Despite the fact that I shower daily, I must admit: I am a slob.
I leave clothing on the floor for days before tossing it in the laundry (even underwear!), it may take me a few days before I wash the dishes, and any flat surfaces invariably become covered with a mish-mash of papers, books, and assorted things. This can include the floor, though on a more limited basis, since we do still need to walk.
In a way, I'm surprised my parents and I aren't sicker than we are. ^^;
It wasn't always like this, of course. My Mother has mentioned before that my older brother was a very tidy person when he was little. As in, under 6, maybe 7. I found this rather interesting given his room was almost always as untidy as mine, sometimes more so. As a History major and fantasy writer, he and his wife's apartment tends to suffer in the same manner as the main floor of my parent's house, but I digress.
When I was in late grade school, early high school, Dad would occasionally snark about Mom being on strike from doing housework. This seamed reasonable enough. There was almost always laundry in baskets. The kitchen was (and still is!) in a state of disarray, and let's not mention the pins on the floor in her sewing room (formerly my brother's bedroom).
With the exception of my Dad, we all tend to ignore the immediate messes in the house. Dad keeps their bedroom (which is also his office/den) as neat as he can, though there are still piles of laundry, and Mom has quite a bit of her fabric stored up there. Admittedly, he complains about the messes quite a bit, though mostly when it's in his immediate way (not enough space around his spot at the dinner table, or papers and books falling off the table by the window when he's trying to get said window open, for example).
Now, some people would probably consider us hoarders. Mom could certainly be considered one as far as her fabric stash is concerned, but that's apparently a common phenomenon with sewers. (If you don't believe me, try doing an image search for the words "fabric stash" sometime.)
I'm pretty sure we're not hoarders, though. The floor tends to be cluttered, sure, but we can still see them. There are no huges stacks of stuff cluttering the floor enough to make it so we need to walk through an aisle of stuff to get from point A to point B. No, I can see out the living room windows through the dining room, from the doorway in the kitchen. Not very well, mind you, but that's more because of the angle than because of the mess.
What we are is disorganized, and procrastinators. "Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow." "I'll get to it in a minute, I want to finish X first." It's basically a downhill trend; once you get onto it, it's hard to break out of this kind of procrastination. Do I know how we arrived at where we are now? Yes, actually.
As I mentioned before, when my brother was young - and I don't remember this, so I can't have been older than 5 or so - my brother was a neat-nick. Given that I was probably 5 or younger, this would make my brother 8 at the oldest. Anyway, he suddenly did a reversal. He wouldn't help out, he wouldn't do what mother asked him to as far as housework goes, and it was suddenly like she was trying to pull teeth from a very stubborn rock. Being the influential big brother that he was, I apparently did the same thing. Many would figure that this left Mom with three options: punish us, withhold our allowances, or just do it herself.
She chose option four: "If they're not going to do it, then neither am I." Which, I suppose would be the equivalent of being on strike. On the plus side, she didn't hurt us, and force us to do the things we didn't want to. On the other hand, she did teach us it was okay to be messy.
Still, I honestly can't blame her; at the time, she was working at a rather irritating job, making waterbeds in a factory, and putting up with at least one co-worker's sexual harassment on a daily basis. That in itself can make someone exhausted, much less a mother coming home to two kids who don't want to do anything other than their homework. Given that scenario, I can't blame her for not wanting to do anything other than make dinner, eat, then sit down with a good book before going to bed.
The downer is that the house always has been very messy. I have decided to try changing that. One room at a time. Granted, I'm not going to touch her sewing room, or their bedroom, but I'd like to make it so we're at least not embarrassed to have company over. Setting up the Christmas tree without having to shuffle things about would be nice too. I shall be linking to photos of the rooms before I try cleaning them, and will be keeping an updated record to see how long the rooms stay clean and whether I can keep up with everything.
Expect updates on Saturdays, at least.
Wooo~!
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