Monday, July 30, 2007

When a Mess Can No Longer Be Justified as a Sign of Genius

Blow up your TV
throw away the paper
Go to the country,
build you a home.

I really couldn't take it anymore. My apartment was a remarkable mess. For a while I was fine with my mess. I knew where everything was, so it was fine.

Then one day I looked around and wondered where in the hell I was going to put my new DVDs and CDs. I saw the VHS tapes I had stacked in liquor boxes and the ones that wouldn't fit sitting in precarious stacks on the floor. On the kitchen table sat piles and piles of burned CDs that hold live shows and various mixes, etc. that acted as a great compliment to the piles and piles of junk mail. And then there was the blue chair. I used to love that blue chair. But after I moved out of the den of evil (a.k.a. where I lived with my horrible ex in Rome) and realized exactly how much his poorly trained dog peed on the thing, I haven't loved it quite so much. And after all, Misha had been kind enough to give me her big gigantic, wonderful chair.

At about the same time I started looking around at the mess, my mom offered to let me have her desk since she really didn't want it anymore and it was only taking up space. Well, that gave me the extra boost I needed.

So I took half a day off Thursday, and have been working on it for the better part of the past several days. Corey was sweet enough to help move the desk in Saturday. I also got a new bookcase type thing to hold all my VHS so my existing shelving unit could be the exclusive home of my DVDs. The cleaning quickly spiraled into rearranging. I got rid of the blue chair, built the new unit, set up the desk and repositioned the big chair. Dude, I even dusted the blades of the ceiling fan and knocked down cobwebs.

Here is the result.


I swear, it feels like total feng sui to me. I imagine the effect would be greatly amplified if I had thought to take "before" shots, but I probably would have been too embarassed to share them.

The desk was just such a nice fringe benefit of all this too. I love my desk. Now I no longer have to go all the way to my bedroom and crawl into the little hole my printer was in. Now it's all easily accessable.





Note the ghetto fabulous desk chair. It's one of my kitchen chairs with the cushions from the big chair (which were just taking up space because I never used them) in a body pillow case. Also note the especially ghetto fabulous hairband-tying method used to keep the pillows in place.

I'm so jazzed about all this that I'm going to start working on the rest of the apartment this week too. I'm going to try to get it all done during the week, because poor darling Corey had to put up with hyper, obsessed, cleaning-mode Jennifer all this past weekend, and nobody deserves to be subjected to that two weekends in a row. The garbage people are just going to love me by the time I'm through.

This isn't even half the crap I tossed.

Note the severly crappy blue chair. Alas. It was good to me while it lasted.

Anyway, once the whole place is spic and span, I will be a very happy little camper. I really think that having a neat place is really helpful to your state of mind. More than that, I think the act of cleaning is really cathartic too.

Breathe in that dust-free air. Aaahhh yes.

Now enjoy John Prine doing "Spanish Pipedream" - trust me, you'll recognize it.


3 comments:

  1. Who are you and what did you do with Jennifer? Honey, it looks WONDERFUL! Wanna come clean/organize my house too? hehe

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hey, can you come over to my house? I'll give you directions.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hey, can you come over to my house? I'll give you directions.

    ReplyDelete

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