Plinky prompt: Tell us about something you would attempt if you were guaranteed not to fail (and tell us why you haven’t tried it yet).

Well, that could be a long list: Go on craigslist and get a kitten. (Due to two weird experiences with craigslist I am now phobic of it.) Join my friend Jacques' writing groups and make some contacts. (Am (a) spacy and (b) shy.) Get back into life drawing. (Severe shortage of people willing to sit still for long periods without being paid). And so on.

But let's go for the pertinent, the looming: I need to clean my room.

I have several room-cleaning issues piled on top of each other. My room is very small and what furniture I have is very big. You have to move the desk chair around in the aisle to pass, and let's hope you're not really fat if things catch on fire, because the angle between the desk and the nightstand to get to the fire door is a bit on the narrow. (And please don't knock stuff off my desk with your butt as you pass.)

And oh yeah, the stuff on the desk: I make jewelry. Not very complex; it's not like I have a bench or even an anvil. Just a bunch of beads, findings, Lego, stretchy string, polymer clay, gold leaf, empty vials of beads, torn packets, a box of Asian newspaper pencils I got in my stocking, two or three broken or old pairs of reading glasses in the wrong prescription, watch parts, sorting bins, empty water glasses, my mouse, a hand-pieced & quilted coaster rescued from a project not meant to be, tiny ziploc bags of the sort used for illicit drugs, a wafer cookie tin filled with polyhedral dice, my keyboard tucked to one side on top of a cookie tine now holding more Lego and the like, a paper clip holder, loose earrings without mates, scissors . . . we are now squarely at the obvious issue as to why I haven't tried it yet, which is that I have less organizing skill than the average small animal who steals random things.

I wanted–want–a Zen desk, but that little cardboard box with the teeny rake and the sand and the pebbles got knocked off the back.

The closet is piled with clothing I have worn, might wear, and might wear again if I can Do Something To Fix It. Very little of this is the canonical five-more-pounds, as I have recently lost ten and am thus faced with but-it-was-pretty/pricey/I might gain it back and then what?

My nightstand is filled with everything I could possibly need from getting into bed until waking (except the wand that pees for me, which is lost). My stuffed animals take up half the bed–and we're not discussing under the bed, because we had a surprise inspection six months ago by some agency installing some sort of little white plastic thing that does nothing, and it all had to be very quickly hidden.

And no, I don't have bugs or anything. Just . . . stuff. Lots of . . . stuff.

Worst of all, I have to move soon, and as always I am determined to somehow have a room like my exceedingly organized daughter, with many charming little tchotchkes and everything in the places she designates as if it's *easy*, damn it. And it's never going to happen. But . . . what if it could? As a guaranteed success?

And there's the rub: That room could exist; but I'm not the non-ADHD person who lives in it. I do too many things at once. In the process of writing this essay, I have washed out two shirts (nuking the mysterious carbon stain on the linen vest YES Mr. Billy Mays!), made 17 polymer clay beads with the gold leaf, hennaed my hair, eaten two small meals, watched 5 episodes of The Vicar of Dibley and gotten most of the beading stuff into the very nice organizer thing I got for it last month. Traces of this day are spread throughout my house.

But it's only been four hours. Daylight remains. I will rinse out my hair, scrub the henna out of the measuring cup, make the bracelet with the beads, and (I think) throw out at least three bags of junk. I have to now. It's in print.