February is nuts for me. From the first of the month to the second week in March no two weeks have congruent schedules, I’m constantly in and out of town—it feels like I’m riding a mammoth wave, trying my best to balance on nothing more substantial than water. Just in general (though especially when I find myself so busy and all over the place) I tend to vacillate between the paradigm of organization and quite the opposite. One day I’ll be on-point: everything in its place—no dishes in the drying rack or stray laundry draping over a chair, my planner full of neatly crossed-out and therefore accomplished tasks—illustrating the whole clean house clean mind kind of thing. But then an extra anthology harmlessly gets left on my kitchen table, random pens or coins start to materialize on my shoe rack, and a blizzard of miscellaneous handouts rapidly begins to accumulate before I even know what’s going on. A film of dust suddenly coats everything, acting like its been there all along but I swear I just swept a few days ago… flurries of dust fuzzies creep along the edges of furniture, strategically planning their takeover of my apartment.
My newly renovated place came with some pretty strict guidelines in terms of how exactly I am allowed to utilize my living space. Along with not being able to keep a bike in it or affix things to the newly white-washed walls, are the explicit boldfaced instructions not to “movie the furniture.” Maybe it’s because even looking at some of the pieces threatens to break them, or because management had their own feng shui plan in mind when they originally set the place up. Whatever the reason, I’ve been a pretty compliant tenant thus far.
Saturday morning however, I woke up badly in need of some grounding and planning on doing a little tidying—maybe wash my floors, organize some of the clutter, etc. Still clad in my pajamas, after my morning cup of joe and a perusal of an old issue of “The Economist,” I decided to tackle the most superficial level of cleaning—sweeping. With the intention of doing an especially thorough job I performed the forbidden task of slightly nudging my couch-like twin bed over about an inch to discover a line of debris that my broom has just missed during previous cleanings. I nudged it again, a little more this time, to find yet more surface area that had been providing asylum to dust and whatever else accumulates under people’s beds. Before I even realized what I was doing I found myself in the midst of a full-scale “movie of the furniture.”
Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t live in a Pottery Barn catalogue apartment, my place is not tricked out with IKEA accessories. Out of the few articles of furniture I do have pretty much nothing matches, unless you consider blonde plywood a style, or count the three complimentary blue tablecloths CSM provided for artsy draping. I sort of have a running bet with myself over when some of the furniture is just going to break (my favorite chair already did). Therefore rearranging wasn’t the most labor intensive task ever.
The second I started pushing things around the room though I begun to feel better. I discovered and utilized the secret-surprise storage space under my bed, thereby clearing off a small side table which was previously used for nothing more than apparently seeing how high I could stack piles of books, papers, and notebooks. Now I finally have a desk to work at. I used to just use my kitchen table, but like I said before, it quickly became overwhelmed with and confused by conflicting materials—I constantly had to push my computer out of way or risk spilling/dripping food on it, and I often found it hard to focus or do work while sitting there anyways. Is this work time or play time?
My most excellent rearranging didn’t just involve moving furniture—the huge paper purge I performed instantly made me feel lighter. I tend to be a pack-rat; I hate to throw stuff away in the event that I might sort of need it in the future, or I sometimes find myself over sentimentalizing things, like some cards from Christmas presents that said, “Merry Christmas Whitney,” or my nametag from the special Thanksgiving dinner we had. But if I hang on to every little slip of paper that says “Whitney Medved” on it for the next year and half, I’m going to need a suitcase just for those. And do I really need the paper snowflakes we made in class before Christmas break? I decided that I need to adapt a much more hard-line approach: have I used/thought about it in the last 30 days? Is it really important? If not, it’s out of here. While I didn’t have my mom’s token paper shredder, I did find myself ripping slips of paper into tiny shreds, both when it was and was not necessary. We really do become our parents.
After I had rearranged, paper-purged, and swept up all the residual dust, it was time to really make the place sparkle. Even though I don’t do it that frequently, washing my floors might be one of my favorite household chores. It is also the most physically demanding. I’m too cheap to invest in a plastic bucket for the soapy water, so I just stop up the bathroom sink (the square footage of my apartment is so small that the size of the basin really suffices, and I don’t do it that often). I also don’t have a mop, because the crappy one that I inherited in the beginning of the year snapped in half during one particularly vigorous scrubbing. The washcloth I use now actually works much better, especially when I assume the position on my hands and knees. You can really put a lot more leverage into scrubbing floors this way—I’m talking full shoulder extension. Sometimes I even find myself splayed out on my stomach with one arm jammed into a hard-to-reach corner and my opposite leg fully extended, looking for that extra reach. Anyways, once I start on my floors I undergo this complete transformation.
I must be a little OCD, because while I scrub I use the faux wood grain of my linoleum floors and articles of furniture for check-points or boundaries of the area I need to cover in between rag rinses—Ok, I’ll get this corner up through the foot of the bed…this time I’ll go in a straight line from the end of the wardrobe across the room to the edge of the door frame. Picture me crawling around in my miss-matched pajamas with my house flip-flops on, my crazy hair thrown up in a lopsided bun, glasses repeatedly slipping down the bridge of my nose as my face starts to lightly perspire, and my un-supported chest swinging as I rock back and forth furiously scrubbing, all the while alternating direction and length of strokes. I even find myself counting in my head sometimes. Weird….
In the recent article “The joy of dirt,” from “The Economist,” a collection of essays all about crazy ladies and their cleaning obsessions is mentioned. The editor of the collection sums up our hang up with cleanliness saying, “we make sense of our lives, sort out our messes, restore order to psyches, work out our anger and frustration, rediscover the beauty in our lives, and express our love for (and resentment toward) others.” (132) Now, judging but what I told you about my cyclical feeling of suddenly finding myself in the aftermath of an A bomb-like explosion, I think we can hardly say I am “obsessed” with cleaning. But whenever I do go on one of my benders I’m pretty sure the emotional and psychological effects I experience match the above description almost point for point. My schedule might [still] be out of control, but at least I know when I come home at the end of the day my environment, and therefore my life, isn’t.
I still kind of suck at cleaning the bathroom though.
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