9/14/2k2

I thought it would be funny to participate in this Top 5 Collab on housekeeping tips because I'm extremely messy and anything I could come up with would qualify as comedy. So let's see ...

1. Space out. No matter how messy a room is, leaving a visible space between any two things always improves the look of a room. Things arranged flush against each other suggests you've reached your limit (in space, sheer volume of stuff, and sanity.) Just pulling the dresser a few inches way from the bed, or the desk away from the wall, can make a big difference. It also forces you to confront the dust and whatever you've been stashing between/under those things.

2. Simplify. (Learned this one from an Anne Tyler novel.) Anything lying around can be classified as Keep, Discard, or Query. My adaptation: Make sure you only have one Query at a time. In order to put another thing in the Query, you have to decide whether to keep or discard the previous item. It's a simple but slow process.

3. Cleaning is good therapy. Just booted a boyfriend from Query to Discard? Clean. Lost your job? Clean. Can't stop eating? Clean. Cleaning a physical space can be a great way to clean out the muddy emotional corners of your life. The more you throw out, the more you can organize and straighten up, the more in control you feel of other things going on in your life. For me, this works for really big traumas, not small exasperations. One summer, when my two best friends were in Majuro and I was breaking up with someone, I took a weekend to clean my whole house -- in silence. The deeper I got into the years of accumulated junk, the better I felt. I didn't call anyone, didn't see anyone, didn't ask anyone's opinions on the crap that I was working out, I just cleaned. I got rid of a lot of things. I was truly amazed at the results. (Warning: therapeutic cleaning quickly stops being therapeutic when you get overzealous and throw away things you'll later regret tossing. But that's the risk you take when you throw anything away, I guess.)

4. Do not share a bathroom with one or more BOYS. (Having separate bathrooms is not only a good housekeeping tip, it's a marriage saver. Or so I hear.) OK, I know I just said I was the messy one, but where to me the bathroom (and all cleansing rituals) are sacred, to most guys it's just a place to er, unload, and maybe catch up on some reading. Clean or dirty, neat or cluttered, it's all the same to them. Case in point: If I shared a bathroom with Eugene's Brother, my bathroom would be a betta breeding lab/live food sanctuary that just happened to be equipped with a toilet and shower. As it is, I share a bathroom with two men who don't change anything on a regular basis except for their reading material. I have to hide my personal bar of soap, bath gels, shampoo, zit cream, you name it, lest they be found and depleted, and I can't leave anything of value (like a clean towel) unprotected -- think: the Dial commercial that assures you you're not as clean as you think you are. I've begged my mom again and again to let me share her bathroom and leave that one to the boys -- to no avail. I'm too messy, she says.

5. Change. Of course you should change your sheets and towels regularly, but occasionally it's good to also change stuff like the direction of your bed, the stuff on your walls, your basic furniture. If you can't change it, at least move it around. For me, boredom is fatal. When I get bored with my surroundings, I get writer's block and I can't stand being in my room. The little messes start breeding and multiplying because since I don't want to be there, I don't care if it's messy. So every so often I have to schedule a major leveling. Then again I don't know how accurate this one is, because I'm always moving stuff around and still my room is a mess. Maybe if my life were more traumatic, I'd have a neater room and my mom would be a happier person because I'd always be cleaning. Too bad for the room and my mom, I'm a basically happy person.

Well, Martha Stewart I'm not. But I think there are more important things to worry about than whether your floors are clean enough to eat off of or what the neighbors might think of my lack of feng shui. The bathroom, though ... I'll never back down on the bathroom ...