The Carpet Again

It is awfully nice to have a nice, clean carpet. Carpets do feel good on the bare feet, but not if it starts to get dirty. I have some bad habits, and the carpet in my bedroom gets dirty due to my way of eating in there a lot. I've never spilled something catastrophic, but crumbs are always coming down on the carpet no matter what you do. I really should make an effort to eat in the living room (which is the best option in the absence of a functioning dining room), but that is a work in progress.

Compounding the problem of crumbs on the carpet, (in addition to feathers from my terrible pillow and other things) I am always very slow to vacuum. In fact, for a long time we in my apartment lacked one entirely, but even having one I have been bad about using it.There it will be by the common closet, and there will be bits of cheese crackers on my floor drawing the insects that presumably draw the spiders, and I often do nothing about it.

Memories Of Shiftless Adolescence

When I was in middle school, I had to take a home economics class. It was a very good thing for me to do, although the habits they sought to instill in us didn't stick for me. That doesn't mean that I was then or am now deliberately resistant to cooking, cleaning or the mending of clothes. It means more that I have lacked the discipline and the general wherewithal to apply what they taught, much as I have wanted to.

I have some fond memories and keepsakes.Our class time coincided with the daily broadcast of Sheri Lewis' show "Lamb Chop's Sing-A-Long", and we enthusiastically (if a bit ironically) watched that every day as we labored, barring the days that we were in the kitchen. As we watched the aforementioned show, we sewed, and I was really bad at that. I spent the entire semester just trying to thread the machine, and our diligent teacher never noticed (or never intervened). I eventually made a little pillow, which I still have.

A Neat Space With All In Its Place

It is really not so tough to keep one's personal space clean. I've come to that conclusion lately, and maybe this is one of those getting older things. Being messy is less charming even as you're approaching your thirties, and then it just drops off a cliff. I don't make all the effort that I'd like or that others do, but I make a fair amount of effort. I think it's about always doing a little so that you never have to get Herculean about it.

Even now, I don't know if I could do it myself without some variation on a junk drawer. I don't have a drawer per se, but I have what amounts to the same thing. I have a paper grocery bag that contains a wire array of things which have no other place. I admit that's not a very elegant solution, but it does the job of containing a mess that would otherwise spread across the room. If only the debris field of a sunken ship could be so reigned in.

Trauma!

I had written out a whole other post, and was not entirely happy with it, as it was very much like more than one other previous one. I felt lousy about the idea that I was repeating myself like some terrible bore, but knew I had other things to do and was at a loss for something original. I was not about to go out and try to find inspiration, so I seemed stuck with what I had. I sighed and resigned myself to it before showering.

There was to be found something fresh! Now, I had been courting disaster by working down some of my toiletry items down to the last remnants, including my soap and toothpaste. As of this writing, the soap was gone, leaving me to brave some liquid body soap. The toothpaste was holding out. Still in question was my conditioner. There had been plenty the day before, and I knew there wasn't none. Would there be enough?

Digging Deep Just Before Sleep

We don't have the ability to travel through time, or at least we can't do that in any true, meaningful way. I've never been much for the notion of traveling forward in real time, or in the idea of the planet Earth as being a spacecraft of sorts. Those are cop-outs. Still, there are those things that feel like space travel, or like I began, like time travel. Opening a time capsule is something like that, if we assume that the past was damp and moldy.

My work area here in the "home office" is like traveling through time. I have a square table in one corner bracketed by two computer desks (which are for my laptop and desktop). Each of the three pieces of furniture enumerated becomes covered in layers of detritus of varying origins and grades of value. The whole space becomes like an archaeological dig, with strings and markers demarcating alone the lines of the above categories.

Doing It Dirty

We have a dishwasher here at the apartment (and, thwarting the old joke, none of us is married). That makes it easy to keep a reliable supply of clean dishes, or rather it should do that. Somehow it happens all too often that the thing that you need is dirty, or there are no more of that thing. Admittedly, I only have one coffee mug that I like, so that's my fault. Why, though, should we ever be out of clean plates when we are never out of detergent? I have no answer.

I do have an answer for how to proceed when you are out of such items. Of course you can get the dishes loaded and the machine going, but that takes a while. Who has such time? You can also hand-wash the one thing that you need, but then it is left wet and you can either wait for it to dry or dry it with something that will leave fibers and shreds of things on it. No, there is in truth just one course of action that will satisfy me.

Clean Getaway

A rare thing happened yesterday. It wasn't that I spent the whole day among friends, although that's not incredibly common. It wasn't even that I was at a baby shower (for the menfolk), although it was a first for me. No, the specific rare thing that I had happen was that I went about a whole day out of the house without showering. I know that's slovenly and unappealing to me, but rest assured that it was not by design.

