Alison Rosen

Drawers; Drew Toal

So I’m back in NY and I haven’t unpacked yet but there’s something I need to say before I do that and also I’ll probably need to sit around for awhile and possibly I’ll never unpack. I just don’t like unpacking. I don’t really like packing either. I’ve got a problem with things. I never quite know what to do with them and I have trouble getting rid of them. Over the vacation I was hanging out with the friend I dubbed Phil in the last post, although I could totally tell you it was the friend I dubbed Collins because seriously, how would you know? He had this bank of very small drawers with tiny things inside them. Tiny Tabasco bottles and those runts candies and teacup poodles and thimbles. Actually they were thimble poodles. They’re so cute but I can’t help but feel sorry for them.

Actually, none of those things were in the drawers. I don’t really know what was in the drawers, probably nails of various sizes and washers and thumb tacks and twist ties and earring backings and paper clips and Q-tips and cotton balls and perfume samples and ribbons and very small scarves and packets of Splenda.

Oh! Speaking of, my landlords who are the best landlords ever got me a Facts of Life DVD and a book of recipes featuring Splenda for my bday! Aren’t those the best gifts ever? They are!

So back to the small drawers. I looked at this bank of drawers and felt so calm and relaxed looking at it. It was like a waterfall screen saver or nature sounds. It was the organizational equivalent of a rainstick, except rainsticks are cheesy and make me think of didgeridoos, which are noisy.

I was so profoundly affected by the small drawers that I thought to myself, “Self, take note of this and do the equivalent in your New York apartment.”

As I write this I’m sitting inside a small drawer and to my left is my sleeping drawer and to my right is my showering drawer. The only thing is that it’s kind of difficult to use the bathroom in the middle of the night because it’s hard to open the drawers from the inside and once you manage to get the thing open you have to throw yourself over the edge and then cling to the whole bank of drawers and then, because they all look the same from the outside it’s easy to forget which is which. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea.

Wait, none of that was what I meant to say. Damn!

What I meant to say was that there’s this young whippersnapper with whom I worked at Time Out New York by the name of Drew Toal who has informed me that he wants to challenge my media empire. “It’s lonely in the upper quadrant of the lower middle,” I warned him, but there was no getting through to him. He has a blog and I’m remiss in not linking to it so go there and get to know him.