That Trapper Keeper Feeling

Dear Friend,

Something I miss about school is the way a semester would end. No matter how stressed or overwhelmed I might feel as a semester wore on, there was a light at the end of the tunnel, the knowledge that, if I could just hold it together until a specific date, it would be over. And once it was over, I could throw away every piece of notebook paper without changing any outcomes, without fear that anyone would ask me for it in the future. 

I think that high of detaching from the paperwork without repercussions is something many of us chase for the rest of our lives—trying to forget the seven years of tax returns, medical records and bills by hiding them from ourselves behind wood grain or wicker, or embarking on virtual rainbow’s-end-journeys where the pot of gold is paperlessness. (I also think that the ability to jettison-for-real was part of what made summer vacations feel timeless and separate from the rest of life.)

Though I discarded my paperwork, I couldn’t discard my memories of the stress and overwhelm that descended upon me each semester. During these periods, I vowed that if the universe would just allow me to reach the end of term without disastrously dropping any of the plates I was juggling, that I would reform. I believed I could reform. With each new school year that approached I’d survey my clean desktop (the physical kind), and the clean slate I’d been gifted on which I could sketch out my new future— my new list of classes, and a stick drawing of future me— unstressed and optimally whelmed due to her superior powers of organization.

The key to the organization part, I speculated (for the first of infinite times in my life) lay in finding the right system. For at least one year, the system on which I pinned my organizational hopes and dreams was this: 

The Trapper Keeper system

The Trapper Keeper binder contained multitudes—of folders and spiral notebooks with pockets, in colors I carefully selected to coordinate with each other, and also match the “personality” of each subject. For math, I’d take all my notes in the red notebook, and put all the handouts and my homework in the red folder. It worked perfectly.

For almost a week. 

Until I realized that carrying all my notebooks and papers to every class was heavy and removed them from the binder, or until I didn’t have time to get to my locker to between classes and had to take notes in the wrong notebook, or until I accidentally brought the wrong folder home one night and cross-pollinated my handouts. By a few weeks into the semester, though I still possessed memories of “the concept of an idea,” I mostly had a haphazard assembly of folders stuffed with random contents and a familiar, born-of-panic determination to just make it to the end of the semester so that I could discard everything and try again. 

In the end, the Trapper Keeper was not my organizational panacea. 

But sometimes, the morning after I finish a larger job just as the weather cools so that it feels almost like fall, I wake with a frisson of potential that is almost euphoric. I reach for the nearest of the five notebooks (each purchased for designated uses and now all devolved into catch-alls) and start a preposterous list for the day with the belief that it isn’t impossible at all. It’s a temporary manic state—by afternoon it will be gone—but I try to revel in it for as long as it lasts—that Trapper Keeper feeling.  

What’s your Trapper Keeper?

B