Far from Godliness

I spent much of the day yesterday cleaning my house, so naturally, it's a mess.

How does this happen? There was some serious effort, like, several hours' worth, put in to attacking the clutter in my house, the innumerable piles of crap that grow all around. The most prevalent locations for these cancerous clusters of junk seem to be table and dresser tops and the floor near doors and windows. Maybe if we kept the piles away from sunlight, they wouldn't grow as fast. Works for houseplants...

I know how the messes get there. Put simply, we have more stuff than we have room. And after Christmas? Forget it. Over the course of a few joyous days, we manage to drastically increase the amount of stuff, most of which we don't need. This year was actually much better, because everyone is poor (or everyone who any of us might be getting gifts from anyway), so we didn't get as many presents as in past years. But nonetheless, we still have all this stuff that doesn't have a home in our home.

On a side note, I wonder if that's not unique to people like us, who live in a small house. I wonder if the amount of crap and clutter that a person or a family possesses is directly proportional to the size of their domicile. Of course you can't make generalizations for everyone, but I suspect that even if we doubled or tripled our square footage, we'd still have things that don't have a place. We'd be sitting in our expansive house going, "where the heck are we gonna put another vanilla scented candle?"

A simple solution to this problem would be to--wait for it--get rid of some stuff. But I can't do that. Seriously, I think I may be genetically predisposed to packrattiness (packrattany? Ooh, ooh, packrattitude!). Even if this condition of chronic hoarding is not a product of nature, it has most certainly been nurtured by a lifetime of "I might need this someday" mentality. I guess when you aren't someone who can just up and buy whatever you want or need when you want or need it (and most of the people I know fit into this category. They're the same people who couldn't afford to buy me gifts this year for Christmas!), then it's natural for you not to want to let go of things because, hey, one less thing to buy later.

In my experience, there have certainly been plenty of things that I've held onto for months or even years, that, when I come across them again, I wonder why the hell I kept them in the first place, but on the other hand, there have also been just enough times when I've tossed something--a kitchen gadget, a DVD, an article of clothing--only to find myself needing it, like, moments after chucking it out, that I feel I can reasonably justify keeping everything, if for no other reason than to avoid the embarrassment of chasing the garbage truck down the street, waving my arms for it to stop, so I can pull the jettisoned item back into my safe possession. (I hope you realize that was an exaggeration inserted to for dramatic effect; I've never chased a garbage truck down the street. I have, however, pulled stuff out of the trash/recycle bins moments before they were dumped into the truck. I know. I have a problem.)

So, back to the mess in my house.... Summing up, we have more stuff than we have room, and we--okay, I--have an aversion to getting rid of things. So what ends up happening is the continual relocation of piles. Maybe you're familiar with this phenomenon. For example, I will have a stack of papers, books, and magazines on the computer desk. Sometimes, if the internet is particularly slow that day, I may go through this stack and sort it into smaller stacks--stuff I intend to file, stuff I want to look up more about on the internet, stuff I need to respond to, etc.--which I will then re-stack into a single pile, feeling very satisfied with myself. And the pile will sit there, growing, until one day, UH-OH!, we're having guests over. Well shoot. If we're having visitors, I need to clean off the computer desk, because if people are going to be in our house, they might want to go into our kitchen, or more critically, we might decide to go out the door into the backyard, and if either of those things happens, they will see the computer desk. So do I, at this time, go through the pile and file things and Google other things and respond to more things? No, of course not. I pick up the pile, throw it into a laundry basket with piles from other rooms, and I put the whole thing in the garage. Then, a few months later, when we can't make our way through the garage anymore, we'll go through all the piles out there, find the laundry basket, and move everything back into the house. It's an ugly cycle, and one that I can't, for the life of me, seem to break.

But, at the end of my cleaning day, I'm comfortable in my own little realm of organized chaos. Always have been. Just ask some of the things piled in my garage. They've been with me since the beginning.