Maybe my priorities are messed up--maybe I should try to clean a little every day and stay on top of the clutter situation--nip it in the bud. But I'm the kind of girl who occasionally realizes--while I'm brushing my teeth before bedtime--that I've gone the entire day without brushing my hair. Is it reasonable to expect that I should be proactive about cleaning the house when I can't even remember to detangle my own hair?
(I just realized that I haven't brushed my hair today. However--and if you've never had thick hair, you will think I'm crazy, and if you do have thick hair, you will be nodding in agreement at my next statement--I can't actually brush my hair right now. Well, I can try, and I can brush my way through most of it, but my hair is so thick that I cannot entirely remove all of the tangles. Even if, by some miracle, I am able to get my brush through all of my hair, the tangles form almost immediately. I have made a hair appointment for next week to have my hair thinned, but until then, it's bun season.)
Anyway. Back to cleaning.
Part of our problem comes from traveling clutter. Traveling clutter is stuff that does not belong anywhere, so you continue to move it to different places in your home with the hope that someone else will either throw it away or hide it so you don't have to think about it anymore. Examples of traveling clutter in our home include:
- Pieces of granite that we rescued from the leftover bin while on a trip to Vermont. We took their trash, transported it many miles to our own home, and now have no idea what to do with it. B has a strange sentimental attachment to the rock chunks so I can't throw them out, but I don't think that they make the nicest decorational items for a bedside table in our guest room, either.
- Organizational shelving from The Container Store. Everything from that store costs twice what you think it should, so once you buy it, you can never bring yourself to throw it out, even if you don't need it anymore. I bought something like 4 of these double-drawer shelving units for our pantry, but now we have Ikea shelving that does a way better job. What to do with the TCS shelving? No idea.
- Magazines. Oh, the magazines. When your frequent flier miles are about to expire, the airline sends you a message saying, "Don't let your miles go to waste! Get free magazine subscriptions!" You convince yourself that you will read 8 magazines a month for an entire year. And then they arrive in the mail and you don't open a single one, and you stack them on whatever flat surface area you can find until your blanket chest is covered in magazines, and the idea of opening it to add or remove an item is so daunting that you would rather go cold than figure out what to do with the magazines.
I've decided to take back control. I'm not going to clean my house every day, and I have come to accept having books strewn about in every room. But I'm throwing away those magazines! The Puritan voice in my head says, "But you haven't even taken them out of their plastic wrappers! You haven't opened any of them!" But I don't care! You have to draw the line somewhere, and in my life, there isn't room for Domino, Lucky, Jane (Jane! Unloved, cancelled magazine, how can I throw you out unread?! Surely I will be punished for this blasphemous decision but I suspect the former editors would applaud my "A girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do" attitude), and even Martha Stewart. Farewell, literary flotsam! Hello, simplification!
