Howdy everyone,
Today I took a much needed break from not working and stayed home all day with my dog. I am happy to say that I accomplished nothing more profound than receiving a package over the previous five hours.
All right, I’m lying. I wish I had spent the day reveling in sloth. Instead, I ended up spending most of the day cleaning. I am terribly ambivalent regarding irresponsibility. Even when I try to act as if possessed by a devil-may-care insouciance I end up doing something lame like washing the floors.
My impulse toward industriousness arose when I realized that I only had three weeks left before my wife and I will have a houseguest. At that time a prospective student will stay with us while she is interviewed for admission into my graduate school program. Typically we don’t let people see our apartment until they know us fairly well. By that time they expect the insanity with which are confronted. My perfect plan of eating junk food and napping with my perpetually tired dog was compromised by the fear that a stranger might actually see what my apartment looks like most of the time. Oh no, this will not do. Clearly I had to take decisive action.
I know what you are thinking; three weeks is a long time away. You have plenty of time to erect your façade of organization and cleanliness next week. Not so. It will take us at least three weeks to figure out all of the things that orderly people do to their apartments to make them orderly. Neither my wife nor I have an innate sense of order. We just don’t understand how reasonable people organize things. For two months we stored our tea in the laundry room – not because we were looking for a better place or we were too lazy to move it – because it didn’t really strike us as a problem! In our previous apartment we stored our spare towels under the desk for similar reasons.
So I spent several hours pretending to be neat today. I did things that seemed neat to me like washing the baseboards and dusting CDs. And even though I spent a great deal of effort trying to hide my true nature, I am sure that somehow I have failed. I am sure that there is some monument to my disorganization sitting in the middle of my living room that will be immediately noticed by my unprepared guest. She’ll say something like, “what an unusual place to store fruit” and I will realize my deception has failed. I know this now, and yet I am compelled to spend the next few weeks battling the inevitable. I think there is a existential lesson in all of this, but I can’t dwell upon it right now. I’ve got to put all of the wine in the linen closet where it belongs.
BTW – I probably won’t be updating this before Monday, so happy Valentine’s Day.
Today I took a much needed break from not working and stayed home all day with my dog. I am happy to say that I accomplished nothing more profound than receiving a package over the previous five hours.
All right, I’m lying. I wish I had spent the day reveling in sloth. Instead, I ended up spending most of the day cleaning. I am terribly ambivalent regarding irresponsibility. Even when I try to act as if possessed by a devil-may-care insouciance I end up doing something lame like washing the floors.
My impulse toward industriousness arose when I realized that I only had three weeks left before my wife and I will have a houseguest. At that time a prospective student will stay with us while she is interviewed for admission into my graduate school program. Typically we don’t let people see our apartment until they know us fairly well. By that time they expect the insanity with which are confronted. My perfect plan of eating junk food and napping with my perpetually tired dog was compromised by the fear that a stranger might actually see what my apartment looks like most of the time. Oh no, this will not do. Clearly I had to take decisive action.
I know what you are thinking; three weeks is a long time away. You have plenty of time to erect your façade of organization and cleanliness next week. Not so. It will take us at least three weeks to figure out all of the things that orderly people do to their apartments to make them orderly. Neither my wife nor I have an innate sense of order. We just don’t understand how reasonable people organize things. For two months we stored our tea in the laundry room – not because we were looking for a better place or we were too lazy to move it – because it didn’t really strike us as a problem! In our previous apartment we stored our spare towels under the desk for similar reasons.
So I spent several hours pretending to be neat today. I did things that seemed neat to me like washing the baseboards and dusting CDs. And even though I spent a great deal of effort trying to hide my true nature, I am sure that somehow I have failed. I am sure that there is some monument to my disorganization sitting in the middle of my living room that will be immediately noticed by my unprepared guest. She’ll say something like, “what an unusual place to store fruit” and I will realize my deception has failed. I know this now, and yet I am compelled to spend the next few weeks battling the inevitable. I think there is a existential lesson in all of this, but I can’t dwell upon it right now. I’ve got to put all of the wine in the linen closet where it belongs.
BTW – I probably won’t be updating this before Monday, so happy Valentine’s Day.
posted by Bartleby the Student at 1:42 PM
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