Waste, emptiness, nests, boxes

I'm feeling very disorganized and procrastination-prone, and tired too, and I have a bunch of errands to do today. Here are some things that are on my mind.

Waste. "To use, consume, spend, or expend thoughtlessly or carelessly. [...] From Middle English wasten, from Old North French waster, from Latin vastare, to make empty, from vastus, empty."

From a 1966 book review: "Pynchon's intricacies are meant to testify to the waste -- a key word in The Crying of Lot 49 -- of imagination that first creates and is then enslaved by its own plottings, its machines, the products of its technology." -- Richard Poirier, New York Times

(Auto-suggestion: don't buy so much crap in the first place. I've gotten much better about this, partly out of economic necessity, but I could always do better yet -- do I really need a VitaminWater, in a plastic bottle, almost every day? -- and somehow I still have about eleven lipsticks. Well, at least those are small.)

Empty. "In Old English Ic eom aemtig could mean 'I am empty,' 'I am unoccupied,' or 'I am unmarried.' The sense 'unoccupied, at leisure,' which did not survive Old English, points to the derivation of aemtig from the Old English word aemetta, 'leisure, rest.' The word aemetta may in turn go back to the Germanic root mot-, meaning 'ability, leisure.' In any case, Old English aemtig also meant 'vacant,' a sense that was destined to take over the meaning of the word. Empty, the Modern English descendant of Old English aemtig, has come to have the sense 'idle,' so that one can speak of empty leisure."

Nest. "See empty nest; feather one's nest; foul one's nest; stir up a hornet's nest."

At times in the past my bed has been covered with books and papers and CDs and clothes, so that I had to shove it all aside to make room to sleep, but somehow I got over having to have a literal nest (aside from my apartment itself, that is) and the bed itself is no longer cluttered. That more or less coincided with getting a laptop a few years ago and using it in bed all the time -- most of my reading and writing and music is now in this one box. But now there's computer squalor to deal with: defragging the hard drive, backing stuff up to the external drive, scanning for viruses and spyware, deleting cookies, etc. I tend to put those things off for no good reason, but I do get around to them once in a while, and my computer seems to be OK.

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Yesterday was a bad day for several reasons, but I did manage to get two empty boxes for the stuff on my coffee table. There they are, ready to go. Later today or tonight I will begin the cleaning. Woo.