I use my dress to wipe up my drink/ You know, I care less and less what people think

I so want to be one of those "together girls." The women featured on the pages of Real Simple and Domino. Those bastions of Martha Stewartism who run successful business, have pretty white kitchens, make fabulous meals from scratch, and keep everything organized in neat little white boxes with perfectly labeled script telling them where their tax return from 2002 is.

I, unfortunately, am the antithesis of these women. Having some semblance of a great desire for the pretty white boxes and neatly organized perfection that said boxes represent, I buy all sorts of things to get me organized-- boxes, day planners, magazines, carts-- all in a failed attempt to get it together; always falling several steps from the mark.

Couple these organizational failings with a depression era mentality of "waste not, want not" and you have a severe problem. I reduce, reuse, or recycle everything from old milk jugs to tee shirts that I have had since middle school and belonged to my mother before me. I save clothes for fabric even though I can't really sew. I drain my olive oil bottles but invariably come back to find an oily mess oozing off the counter top. While this is seemingly great for the environment, it leaves my personal environment more than a little cluttered.

This has become more and more evident to me since Jack moved here. Much to my (and his) chagrin everything that I didn't want him to know about me has begun to surface. My inability to put clothes in the hamper and propensity to read online celebrity gossip instead of doing actual work, the fact that the dog pees on the carpet more than he does on grass and while I have an entire closet devoted to shoes most are in the floor, all of the things that I knew would expose me as a fraudulent together girl have appeared and now he knows.

I would like to say that my resolution for 2009 is to become organized and lead the life of a Real Simple woman. But I fear that it will be another year of dragging around a purse full of receipts and unfinished to do lists much like my mother before me and her mother before her. You see, this is an inherited flaw and while I may attempt to over compensate for it by buying compartmentalized bags it's going to show through just like my clumsiness. Try as I may to be graceful and lithe, somehow I always tend to drop the disorganized bag.