I was squeezed into a space defined by two walls and two desks, my computer on one of the desks, facing one of the walls, where I had been spending more and more time writing fewer and fewer words. I moved the monitor and the keyboard to the other desk, so that I faced across the room and toward the door and felt immediately at ease; I began to breathe. Then I began threading and rethreading the maze of wireage: i.e., the monitor cord, printer cord, external drive cords, speaker cords, second monitor cord, power cords, power bar cords, lamp cords, mouse and keyboard cords, and several connective cords without any connections, which were simply there to be disentangled and then further entangled as I pressed on rearranging the desk and my life. In the end I discovered that the short cord to the second monitor provided a defining limit of any “ideal” arrangement: more adjustment was required, and then more adjustment after that, and more. Working within a constraint is good for the character and for postmodernism too, as we all know, so I turned to the internet for constraint advice and found a list of feng shui sites, each promising a particular reward for good desktop feng shui; i.e., success, money, happiness, love, etc., but, significantly, no promises for writing rewards of any kind. But for feng shui success in any area, I quickly learned, I would need to know my lucky feng shui positions, available through another website, where I had first to follow another link to learn my kua number, which turned out to be 8. And then back to the first link, which told me my lucky directions and the rewards to be found at each one (mine are: SW=$; NW=health; W=love; NE=spirit); all other directions will bring only bad luck, each in its own (unspecified) category. With those directions now clear to me, it remained to put things on my desk in their proper places on the compass rose. My lamp, for example, was to go in the upper left corner of my bagua, where it is of no use to me; the family photos were to be displayed in the northeast along with lucky charms, etc. Already the desk was getting crowded again; there were plenty more spots to fill. I scrolled through a list of feng shui desktop sites looking for one that showed a computer with two monitors (even the Feng Shui Your Computer into a Money Magnet site only showed a tiny laptop) when I came to the end of the list and stopped at a blog post called “Put That Bagua Map Down! And Step Away Slowly.” This was the advice that I needed. I connected the keyboard and began, as advised, to type away, slowly.