Clean Up

There’s a piece of trash or clutter on the floor. How many times do you walk past it before you actually bend down to pick it up. For me the number might be three. If I’m stepping over the child’s toy and it’s the fourth time I feel embarrassed and guilty enough that I’ll spring into action and put it away. There are other rules though. How many times have I picked it up so far today? Is it after bedtime or in other words after 9pm? If so I might be off the hook until tomorrow.

Human personalities are largely about tolerances. Not machining tolerances, but how much you will put up with a particular thing before you feel you must do something about it. In conversations you can see a pretty clear ranking on silence tolerance. How long will each person allow a silence to hang in the air before breaking it? I have observed that my silence tolerance is longer than most of my friends. Only a few people I’ve met who are clearly anxious/neurotic or somewhere farther down the autism spectrum than I have exhibited a longer silence tolerance. I’ve had great pleasure seeing one of these people, geeked out on low quality Montreal cocaine, burst into the conversation earlier than usual over and over again. Perhaps a candidate for a regular amphetamine prescription.

Certain houses of many roommates, usually college aged men, have an unfortunate confluence of people who are all too willing to let the kitchen go to hell. A bit of food cooked onto the range burners I can forgive, but a festering sink filled with molding pots and pans while the drains are clogged with bits of scrambled egg and ramen noodles I cannot abide. A quick path to sainthood in these houses is to clean the sinkful of dishes. After this you can take any quantity of free alcohol you feel is required without argument. In these apartments, if there is a roommate who desires a higher standard of cleanliness they will quickly be overwhelmed in trying to push their work ethic on the rest, and be reduced to begrudgingly washing only their own specific personal effects, to the exclusion of the entire house. C’est le guerre.

It’s easy to forget that the cleanly folk are making as much of an imposition on the filthy as vice versa. The squalid enjoy their carefree life of disgusting drains and milk-curdled glasses, beer-smelling carpets and stained toilets. Not caring is a beautiful luxury that is not to be sneezed at. The situation can become untenable when these two warring factions are forced to be at odds with one another for too long, or if one decides to attempt to impose their will through “house rules” or even worse “chore schedules”.

Of course this mostly matters in the common spaces of the kitchen, the living room, and the shared bathrooms. Let them live in their piles of mess. Occasionally battles do spill over. I remember a roommate bringing a large box full of maybe twenty dirty cups down from her room. “Oh that’s where all the glasses went!”

When living with someone long term, like a wife perhaps, a more agreeable equilibrium must be established. Sacrifices will need to be made. You may have to vacuum once in a while to keep things smoothed over. You will also need to live for a while and see where your different tolerances lie. Personally, I care more about the sink being free of dishes, so I’ll just take care of that if I walk by and see the need. She gets bothered by dog hair and dust, so she is the one who will whip out the vacuum and duster. This is an area where knowing or finding out what bothers you is actually massively helpful.

One of my sisters was recently remarking that she doesn’t make an extra effort to tidy up her house more than she would otherwise when she expects company. Besides being a little lazy on that front, and having four children, she feels it creates a more intimate experience when you allow the guest to see how you truly live. Seeing how someone keeps their living quarters is seeing where their priorities lie, what bothers them and what doesn’t, and gives you context as to how to behave in their space. We ought to strive to bring order into our world, but allowing some chaos is necessary too.