 |
| Oh Maxine! What a good idea! |
Almost every day of my life you will hear the words come out of my mouth, “I need to clean my house!" You would think that since I talk about it all the time that my house would be clean as a whistle and neat as a pin, right? Wrong! I HATE housework! Wash the dishes in the morning, and by supper time they are piled high in the sink. Clean the litter box, and the next day it’s full again. Wash clothes, and two days later you’ve nothing to wear. Sweep the floor and two minutes later step on a piece of something that didn’t get picked up. It’s horrible! It’s an exercise in futility exceeded only by the notion of resisting the Borg!
I am a procrastinator anyway. I think you should never put off till tomorrow what you can put off tilll next week, or forever for that matter. Now, you would think that since I know I don’t like to clean things that I would live a spartan existence, just a bed, one chair, one plate, etc. This is not the case. On the contrary, I am a packrat, a collector. I have collections of collections! I come by it naturally, of course. For example, when my mother moved in with my sister and sold the family home, the attic had to be emptied. We all knew the attic was full of stuff, but the sheer volume of “things” in that attic boggled the mind! To a neat freak, it would have been an opportunity to throw some junk away. To me, it’s an opportunity to bring more “collectables” into my home. Never mind the fact that most anything up there was bound to have mold, mildew, Black Widow and/or Brown Recluse spiders, and the possible stray alien egg on it. Never mind that lurking in the fiberglass between the rafters there may have been a heretofore unknown species breeding. Nevertheless, when I visited recently, I came home with my old dollhouse, (which still had all the pieces), tables, lamps I’ll never use, pictures of relatives I never knew, and a collection of fashion dolls all naked and headless. One of the people who was helping move things asked me if I had ever dealt with the problem of ripping off doll heads. I just smiled and walked away. He's lucky he still has HIS!
But now I’m home again and in the past 2 months I have bought 3 or 4 books on organizing. I don’t understand why organizing always costs money. I am thinking about writing a book called "Organizing the Stuff You Have with the Stuff You Have". Who has $300 to go out and buy a new closet organizer system? I sure as hell don’t! Even a plastic tote is $5. Multiply that by the number of them I would need to buy, and I could have enough cash back on my credit card to get me to Hawaii. Some day maybe I will buy some of those clear plastic boxes to put all my stuff in so at least I will KNOW what is in my closet that I will never use!
So for now, I do my own thing... cardboard boxes, boxes, and more boxes. I have boxes everywhere. On most of them is written what is in there, what was in there recently, and what was in there 5 years ago. I am even a packrat with boxes! Unless it’s falling apart I don’t throw it away. I just mark out the label, write something new, and put it back on the shelf. Then there is that old bane of existence, MAIL. Junk mail, bills, catalogs, whatever it is, always ends up in a pile. Before I know it, I have quite a collection of papers that need to be eliminated. So I make an “eliminate” pile, and it sits there till I get around to it, which is usually three to four months after they arrive. Sometimes, I find disconnect notices in that pile. In a panic, I'll go looking for a newer bill that will show that the disconnect is no longer a threat. Usually I can either find one showing that I've paid, or I'll frantically call the company and beg for an extension. I always wonder how I managed to only have my utilities disconnected a few times. Maybe the company has my name in one of their piles and hasn't found me yet. Or, maybe the person who schedules the disconnects is a packrat, too, and he/she understands.
I have tried before to ask people who have nice clean homes how to clean. I have inevitably received the same answer....hysterical laughter. People think I’m joking when I ask that. I don’t understand why I don’t know how to keep my house clean. So, when I ask, it's because I really want to know. I figure that out there is someone who did not have assigned chores when they were young, or who didn’t learn to clean from their mother or their grandmother or their nice neighbor. They had to learn it on their own. Somehow they were able to cut through the banality of cleaning to find the "true light of cleanliness", or something like that. This person would be able to pass their "light" on to me. My daughter learned to clean from one of her friends. She has tried to pass her "light" on to me, but I'm a slow learner in this case. She loves me, so she just shakes her head and smiles.
Here's the thing...Housework is repetitive. I don’t like to do the same thing over and over every day. Maybe I'm messy because I am truly adventurous. The everyday stuff pales in comparison to the new horizons I am seeking. Whatever! The truth is, I'm not disciplined enough to take care of messes while they are small. Plus, I am used to the mess, even though it's not as bad as it used to be. All I know is that if my house is too clean, I’m not comfortable. I start missing the pair of scissors that have been laying on the bookshelf for the past month. Where on earth did I put them? I am trying to fix something and need a hammer. Where is it? I can't find the cat toy that I always trip over. Now the cats are bored and are starting to eat the houseplants, which I just found behind the newspapers and other miscellaneous junk piled on the table. Judging from the looks of the plants, the cats knew where they were all along.
Once in a while, though, my daughter and I will have this huge burst of energy and will clean the entire house. The living room, kitchen and dining room will look so good that we want it to always look that way. We thought about taking pictures of the rooms, gluing them into sunglasses and making everyone who visits wear them. That way, we could actually keep the place messy but no one would be the wiser. It would be kind of like looking through rose-colored glasses, only they wouldn’t be able to see a damn thing. They would think our house was straight out of Better Homes and Gardens. Just the way I like it!
I said that we get into moods and clean the entire house. That is true with one exception–my bedroom. It is the repository for every reject thing from every other room in the house. I have things in there that I still don’t know where to put them. There could be a million dollars in unmarked bills in there, and I wouldn't know it. Usually stuff ends up in a box marked “Stuff” which is put on a shelf in my packed-to-the-gills closet. About a week later, we will need something, I’ll remember it’s in my room, drag "Stuff" out of my closet, and the mess starts up again because I: a)really want to go through it and sort things out, b)thought I saw an unmarked bill in there, or c) am too lazy to put it all back, because when I moved the box from the shelf, all the other boxes fell down to take it's place.
Laundry is horrible too. I try to wear my clothes more than once before I wash them, but I have this “shelf” on my upper body which catches everything from cracker crumbs to barbeque sauce. I wear something once, and if I don’t eat in it, I may be ok. However, if I have a meal of any sort, I’m bound to be washing it the next day. I do try to keep the pile of dirty clothes smaller these days, though. Once we had such a big pile of clothes on the floor, a friend of ours came over, walked down the hall, and vanished! The pile of clothes actually turned into a monster and ate him! Well, maybe not. He never did come back, though.
Like I said, I do a little better with cleaning, so it's not as bad as it used to be. I at least try to keep the dishes done up and I attempt to keep my little space in the living room clean. I do a lot of crafts, so there are always little pieces of fabric, thread, and the occasional needle all over the floor around where I sit. I call them my "droppings". I'm sort of like Pigpen in Charlie Brown comics. I have this cloud of stuff around me all the time. It’s part of who I am. Being a little messy is part of my charm. I'm too creative to care about having a super clean house. I have a magnet that says "Boring women have immaculate houses". I agree with that. However, I think from now on, my motto will be "Love me, love my droppings".
Mouse click in 3....2.....1....
