When Two Students Marry

As our first wedding anniversary quickly approaches (August 16), so too does the first anniversary of our life in our 500 sq ft apartment. Allow us to elaborate on the demise of organization that follows when two students—working toward the same degree no less!—marry one another.

When Brian moved to New York two years ago, he left a great deal of his Cincinnati paperwork with Jess in Ohio. Jess subsequently piled much of this paperwork in boxes and put it in storage, along with multiple boxes of her own graduate and undergraduate paperwork. Meanwhile, both Brian and Jess continued to accrue more and more paperwork as they finished their graduate studies. When it came time for Jess to move to New York, the boxes of Brian's paperwork came out of storage and were combined with boxes of Jess's paperwork, only to be combined again with new boxes of Brian's paperwork already in New York.

Needless to say, the organizational predicament we find ourselves in is as messy as it is confusing. After a wedding and a move across country, neither of us felt like sorting through all the paperwork, so we literally threw it all into newer, "fancier" (=Ikea) boxes, which have been sitting in our living room, untouched for nearly 12 months.

The situation would no doubt have been easier to handle if it was simply a matter of sorting and tidying every box. Unfortunately, the most daunting problem we faced was weeding out the countless duplicates of paperwork stemming from 9 years of taking virtually all the same classes! If only we'd married our first year of grad school, then we'd only have 2 Harold Powers articles instead of 4, only 1 photocopy of chps. 1-9 of Christopher Hasty's Meter as Rhythm instead of 2, and only 54 David Lewin articles instead of 108...wait...how many Lewin articles are there?!

For nearly six hours we sorted, and tossed, and labeled, and alphabetized, and chronologitized, until eight boxes became only three! With a little help from Ikea, we put up new shelving, and voilà, we now toast to one year of marriage and only one copy of all things music theory!

Before . . .


And after . . .