en•tro•py
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a thermodynamic quantity representing the unavailability of a system’s thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work, often interpreted as the degree of disorder or randomness in the system.
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lack of order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder.
I do not think much about thermodynamic quantities; the thermal energy of systems (whether available or unavailable for conversion into mechanical work) is not where I live, at least not consciously. But I admit to being bothered by lack of order/predictability, and by any decline (gradual or otherwise) into disorder wherever I observe it.
Last year I indulged myself by sorting, folding, and neatly stacking the towels in our Tempe rental, thereby rolling back the disorder that had accumulated across a succession of renters. Hey, everyone needs a hobby. I documented the result.
2025 Mar – How it started
I also amused myself by speculating whether this imposed order would hold up in the year we were absent. In the main linen closet, it held up pretty well. Not perfectly, but pretty well.
2026 Jan – How it’s going
But there was another closet: one with irregularly sized pool/hot-tub towels. And I mean irregular: some were about the size of a standard bath towel while some were seemingly designed for a natage à trois. After some experimentation (with the towels, not with group hot-tubbing) I settled on folding them into roughly equivalent widths and then rolling them into adjacent-to-neat bundles.
2025 Mar – How it started
I figured that this system would be more vulnerable to disruption than the more-or-less standard-sized bath towels, traditionally folded, and so it was.
2026 Jan – How it’s going
You can still see the underlying organizing principle, especially if you know what you’re looking for, but the discipline of the original configuration has slipped. One towel is now folded, not rolled; some have lost their standard width; some formerly tight rolls have relaxed almost into shapelessness; and back in the corner, some (oh, the horror) seem to have just been stuffed up onto the shelf.
Does it matter? Not at all, but it shows how tricky it can be to maintain a system — any system, even one as simple as a stack of towels — when the member elements aren’t standard and neither are the maintainers. Between them, the renters and the housekeeping staff managed to maintain the order in the closet of regular towels, at least partly, I expect, because they could see the target at a glance. They lost the fight against entropy when it came to the pool towels because the target was less obvious and the method was more complicated.
It brings to mind the silent yet obvious systems we all interact with collectively:
- shopping-cart corrals
- condiment and cutlery counters at fast-food restaurants
- racks of clothing in stores
- packaged food in grocery stores
- books on bookstore and library shelves
- yarn on various unfairly enticing displays
Most of the time, the organizing principle is obvious and simple, whether it’s type/artist, brand, style, colour, size, or some combination of those in an equally obvious hierarchy.
All women’s discount clothing in this part of the store;
all pants on this rack, sorted by size with dividing markers stating that size.
Within each size category, we sort by colour or brand if time allows.
Their specific choices might not be the way I’d fold the towels, as it were, but I can usually see what they’re doing and I can help to maintain it, even if that just means not making things worse. And so I return the pants that were too short to the same place I found them, or to the right rack but hanging at the end so it’s clear they need proper re-filing, or at least to the right section of the store.
Indeed, depending on how clear the system is, how close it is to being perfectly executed, I might even move that novel by Robert Heinlein that I stumbled across under Fiction-R to Fiction-H.
However actively I interact with these systems–and it varies by the system and the day–their very existence is a marvel, a resistance to disorder by individuals and by society collectively, based on learning (and remembering!) which approaches work and which don’t. And it’s a marvel that I have the opportunity to push back against entropy, even if I don’t think of it in those terms exactly. A gradual decline into disorder may be inevitable at the level of the heat-death of the universe: at the level of my day-to-day, it’s a choice.
