I know; this may not be news to some but I was sort of hoping to avoid a swift descent to the fiery furnace for another decade or so, maybe more if I kept moving and eating enough dark chocolate.
This assessment has been confirmed by finding in yet another slick magazine in my too-wide assortment of subscription reading material( It was some kind of a package deal that brought me publications ‘way outside my usual selections. Martha Stewart heads out to commune with her two alpacas, five cats, three horses, four goats and eight cows in the back forty whenever someone mentions my name being on her mailing list). All of these publications, even Popular Science, are prattling on about getting organized…weeding out your closet, straightening up your file drawers and/or cabinets, classifying the victuals in the pantry, arranging the linen closet and the workbench, boxing and storing the Christmas stuff. It never ends!
Actually, at my house, it hardly even started…ever.
I’ve decided that it must be genetic. I’m missing the “tidiness gene”. Some chromosome took a wrong turn and wound up in the Save-A-Soul Mission to the Acutely Disjunctive instead of lined up neatly waiting to jump into my gene pool. And now look!
I should look into the possibility of installing one of those track systems like they have at the dry cleaners in every room in the house. In the kitchen–push a button–zoom, zoom here come the plates, zoom, zoom, there’s the sugar, zoom, zoom, cereal on the way, zoom, zoom, say, grab me some ketchup there. If you didn’t recall just exactly what it was that you wanted, you could have the whole shootin’ match go by again until you either remembered or decided on something else. Ditto for wardrobe. Have the shirts go by while you hold up the pants to check for color match or available socks or whatever. If you can click the remote to skim through available programming on the TV, why not broaden your horizons on the domestic front? Might not function real well in the bathroom. How many choices of towels does one need, after all? Cosmetic and “personal care” products might work but you’d have to be aware of the speed of the mechanism. Too much and you could wind up flinging “Tangee Purple Passion” at the shower curtain…with unfortunate results…or splashing Listerine on the cat who wandered into the wrong place at the wrong time (Cats do that); the draft from the passing robes and jammies might not be what you’d desire while standing there in the altogether after a nice warm shower either.
There’s probably a Twelve-step program somewhere for those afflicted with this problem but I’ve no doubt lost the information on it. There’s no hope.
My grandma used to say that if you saw a shooting star and said , “Money. Money. Money,” before it went out, that you’d be rich. Well, that may be, but it has–at long last, after years of frustration–finally occurred to me that if you’re the kind of person who has the presence of mind to think of saying, “MoneyMoneyMoney,” upon catching sight of one of these celestial spectacles, instead of just thinking, “Oooh, loooook!” then you’re likely to be the sort of person who will have the focus to get rich on your own hook, without resorting to lucky chants.
Sooooo… “Ya pays yer money, Ya takes yer choice”. I kind of think that when that last school bus pulls out with me on it, I’ll not be heard muttering, “Should have run the vacuum more. Needed to scrub the shower more often. Polish! I left things to be polished!”
Nope. As long as the neighbors and the Health Department (Ha! This is Portage County, we’ll have starved the Health Department to death before that. There’ll be germs the size of draft horses camped out here by then…heck, maybe by next year) don’t come in on a kamikaze raid dropping Clorox bombs on the front porch, I’m most likely to muddle through another year as usual. It can’t be Christmas Walk all of the time.
