Outside Food

I've been on this kick lately of keeping things fairly neat and clean, although how long I will manage to keep it up is an open question. I hope I can do it indefinitely. After I vacuumed my room for the first time in a long time, I vowed to not eat in my bedroom anymore. It's convenient, sure. Probably it's too convenient. I don't want to be a hermit who only exits to cook food and use the bathroom. There's a lot I don't want that results from eating in my room.

Spills are a constant risk, however careful I may try to be. My room isn't set up to make that an easy thing to manage. It's an inevitability, and removing the food is the only thing that can change that. Even if I manage to prevent spills but keep the food, those smells seep into everything and linger. In the past I have opened the window and door in hopes of evacuating the smell, but this has met with limited success. The perfectly clean smell comes from not having the food there in the first place.

I sometimes forget my vow. Plenty of times I have sat down before my computer and taken a bite of something, only then to remember and frantically exit. A couple of times I have remembered only after the fact and felt convulsions of guilt and self-recrimination. I figure though that when it's truly not deliberate, I shouldn't feel so bad. There are a lot of things we do that are automatically triggered by long routines such as always eating in my room. I'm still breaking that cycle.

Maybe what I could do is act as if my room is an office and I am the subordinate who is charged with such duties as dispensing supplies and keeping the place in order. I would in that capacity be the bad cop making everyone eat only in the break room, except that "everyone" would also be me. I guess all that I could do would be to put a "No Food" sign on my own door in the hopes that I would spot it before unwittingly breaking my vow. That should work.