Clutteropolis

You know you need to start shaping up in the housecleaning department when a 4-year-old who's as oblivious and messy as any other comes into the kitchen, where you've just loaded the dishwasher before clearing and wiping the counter (and everything!), and he suspiciously asks, "Why's it so clean in here??!"

Let me clarify that his threatened tone seemed to indicate this was somehow a well-established sign that we would be dropping him off at the orphanage later that afternoon.

You might be thinking, "But Dan, I thought you rode the OCD dragon, and thus would have a spotlessly clean house for us to be jealous of?" Well, I assure you that my current roommates douse themselves in dragon repellent daily, so I am easily outmatched versus the controlled amount of the Demon Power I allow to seep through the pressure valve. This is not a force to be easily unleashed and recaged, before you suggest that I let it out to play for a week or so and then go back onto a strict maintenance system.

When living alone or otherwise having complete control over a space, I just keep things in balance by reminding myself frequently that perfection is not possible-- my ideal living area would look pretty unremarkably normal to the untrained eye. I don't like to Clean with a capital C because things can get out of hand for me easily, so I prefer to just live neatly so I don't really ever have to clean.

Moving is not helpful for this, and neither is living with people who just aren't wired this way. Not only do we have stacks of junk and half-filled boxes distributed throughout our house, dating back to just over a year ago when we moved here, but we've actually moved backwards by adding to the collection.

When school ended in June, we were blessed with the arrival of everything that would normally fill a classroom serving 15 special-needs pre-teenagers and the two adults teaching them, plus all the many assorted things that had been disappearing from our house over the course of 9 months.

And the blindsiding left hook to go along with that uppercut is the puppy that followed the other stuff home-- crap from retiring teachers desperate to lighten their own loads* at the expense of anyone naive** enough to do it for them.

A minor sample of the kind of thing we're left with, in addition to the usual boxes of unnecessary toys, old magazines, and if-I-knew-what-was-in-them-I'd-be-obligated-to-put-it-all-away, is as follows:

• Boxes with 20 copies of the same questionably-useful books.
• An assortment of 30-year-old Tupperware bowls with no lids.
• Bags of old coffee mugs/potted plants (mold is a plant, right?).
• Milk crates filled with three-hole punches and other desk junk, inexplicably including four (yes, four) staplers of various shapes and sizes (always advisable with a toddler in the house).
• Half a box of "ladies" shaving cream samples, for the hairier children in school.
• A bunch of stupid signs and posters with cartoon characters trying to teach me things I already know.

All I can say is at least as far as this goes, I'm glad school has started again, because I've finally gotten most of this stuff out of the house now. However, the resulting empty boxes combined with our usual piles still blew the phone repairman's mind yesterday when I insisted to him that we had been living in this very same apartment with a working phone for over a year, give or take a couple of his company's screwups.

All I can say, upon reflection, is that somebody really needs to straighten things up around here. Whatever happened to my live-in maid service?


* Don't think for a second that I blame them for this, nor that J- won't be doing the same thing someday.

** Whenever the universe calls for naivete, you must know that we will be there. You can sleep soundly tonight and all nights hence, knowing that we will always answer this call and stumble foolishly into harm's way.