Treatises On Why I'm A Slob
This post was first made on October 17th, 2007, on Facebook.
Those of you who've known me for awhile will remember that I'm a pretty damn neurotic sort of guy. I like things clean and orderly. I like an uncluttered desk and a clear floor, cans and bottles stacked neatly in the recycling bin, the bed well made, and everything perfectly organized. Nothing makes me happier than walking into my dorm and seeing it perfectly neat and clean.
That's never happened, of course, because while I want to live in an Adrian Monk world of meticulous organization, I'm far too lazy to actually do all that work. The picture accompanying this article is of my recycling bin. Well, see, it's a picture of the general area where I assume my recycling bin is - I'm damn sure it's somewhere under all those recyclables. What sucks about living in the dorms is that when you take out the recycling, you have to painstakingly separate everything: bottles, cans, glossy paper, white paper, colored paper (remind me why we're segregating our recycling bins?). This is a royal pain in the ass, especially to a guy like me who has literally thousands of hot girlfriends, and thus no time to separate out his Aquafina bottles from his Diet Coke cans. I've been here for six weeks now, and I've emptied my recycling once. It's gotten to the point where when I'm done with a piece of paper or a plastic bottle, I just throw it underneath Desk Beta and hope for the best. Every morning I wake up and look at it and think, "You know what? Today's the day. I'm just going to spend an hour trucking that stuff downstairs and separating it, and then I'll be done." And then that night, as I go to sleep, I think, "You know what? Maybe this just isn't the right week to take out the recycling." I don't think there's any particular rush - it's not like recyclables decompose and attract rats or anything. If any rats did come and infest my aforementioned Diet Coke cans and Aquafina bottles, they'd probably be really clean, nerdy rats, and instead of crapping all over the place and eating my food they'd probably just use my TV to watch anime while I was asleep.
There's other stuff too - my jacket stays on my bed, instead of in the closet, and the various sheets of paper I accumulate in my academic life just get piled on my shelves. Every so often I go a little crazy and clean the whole thing up, but then things gradually get dirty again over the course of about a week. I start to make excuses for why I leave crap out. "Oh, why bother putting my Ibuprofen back in the drawer? I'll just leave it on the desk for the next time I have a headache." "Oh, what the hell, I'll just sleep with my jacket on the bed. It'll be that much easier to get to in the morning." "You know what? I'm going to leave that Nalgene bottle on the floor. I mean, it's bulletproof, for Christ's sake, what's the worst that could happen down there?" Before long, everything in my room has been set on top of something else. Sometimes, it results in my printer looking like a totally cool dude:
Eyyy!
Other times, it results in my $25 book of poems for Comparative Literature sliding into the netherworld between my bed and the wall. I haven't quite figured out how I'm going to get that back yet, because my bed is more or less bolted down (I guess university housing was afraid I was going to steal my bed).
This is the curse of being anal retentive and also seriously lazy: the lazy keeps anal retentive from organizing the room most of the time, and when anal retentive finally takes over for an hour and does, lazy is always there for the long haul to screw it all up again.
In the time it took to write this blog, Truman could have emptied his recycling five times or studied for his journalism midterm
Those of you who've known me for awhile will remember that I'm a pretty damn neurotic sort of guy. I like things clean and orderly. I like an uncluttered desk and a clear floor, cans and bottles stacked neatly in the recycling bin, the bed well made, and everything perfectly organized. Nothing makes me happier than walking into my dorm and seeing it perfectly neat and clean.
That's never happened, of course, because while I want to live in an Adrian Monk world of meticulous organization, I'm far too lazy to actually do all that work. The picture accompanying this article is of my recycling bin. Well, see, it's a picture of the general area where I assume my recycling bin is - I'm damn sure it's somewhere under all those recyclables. What sucks about living in the dorms is that when you take out the recycling, you have to painstakingly separate everything: bottles, cans, glossy paper, white paper, colored paper (remind me why we're segregating our recycling bins?). This is a royal pain in the ass, especially to a guy like me who has literally thousands of hot girlfriends, and thus no time to separate out his Aquafina bottles from his Diet Coke cans. I've been here for six weeks now, and I've emptied my recycling once. It's gotten to the point where when I'm done with a piece of paper or a plastic bottle, I just throw it underneath Desk Beta and hope for the best. Every morning I wake up and look at it and think, "You know what? Today's the day. I'm just going to spend an hour trucking that stuff downstairs and separating it, and then I'll be done." And then that night, as I go to sleep, I think, "You know what? Maybe this just isn't the right week to take out the recycling." I don't think there's any particular rush - it's not like recyclables decompose and attract rats or anything. If any rats did come and infest my aforementioned Diet Coke cans and Aquafina bottles, they'd probably be really clean, nerdy rats, and instead of crapping all over the place and eating my food they'd probably just use my TV to watch anime while I was asleep.
There's other stuff too - my jacket stays on my bed, instead of in the closet, and the various sheets of paper I accumulate in my academic life just get piled on my shelves. Every so often I go a little crazy and clean the whole thing up, but then things gradually get dirty again over the course of about a week. I start to make excuses for why I leave crap out. "Oh, why bother putting my Ibuprofen back in the drawer? I'll just leave it on the desk for the next time I have a headache." "Oh, what the hell, I'll just sleep with my jacket on the bed. It'll be that much easier to get to in the morning." "You know what? I'm going to leave that Nalgene bottle on the floor. I mean, it's bulletproof, for Christ's sake, what's the worst that could happen down there?" Before long, everything in my room has been set on top of something else. Sometimes, it results in my printer looking like a totally cool dude:
Eyyy!
Other times, it results in my $25 book of poems for Comparative Literature sliding into the netherworld between my bed and the wall. I haven't quite figured out how I'm going to get that back yet, because my bed is more or less bolted down (I guess university housing was afraid I was going to steal my bed).
This is the curse of being anal retentive and also seriously lazy: the lazy keeps anal retentive from organizing the room most of the time, and when anal retentive finally takes over for an hour and does, lazy is always there for the long haul to screw it all up again.
In the time it took to write this blog, Truman could have emptied his recycling five times or studied for his journalism midterm