I feel like I’m the type of person who tends to swing between the two extremes of cleanliness like the on-and-off switch of a light bulb. Half the time, I’m a slob who is perfectly content to live in my pigsty of a room with all my possessions strewn about the room like an extremely localized tornado whipped through my room and threw all my clothes in haphazard piles around my unmade bed. Other times, I’m like the ultimate, immaculate clean-freak, with my clothes starched, ironed, and hung delicately in my closet in carefully calculated order by style, then color, then alphabetically by brand name, my floor is vacuumed into carefully measured lines and every surface is dusted and organized.

Sometimes this OCD/Slob pendulum can oscillate simultaneously. In school, my books are carefully placed in order by subject and schedule in an intensely neat stack with all my notebook papers laying perpendicularly beneath my color coded binders. Sometimes I’ll even empty a disorganized box of box of crayons and organize them by color and size, just to satisfy the inner obsessive clean freak inside me. But, as soon as the books enter my backpack, everything becomes chaos. There are crumpled papers and gum wrappers and random knickknacks accumulating in random pockets all over my bag. I call my backpack a black hole because once something enters in, it doesn’t come out until the end o the school year when I shake everything out and realize “Oh! So that’s where my Biology homework from September went.”

Now this whole pendulum thing is kind of strange for me. Usually I am a person of extreme moderation (if such a thing as being radically non-radical can exist), I hardly ever dip to either of the dual poles of life, except when it comes to organization.

I wonder if I am really a hyper-organized person who is just really lazy and only realizes her true potential when her bursts of OCD are happening. Probably… the thing is, I don’t really mind messes I create myself. When I drop a shirt on the floor of my bedroom, its like I think, “Well, since I did that in my space, it’s OK. I’ll pick it up later… Right now I have important business to attend to. No one else can look at pictures of cats on the internet for me.”

Mary Poppins?

My slovenliness is a problem that I have been working to resolve. I understand it is wrong for my to not take care of the room God has given me to keep up with, just like it is wrong of me not to take care of my body, which is on loan. I have been given so much in life and it is selfish and careless of me not to be grateful and take care of the wonderful things I’ve received. I also know it isn’t right for me to get obsessive about how clean things are (like maybe organizing my shoes in alphabetical order by brand and year of manufacture is a bit much). I think I can work on finding a happy medium, because no one likes an extremist in anything. But I do think I’ll lean more to the cleanliness side because, hey, everybody likes having a clean room and clothes that aren’t all wrinkly from being balled up and thrown under the bed.

I am excited that I have an opportunity coming to help my parents organize and clean our house. We are thinking of downsizing so I have a big job coming of getting our house ready for market and packing up our stuff in a way that’ll let us be able to find it again. For now, I’m going to do some Spring Cleaning (or late Summer Cleaning) to my closet. I think I feel a cleaning streak a-coming!

Organizing & Lists!