Mar 14 2003
Love/hate: Tidiness
Love/hate for Friday, March 14, 2003
Tidiness
I really am a control freak. Overly organized and overly tidy for most people’s taste. I buy birthday and Christmas presents throughout the year, whenever I see something that someone on my list would like, and rarely, if ever, am forced to endure the last-minute shopping that is apparently the norm. I already have all the birthday and anniversary cards for April, for example. Our trip to Canada in June has been planned since February.
So it will come as no surprise to you that our apartment is pretty damn tidy. My brother says it looks like no-one lives in it, but this is coming from someone whose living room is full of Tesla coils and a refrigerator containing nothing but home-brewed beer and cider with spigots in the fridge door. For me, part of the pleasure of coming home at the end of a long day of duties is coming home to a clean, tidy, and pretty apartment.
The cleaning lady takes care of the clean part mostly, but I am forever tidying, it seems. It makes John laugh to see me straightening pictures and stacks of magazines, pushing in drawers, alphabetizing the spice rack. When I have been gone for a few days, as I am now, the tidiness standard definitely devolves. John has a good time “batching it”* while I’m away: eating crap, staying up late watching horror movies, not doing any domestic chores whatever, including tidying up. He doesn’t go as far as smoking in the house while I’m away, but other than that, all girl-induced behavior pretty much goes out the window. It’s a little vacation for both of us.
But once I’m back, the reign of tidiness terror begins all over again.
*To quote one of the genial Quilici brothers. They used to have a butcher shop within a little market near us which sadly lost its lease after 75 years and has been replaced by an antique shop. We still miss the market, which was family run for the whole 75 years and was like stepping back into the past. When I was away, John would stop in and get a BBQ chicken or gloriously messy sandwich, and the Quilicis would always ask him if he was “batching it”.