My sister is in town this week, doing things like lobbying Congress and seeing her elbow appear on the news because she's sitting next to people who are worthy of news coverage. She's like, important and stuff.

When you've got a sister like that and a brother who has worked on two presidential campaigns this year and currently attends an Ivy League law school, well, sometimes it can make you feel like a Roger Clinton to their Bill.

And I mean presidential Bill,   not fending-off-an-amorous-dog Bill.

Jess,  who also has a mattress in her living room, has mastered the art of disregarding it. That’s where I’d like to be, but the mattress is creating a low-level hum of crazy for me, on account of the OCD. I imagine that Steve harbors this same low-level hum of crazy for the giant photo leaning against the couch, which also creates a level of guilt for me on top of the crazy, so it's really fun being me right now.

And so while I did my morning workout, I distracted myself from the pain, suffering and wheezing by mentally conjuring up ways to rearrange the apartment so that I can achieve Jess’s way of rising above it. I'm very excited for Saturday, because that's when Project Zen Design will officially be underway.

In case you haven't noticed because aliens gave you a lobotomy, I'm a self-help junky, and I'm constantly working on some self-improvement project or another.  The latest in my string of self-improvement jobs is four goals that I'm working on simultaneously.
1. Give up the nightly wine habit. (check.)
2. Turn the apartment into a serene setting worthy of magazine coverage. (not even close.)
3. Train for a 10 mile race. (Hold me, I'm frightened.)
4. Revise and polish my novel. (w00t)

Trying to tackle all four of these things at once is akin to riding a four-seater tandem bicycle in a race against myself that has no end. Several times a day, I need to climb backwards and forwards across the handlebars so that all four seats are in use.

Giving up the nightly wine habit has come first, since once I have my wine with my dinner, I'm ready to faceplant in the bed. If I didn't live with Steve, I'd wake up in my work clothes at 3 a.m. with the lights on, and then I'd have to get up and peel my contacts off my dried out eyeballs. Obviously, this situation isn't conducive to my Zen design project, running, or the book. So the wine goes out the window first. Then everything else should fall into place, right?

Yeah, not so much.

Of course, I immediately picked up an alternative habit to the wine, and that's stuffing my face. However, this hasn't been entirely bad, because it certainly moved my daily work-out to the top rung of the ladder, since I need to run faster to stay ahead of my mouth and its ambitions of world domination by eating everything that isn't nailed down.

The next project to get my full attention will be Zen design, since I should be doing that rather than stuffing my face. I only need to carve out 20 minutes per evening, and I feel I’ll make good progress there. I’d best set a timer for those 20 minutes, otherwise, you know, I see something out of the corner of my eye, and yell, “Shiny things!” and then I’m off in some other direction and I’ve lost the plot entirely.

Speaking of plot … last, but never the least, it’s time to work out a schedule for polishing up the book. I’m thinking weekends are the obvious choice as a timeslot, what between all the running and the zenning, I’ll need big chunks of time to sit down and get lost in my writing so that I’m distracted from anything resembling food that’s lying around.

I have another plan that sounds slightly ridiculous, and I’ve toyed with picking up this new habit in the past, and frankly, I keep forgetting about it. But I would really love to pick up a voracious tea habit. Yes, tea.

Why tea?

Tea is an all-purpose substance. You can have some black or green tea in the morning for a pick-me-up. I could have a variety of herbal teas in the afternoon as a relaxing little tea-ceremony-type-ritual as the hairiness of the workday threatens to make me starting gnawing on the office furniture.

And then when I get home and I’m looking at my evening projects, I can have a cup of chamomile tea in lieu of the disorderly eating thing.

Soon I’ll be stretched out across all four seats of my tandem bike simultaneously.

Have any habits you want to break?

I'm really loving this Zen Habits web site that my friend Paula directed me to. I had been feeling sort of panicky lately, with our old bed sitting in the living room and the state of our home being slightly off-kilter. But the old bed isn't hurting anybody (while the new bed is totally amazing by the way), and so I can ignore the old bed leaning against the wall while I focus on other tasks that I need to accomplish in the interim.

I am really keen on making the place like a totally serene environment, with very few items gracing the surfaces. Since so much will have to be "put away", I also want those items to be perfectly organized so that I always know where everything is. I want to exercise my OCD and just run rampant and get rid of anything in the apartment that's not totally necessary.

I want all the clothes in my closet to be items that are flattering, and so I only want to keep the clothes that I love. Let me beat this into my skull: I don't need a volume of clothes. I only need to keep what works for me. I have a few outfits that I pull out time and again, try on during the scramble of my morning, decide I look BLAH ... and then for some reason, I hang this crap back up in the closet so that I can waste more time another morning when I don't know what to wear. It's time to make a break from that routine. I don't need an abundance of clothing. I only want to keep quality items. How many different ways can I say this to myself? Self, are you listening??

I think I got it now. 

This will probably sound like a no-brainer to most people, but I was completely taken by surprise recently when my tastes seem to have changed so dramatically and without warning. Shocker: 33-year-old Katie is completely uninterested in keeping relics produced by 23-year-old Katie. And now I’m surrounded by previously-cherished items that I suddenly Cannot. Get rid of. Fast enough.

I created a painting in college that has a bright pink background, and there are colorful candies scattered across the canvas. Towards the bottom of the painting is a big cigarette. Uh wha? Yeah, so this thing is sitting in my living room. And all of a sudden, I went from being proud of this thing (the painting looks like a photograph! I’m so talented!) to utter disgust. (Why is there something so hideous gracing our living room, and how soon can I get rid of it?)

This is coming on the heels of wanting to divest myself of my giant black and white photo that I’m falling more and more out of love with every moment that it sits on the floor as it leans against the back of the couch, waiting for someone to adopt it.

I also have a box of snapshots from college and a few years after that illustrate The Imbecile Years that were dedicated to partying and thinking I was cool. This used to be a box of fun memories to rummage though. But it is currently serving as a Box of Embarrassment Waiting to Happen, and I’ve decided it’s time to burn the evidence.

I never thought I would want to run out and buy a shredder and set up a proper filing cabinet and … just get my crap together. (Not that I've done this yet, but it's on my list.) This adulthood thing has just sprung up out of no where, although I know that isn’t true. I guess over the past year or so, the maturity has crept up on me, like a silent killer of any last trace of irresponsibility left in my veins.

The funny thing is, I feel kind of giddy about it.

(And while I’m busy bragging about how adult I am, um, please ignore this weekend’s post about the waffles. Thanks.)