2001-01-05 - 23:59:49

Slahb's Disease - Please Give Generously

Okay, moving backwards still I'm now dealing with my second resolution, to try to keep the Hamster Palace a little neater and to try to be a more organized Uberhamster in general.

You know, it's a good thing that I don't have a webcam or something like that, or else all of you could see how messy the Hamster Palace is right now... although actually it's been getting gradually neater over the last few days.

Well, the reason for the mess is obvious: I'm a slob. What's worse, I'm a LAZY slob, which is the worst kind. I'm a victim of Slahb's disease - please give generously.

Keeping things neat and organized has been a consistent problem throughout my life. I remember as a little boy, my Mom constantly would be shouting at me to pick up my room, and I'd always be evading this task in a passive-aggressive sort of way. I was a pretty obedient child, but I would rebel in subtle ways - generally by being messy and constantly late. If you're still doing in your forties, I guess it's pretty much of a lifestyle.

I also have some issues with cleaning tasks. When I was a kid in school and at camp, kids were always punished by being made to clean stuff up. In elementary school, worst of all, the kids would vote on who became "lunchroom monitor" so the job of cleaning up became not only a punishment but the result of a sort of reverse popularity contest. Yay, my classmates hate me, and I have to clean up their shit!

In addition, I don’t really feel as if I'm very good at cleaning things. A lot of times I feel that I'm doing a bad job - just smearing the dirt around instead of really cleaning it off.

Nearly everything I know about cleaning things I learned at summer camp. My parents never showed me how things need to be taken care of. I think it was partly because they were lazy, and partly because there seemed to be some sort of sexist notion floating around that housework was for girls. Whatever.

So, I don’t have many good feelings associated with cleaning stuff up. Still, things have not gotten too bad until recently.

The fact is, ever since Lily moved in, things have gotten progressively messier. I hope she won't be offended by me saying it, but Lily is also a victim of Slahb's disease. Like me, she seems to be allergic to putting things away. Since I'm such a king-messmaker I really have no cause to complain, and it's probably for the best that we are two-of-a-kind. Some neatnik female constantly shrieking at me to hang up my jacket would get on my nerves very quickly.

I've been living on my own for almost twenty years now, and I've developed a sort of style. I know that I'm a lazy slob, and I make allowances for it. The two major ways that I do that are by 1) making plans to thwart my slobbishness and, 2) Trying to not get things dirty in the first place!

When I lived by myself I had certain rules that I nearly always followed. All clothes, when taken off, stayed in the bedroom. This made them easier to collect when it was laundry time and saved me the embarrassment of kicking underwear under the couch when company showed up. No soda in cans, only in bottles. This has saved many nasty spills. Nearly all food, except for some snacks, is consumed in the kitchen. This limits the mess and also saves hunting all over the house for dishes and silverware.

I was (and am) a great one for drinking beverages out of the bottle or the carton while standing in front of the refrigerator. This is a typical male trait, I know. Hey, it saves washing a glass!

I'm not a slob, I'm conserving resources! That's the ticket!

On the other hand, Lily has less experience living by herself, she seems to have less ability keeping her sprawl under control. I'm constantly finding things in odd places like food wrappers, half-full glasses, dishes with dried food in them, unfinished cans of soda, and various items of clothing.

So Lily is less down with the tricks of how to keep messes from expanding out of control. However, there is something that the two of us have in common... and I'm not sure how to put it. It's a certain neurological condition. Let me give you an example.

I come up the stairs, laden down with papers and other items from the store. Coming in the kitchen door I spy Lily sitting on the living room couch and I give her a hug and a kiss. Then I sit down at the computer to check my email. Now, wait a minute... what happened to all the stuff that was in my hands when I came up the stairs? I have no idea! It somehow disappeared in between me coming in the door and hugging Lily. It's like my subconscious mind issued a command to my hands to put down whatever was in them, and the hands complied. But my conscious mind has NO IDEA where the things I had in my hands went.

I generally find items like this by simply checking handy flat surfaces around the apartment. Once all the flat surfaces are full of hastily discarded items, then the floor starts to fill up.

I guess the kindest term for it would be: absent-minded.

Try to imagine how much of my life I've spent looking for things. I think by now it's taken up an entire year of my life. Say, have any of you seen my car keys?

To be fair I think one of the reasons for the expending mess is that since there are now two people here, each of us is perhaps naively hoping that the other will magically turn into Martha Stewart and start cleaning up the detritus the other leaves behind. We have not settled whose responsibility it is to do various household tasks, so each of us assumes that the other will do the job.

Well... SOMEONE has to do the job... and it looks like it's going to be me. There's a number of reasons why I should be Housekeeper General, at least for now:

1) Lily is doing the vast majority of the cooking, something I am pretty inept at.

2) Lily is a full-time student who also acts in plays - she has less free time than I do.

3) She currently has a bad back - bending and stooping to pick up and clean up will definitely slow its healing process

4) Since this was my place two years before she moved in, I know where everything is, and where everything belongs

5) 90% of the crap lying around is mine anyway!

So I've been, slowly, trying to restore order around the Hamster Palace. I figure that if I devote an hour to it every day, eventually I'll get the apartment looking the way I like it. I'm slowly moving from the East end of the house to the West. I'm moving from the kitchen to the Library. So far the kitchen and the laundry room are looking better, now I think I may do some work in the Library.

Of course this doesn’t help the underlying problem - my basic lack of organization. I'm going to have to think of the best way to combat this. It may take a while.

You know, I was looking for a quote to conclude this entry, but I just can't find it. So, I'm going to have to paraphrase:

Life is too short to waste time doing housework. I've found that after four years or so you don't notice the dirt piling up any more. The important thing is to not lose your nerve! - Quentin Crisp