July 18, 2007:
Reality TV induced tidying
Somehow last night, my TV was on WE (I think Ron was watching a girls’ Thai boxing show beforehand?). There was a program about assorted nutjobs and neurotics (one of whom was a collector, not at all crazy, just a bit of an obsessive weirdo, perfectly acceptable in my book): germaphobe, body image nut, clean freak, the not-crazy mask collector lady–all of whom I could either dismiss, or, in the case of the clean freak, think, man, I’d sure like to bring her out here once a month (is there a ODC-Anon placement program?). And then the panicked, apologetic hoarder lady living in something between utter chaos and squalor came on. I gasped at her house, then kind of mentally panned out to my own room and realized, um, yeah. You’d better clean that shit up.
It’s still a big mess, but at least it’s not so strewn with so much yarn, so many knitting supplies, and such a vast sea of my own laundry, Ron’s laundry, and burlesque show costumes that you can barely see the floor. My room was looking like my college room–or worse, Tanya’s college room, which, at its funniest, was literally knee deep in clothing and concealing a secret pile of broken crockery behind the door.
With the burlesque show (see Kansas City Star’s brief writeup with video) wrapped up, I have a few weeks to TCB and tackle all the stuff I want to work on before I go on vacation.
Then last night, with Laurenn, I added something new to my calendar after vowing not to add anything new to my calendar for the rest of the year. As soon as she gets up, I’m going to have to tell her I can’t until the spring. It’s a shame, because I think it’s a great idea, and I don’t want to sit on it, but I simply won’t be able to meet my current responsibilities and I can’t keep filling in every single free block on the calendar and expect to maintain any semblance of mental health. As it is, I’m only very narrowly avoiding becoming the sad hoarder lady on WE–who, by the way, I have been, and am still much at risk of becoming again, except that I now have a VERY large home that is much harder to fill.
Today I’m going to make a list of all the chores that theoretically should be done regularly (not just frantically before events and guests), then I’m going to systematically start timing how long it takes to do them. I did this a long time ago, in Austin, and had a rather successful, if short-lived, affair with a dated and obsessive system called S.H.E. It stands for [something I can’t remember–scattered? scary? super-duper? sexy?] Home Executives and was the brainchild of two sloppy housewife sisters who were born-again into cleanliness and responsible time management with the aid of a big stack of index cards. It has a cult-like following, much like GTD and all the other obsessive systems that promise to fix your nutsy life. Anyway, I need to know exactly how long everything takes, both so I can do a better job of wedging in cleaning, and so I can better manage our work exchange residents, who have kind of been all over the place in how much work they actually do. I am a truly defective manager, and Ron’s no better. We’re so not The Man. I should read a book or something. Read, schmead–I should make a habit of buying self-help/organization books on iTunes. Hm. I may have just invented my own polio vaccine….
And at some point, I either need to update the Housewife or put her out of her misery. Only time will tell which one.
