Week 1: Goodbye desk!

Just a quick update: one of this week's tasks was to get rid of something. The Apartment Cure book said the bigger, the better. So with Cara's help, I got rid of my desk! My bed now has space on both sides. I didn't realize how cramped I've felt.

Week Zero of the Apartment Cure: Are slobs born or made?

My bedroom and living room today.

For most of my life, except for a six month period in sixth grade when I decided that I could become neat by covering my room in tatami mats and sleeping on a futon and covering the overhead light with a red plastic lantern, I have been a slob. Eventually, my mother gave up on getting me to put my clothes in drawers. She got me two boxes: one for my clean clothes and one for my dirty. I sat in a pile of clean clothes every morning to pick out my outfits until I left for college. Was I born this way? Or did something make me a slob?

My family was messy growing: my parents opted for a creative household instead of a neat one. We got to leave the living room in fort configurement for days on end. And my sisters and I are all quite crafty. But they are both neat. Even my parents are neat now. I am the last vestige of laundry piles and overturned furniture. Perhaps I am the slob scapegoat: the rest of my family can be neat because I express the mess for all of them. Well, should they start to leave their clothes on the floor and papers all over the living room floor in the next few weeks, we’ll know my theory was right.

I like to think in the past two years I’ve progressed from the day my friend Megan found a tiny frog living in a curtain in my living room. Currently there is only one fork in the kitchen sink and only a couple things on my bedroom floor. But I am for the most part still living in chaos. I have to look for my course syllabi every time something is due. I file my mail using the pile system. The thing is: I hate messes. But that hasn’t stopped them yet.

Enter the ear infection. Two weeks ago, I got a double ear infection that is finally on its way out. In my moments of worst pain, I decided that I needed to get my room in order or else my life was going to end up as clogged as my ears. Then my friend Jamey posted a link to the Fall Apartment Cure on my Facebook page.

And so I begin. Eight weeks to transform my living space from a place that makes me feel guilty and like I never really left my early twenties into a Tigerland oasis of adulthood.