Skip to main content

Clean Up

I was watching Oprah the other day--part of a week long series, Oprah's clean up your messy house--with Peter Walsh and Candace Olsen. They made surprise stops at a few people's apartments in NYC and got them cleaned up, tidied and organized.

Now this kills me. Your every bedroom surface is covered with clothes. Your kitchen is a germ infested pile of dirty dishes and over flowing garbage. The refrigerator is growing fuzzy green phosphoescent slime. And someone, a professional organizer, is needed to tell you to do laundry, fold/hang up your clothes, take out the garbage, wash dishes and clean the fridge. It's not that I don't know plenty of people who live like that, and it's certainly not that I haven't experienced the overwhelming inertia of life's clutter gotten out of control. (For me, at least, it's called depression and prozac helps alot.) It is, partly, that I wish I had had the smarts to see a niche for the professional organizer and develop that career path, but also that I don't understand the willingness to let TV cameras into the house to expose to the world one's inability to cope.

Okay, I know. Reality television is all the rage as we sink to the lowest common denominator. Messy houses are even less offensive than bachelors looking for true love, shallow housewives, trading spouses. (ICK!)

And, okay, maybe we are a tad on the obsessive side. Books on my shelves are alphabetical by author, then by title if we have multiple books by a favorite author.
Garden books all together, history books all together, cook books all together, of course. But it is definitely not OCD--we haven't instituted the Dewey decimal system.

Hmmm...could be it's a lot about kicking myself for not being bold enough to turn my "talents" into a career. I actually stopped watching Oprah for a period af time after she had Martha Stewart on a segment. Martha was showing people how to fold sheets. FOLD SHEETS! The woman is a multi industry mogul because she knows how to fold sheets. I know how to fold sheets and towels, too. My linen closet is as neat as a pin. I refold the sheets in our rental house within the first day of arrival. (Yes, obsessive, NOT cumpulsive.)

Here's the thing...I would love for the "clean up your messy house" crew to come to my home for a redo. It's not that my house is messy or out-of-control disorganized, but I would love to have all the matching containers, color coordinated "zones," and a general spruce up as a gift from Miss Oprah. Seriously, where's the reward for a good life??

NOTE: Please do not think I in anyway mean to denigrate sufferers of OCD. It is a terrible condition whose victims suffer immensely.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

I appreciate readers' comments so much. You don't even always have to agree with me.

Popular posts from this blog

It's TIme

 It's been a while since I have posted anything and even my reading your posts is falling by the wayside. I am in Florida now. I have a yard where little attention was spent on landscaping for the past years so I am slowly and (somewhat) methodically addressing that. I also volunteer to work at the pollinator garden and the edible garden I helped install at the UU grounds and I took over the volunteer job of cleaning out the overgrown community garden by my neighborhood mailboxes. The neighbor who was doing that got sick and could no longer attend to it. It's a bigger job than I'd thought at first -- not only overgrown with weeds, but the plants that are wanted there are in life and death competition for each others' spaces. And two walks a day, morning and evening, so Levi can keep up with addiction to canine social media and a daily rousing came of stick or ball midday take up another chunk of my time. I have a weekly meditation group that I co-facilitate, and my own ...
10 comments
Read more

New Furniture

 We went shopping for a new couch. I liked this one, the first store we went to. Of course it would be an impulse to buy the first one so we trekked around to other stores -- something we liked more, a better deal? No surprise that we ended up going back to that first store the next day and purchasing that couch for our living room. Also a matching love seat for the den where we watch TV. Because I had replaced my old love seat with two recliners. We couldn't keep three households worth of furniture after all. Well, my recliner was not big enough to accommodate both Levi and me. Poor boy had to watch TV from his bed on the floor. There! This is much better! Spoiled much? The little tail on the floor belongs to his toy squirrel, Buddy. It's like having a toddler with the need to be picking up toys or risk tripping over them. But his very favorite play thing is that bathmat that can be found anywhere but the bathroom floor.
10 comments
Read more

Walking

 I have always been a walker. Now that I have a high energy dog there is no excuse for not getting out there. And the weather is not an interfering factor here. Early morning and early evening are our preferred times so even when it gets hot we should be okay. We can get quite a long walk going around the neighborhood, greeting neighbors out working in their yards or walking their own dogs. But the landscape changes quickly just beyond the confines of the housing developments. It could be described as natural Florida or as sites of future housing developments. I do prefer the first option. And I really enjoy being out in natural areas so I often opt to head to a nature setting. I would have liked to put a picture here. Unfortunately my iPhone has made a unilateral decision. It will no longer be sending my photos to my computer. Why? I have no idea. However, we may be walking along happily enough -- me listening to the birds or trying to identify wildflowers and other plants while L...
10 comments
Read more