The thing is that I had meant to get up a good couple hours before I needed to be out of the house. That is typical for me. I have the chance to shower and get ready at a relaxed pace, eating breakfast and getting my hair entirely dry before I even think about heading out. Well, for the second time in recent memory, I somehow slept through my alarm. I don't know how it happened. I had to have turned it off, and this after waking up a couple hours early and using the restroom.

Paper

There are a lot of little things that people buy that don't seem so essential on their own. I mostly have eschewed these things, but have come to appreciate more and more that while there may be a hundred household items that each can be dispensed with individually, you suffer from trying to do without the whole lot of it. I mean therefore to start buying these things and seeing whether they have the same outsized positive impact on my morale that the mere act of showering and dressing every day does.

Even the most inveterate bachelor values toilet paper (comical beer commercials in which they pass it up in favor of their drinking habit aside). I used to buy the cheapest, but now I go for your ritzy, soft two ply. That was the extent of the paper products I bought that weren't bound for the computer desk. I used the toilet paper for sneezing, and it really wore me down. When you're sick and blowing your nose every couple of minutes, it gets sore. I've put up with that for the last time.

Manos Rojas

Years ago, I'm sure I never had any personal interest in being too clean. I was a boy after all, and children tend to not see any strong personal incentive in being clean, or at least it does't seem to me that they did then. They rough-house and they cannot appreciate the delayed gratification that lies in eating a few minutes later in order to do so under sanitary conditions, for example. They would prefer to eat immediately and take their chances.

Being a grown man now, I have any number of reasons to be clean. It's expected of me, whereas latitude was granted to a boy of little maturity. I had better have clean hands in order to thrive personally and professionally. Even if it weren't for that, I very much prefer to be clean, being somewhat fastidious in very specific, narrow respects. An important consideration is that I now am the one who cleans up after myself.

A Wash

I generally make a good attempt at hygiene. I always make sure to wash my hands when necessary. As is so often the case, I became very diligent on this point not for myself but for my possessions. Now that phones and other electronic devices are blessed (or burdened) with touchscreens, those of us that have them must have clean, dry hands in order to use them. Doing so will give my phone a lot more life and me at least a little.

At home I sometimes wash with bar soap in the bathroom and sometimes with dish soap in the kitchen. In either case, I don't have any proper paper towels on hand, and so I use a variety of improvised techniques. Sometimes it's cloth towels, sometimes the pants I'm wearing, and sometimes it's just time. I appreciate that these aren't ideal methods, but at least I'm trying. You must admit that puts me ahead of many if not most.

Tidying Up

As you may have noticed if you've ever laid eyes on this blog's homepage before, there have been some changes. Those who know me and regularly gain entrance to my room are already aware that this is just one aspect of an entire wave of frenetic cleaning and organizing which overtook me at that time. This is a fairly regular, if infrequent, event for me. I just put up with clutter and general disorder until I can't put up with it. It's kind of like what they say about momentum in sports: It's something you have until you don't have it anymore.

From the moment I established the look of my blog as what it was until a few days ago, I realized that a three column layout was not really what I wanted. I made the best of it for a whole year only because I didn't want to go to the trouble of finding one which better served my needs. Many elements of content consequently resulted and grew stagnant. Finally, "I couldn't stands no more!" Just like that, it was all gone, and the dust cleared to reveal a two column layout containing the mere essence of what lay there before.

Cleaning Up Is Hard To Do/Yesterday Is Dead And Gone/Oh, I Believe In Yesterday

Lately, I have been doing rather well at being neat. After a long period of doing the bare minimum in all things housekeeping, I broke down and went to work on it. I had to clean the dishes in stages, as there were too many to dry them all at once. Once that was done, I cleaned up my room, and now can walk around it without fear of stepping in anything or tripping. The last thing was doing my laundry (for it had been a little too long). Now it's only a matter of keeping the ball rolling.

Going back to Tuesday: after I wrote my last post, I found myself out helping my roommate providing for the continued availability of clean water in our apartment. This brought us first to Target and second to Rite Aid (a drugstore). There have been two things I've been looking for, and have not had any luck. The first is an ink cartridge for my printer. For whatever reason, it's near impossible to get them locally. One can always order them online, which makes me think that virtually all the cartridges are on a single place, with just a handful physically delivered to other places without bought by a customer first. I have no desire to pay shipping charges for something I ought to be able to get here, and so remain without a cartridge.

The other thing was mustache wax. As relatively few human beings cultivate mustaches, the paraphernalia for such facial hair is very much a niche product. I had bought a tube of the wax years ago, but did not use it regularly until recently. It had just run out, and I was checking every store I went into in a bid to find some. I had no luck with this until last night, when I finally did find some. I was especially happy that the wax came with a little mustache comb, as my own had gone missing. Now I have the wax, the little comb and the scissors. Things are beginning to go my way.