps floating cheerfully in the toilets on Easter to greet the cleaning ladies. Indy girls are weird, yo.)

Mandy told me this story the next day and we both laughed. Wacky story, but the best part is that, about a week later, it happened again! Jessica stopped by, Carolyn let her in and maintained a straight face when Mandy came home, and Mandy found half her sock drawer planted in her bed. Again.

(Along these same lines, when I was an RA in a different dorm, one day a girl came home and carefully turned each and every wall hanging, postcard, print, and post-it in the room 180 degrees--but in the exact spot on the wall--and then just sat quietly, waiting to see when her roommate would notice.)

Fast forward a few weeks, to a dinner with Mandy where I was trying to explain this fretful, anxious feeling I'd been having. "It's not any one big thing," I said, "it's just, like, a bunch of little stuff but it's all piling up and I can't get to a comfortable, relaxed place because there's just all of these little niggly things poking at me..." She interrupted, "Falling! You have socks in your Bed of Life!"

So now, whenever I have that feeling--that overwhelming sense of urgency coupled with despair, where you can't stop thinking about all the little things that are swarming around you like so many gnats, forming a black cloud that itself inhibits you from taking any productive action--I make a list. And at the top of that list I write "Socks in My Bed of Life." And usually I can fill up a good page or more of things as trivial as "schedule hair appointment" and as large as (ahem) "get your effing blogging shit together." And often, just seeing these things written out (I'll cop to occasionally often writing a few things that I've already accomplished just so that I can cross them off) helps me feel a little more in control and less drown-y.

It's time to make a list.

What do you do when you've got Socks in your Bed?