Saturday, May 21, 2005
(4:59 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Cleanliness
This past week, the house has been more cluttered than usual, and I think that made me more irritable than usual. I have never had any roommates who were not prone to clutter, so I hope that no one will take that as a passive-aggressive attack on Anthony and Hayley. I am excessively anti-prone to clutter. When I get into a car that is full of stuff, where things have to be swept onto the floor to make room for passengers, I literally do not understand what could have caused that situation. My car has nothing in it at all, aside from a CD wallet and some change, and a couple "emergency" type items behind the seat -- a flashlight, a road atlas, a blanket.It would never even occur to me to leave things in the car to pick up "later," because in my experience, "later" (for those who habitually defer simple tasks that take two seconds to perform) is synonymous with "when things are so messy that I can't stand it and have to take a couple hours making a big production out of cleaning." This definition of "later" virtually guarantees that one will not "learn one's lesson" and develop habits oriented toward general tidiness -- understandably, one associates any kind of cleaning- or tidying-related task with what a huge pain in the ass it was to clean out your car for hours. One naturally wants to avoid such a huge pain in the ass, so -- "later."
I read about a self-help plan in The New Yorker called "Getting Things Done." It included a simple principle, similar to what I'm advancing here -- don't put off small tasks until they become a huge mountain. Yes, it's relatively unimportant whether one's dining room table has a couple things sitting on it that you just forgot to put away, but if you get into the habit of parking stuff there and only putting it away "later," your table is going to be constantly cluttered and will not be a welcoming space for when you actually want to do something on the table (such as press your tits on it). So get in the habit of putting stuff away. And stop just throwing stuff on the floor. And when you put the groceries away, don't leave the bags sitting on the table and the floor. And don't leave your mail distributed throughout the entire house. And don't just leave empty envelopes on the coffee table. And I could go on.
One does reach a point of diminished returns. I did that today. Anthony and Hayley were gone, so I did what I have always done, during my entire adult life, when I have lived with a lot of different roommates, none of whom were as tidy as me -- I cleaned up. Not thoroughly, not "anally." The shower was not cleaned today, for instance. I did not "dust." I flipped over the futon cushion so as to hide the huge mounds of cat hair, rather than remove the cat hair (by the time I decide to flip it again, the cat hair will have fallen off the bottom side -- a good system, until the time comes to sweep under the futon, which I saved for "later"). The windows remain unwashed.
This whole process just took a couple hours -- sweep and mop the floors, brush out the toilet, do the dishes, no big deal. I also washed the towels and the floormats and made the sink sparkling white. I have kept up to the second on my e-mail and on everything that comes in on my RSS feeds. I keep expecting that once all these little tasks have been achieved -- once the dishes are all done and put away, once the dining room table is cleared off, etc. -- this space for doing the "real stuff" will open up. It hasn't, though. All I'm doing is small stuff, or more accurately, all I'm doing is walking back and forth through the house, looking for small stuff to do. I've now taken it upon myself to drink "enough" water, by health-nut standards, which makes me have to pee a lot -- something to do!
I was led to believe that the tidy habits that were incessantly grilled into me as a child -- for instance, my mom demanded that my dad and I sit down when we went to the bathroom, to reduce splashing, and she really would have preferred it if we would wipe out the sink after each time that we used it, and my grandma was even worse, though now that I live far away and never see them and are never seen by them, both of them have lightened up considerably in the face of reality -- made me morally superior to other people. I thought, therefore, that some kind of reward would follow from the appropriately tidy behavior -- like maybe my house would start to feel like this really great place to get some work done. It doesn't, though. A really super clean house feels like a place where you do nothing, because no one lives there. The point is to keep everything put away, touching it only to remove the dust that inevitably gathers.
This is why I should never live alone. I need an inherent obstacle. I need to live with some "slobs" (and who, compared to me, is not a slob? The only people who could possibly view me as a slob are my mom and grandma, who are now slobs according to the standards that they imposed on me), so that the project of totalitarian cleanliness never appears to be feasible. So Anthony and Hayley -- and Pippin, Maizie, Sid, Soren, Zarathustra, and Meep -- and Jared, Jesse, Justin, Richard, Kari, Brett, Tara, Kevin, Robb, Mark, Adam, Kyle -- I hope you don't take it personally that sometimes I have bitched about the messes you leave lying around. I always make sure to reproach myself for it afterward. This is all part of the process -- I think this is something I can get over, with some help.
