Allow me to remind you of the day my dorkiness was revealed to the world. I've never thought of myself as extremely organized - I left things like color-coding and notebook tabs and pastel post-its to the notorious 'Tracy Flicks' of my high school and college classes. I preferred to doodle all over my white binders, until they looked for like ink reserves than school supplies, and sometimes used the same binder for multiple subjects - without dividers. Yes, the horror, I know.

Anyway, I guess it was my post-grad working experience that really whipped me into shape, and moving out of my second NYC apartment (and watching Clean House) that completely made me crazy about eliminating clutter and not holding onto useless and solely sentimental things. Now I can't stand being surrounded by papers I don't need, tchotchkes that gather dust, or even things that aren't put away where they're not visible. This actually is a bad situation for me because we currently don't have enough storage units in our house for all of our things, so everywhere I look I can see things that COULD BE PUT AWAY if only we had somewhere to put them. Argh.

Enter my work desk. What's funny is that I showed up just a couple weeks ago to a large, airy-looking office and wasn't the wiser until parents and teachers started showing up and marveling at how clean it was. Apparently it was a sty last year. When I was introduced to my desk, it was crammed full of things that I didn't even know what to do with, and I was too overwhelmed to even begin to tackle them.

Well, I have now been here about two weeks, and yesterday I decided it was high time to get organized. I turned my desk inside out, and was simultaneously fascinated and horrified at what I found, including but not limited to:

three rolls of masking tape
three white-out correction tapes
two boxes of 5000 staples
two boxes of paper clips
ten (yes, 10) post-it flag dispensers
an unopened raspberry truffle
a jolly rancher
unmailed report cards from 2004-2005 school year
yearbooks from 2004

Needless to say, I pared down and put lots of stuff back in the supply closet, and recycled a crapload of papers. And now, my supply drawer looks like this:

pardon the quality... camera phone

I'm in love. I want to open and close it and look at it all day. :)