i don’t know what it is about organizing/cleaning that i so deeply adore, but i just can’t stop doing it. i know i come from a long line of anal people: my great grandfather was called The Tyrant, my grandfather insisted my grandmother iron his hankies into perfect squares, and my father kept his shirts in the bag with the cardboard from the cleaners precisely stacked on his closet shelves (my sister & i used to try to pirate that cardboard without disturbing the perfect order of his shirts but he knew every time). or maybe it is just my manifestation of OCD combined with the false sense of control i feel i have over my life when a drawer is perfectly outfitted with labeled bins. as a kid i loved to clean and purge. my sister was always rescuing my priceless childhood memories from the kitchen sized garbage bags i would smuggle up to my room and fill with stuff that i eventually tried to buy back on ebay (and it turns out you really can’t buy your childhood back). i even had a circa 1979 dymo label maker which my sister & i used to label everything in the gd house. there was nothing like new pristine school supplies and brandy new boxes of crayons to send me into a tizzy. and i was quite neat for the most part, save for the messy anomaly of my teenage years. so, you can not imagine what a horrible, awful surprise it was to learn i had married a slob of epic proportions. we are talking a filthy, messy, stacker. nothing tortures a neat person more than having a slovenly roommate (just ask felix unger). i was miserable and had to do something about it, so i turned to a trusted friend for help, Mr. Clean, and became completely obsessive with instilling order in my life.
the organizing impulse really kicked into high gear when i learned i was pregnant with my second child (a sweet surprise that occurred immediately after i lost the last bit of first baby weight & had bought an entirely new wardrobe of very expensive size 1 jeans which never got worn): i had the idea that if i could somehow systematize my entire home and catalog every single item located in it, i would be running a well oiled machine before rugrat number 2 joined the family to turn things upside down with her own special brand of chaos. it would be different this time after the baby came – it just had to be. it had been 3 years since number 1 invaded, and i was just beginning to feel like i was finally in control of my life again (which is really a well practiced illusion for anyone with children anyway). i watched all the organizing shows, bought instructional books (which i could now write myself), took notes, and then attacked my home from every angle. i purged all the useless items and had every single closet professionally organized. i was buying giant plastic storage tubs before it was fashionable. and i worked it like a job before there was an actual industry completely dedicated to the Organizing Arts. anyway, by the time i was 8 months pregnant and balancing with one toe on a bar stool i had fashioned into a ladder so i could clean off the last high shelf in the kitchen, i had achieved my goal of 100% complete domestic organization and OCD niravna was mine (but the post baby organizational bliss was short-lived since once that second runt became mobile, she quickly desecrated my sacred Temple of Neatness).
my closets became a thesis in anal retention. all garments were placed on wood hangers (NO WIRE HANGERS!) which all must be made of the same wood and finish and FACE THE SAME WAY. as a kid when i had those colorful plastic hangers, they too were arranged by color. clothes were lined up according to season, function, color order (ROY G. BIV), and arranged from shortest to longest by sleeve and overall length. do i even have to tell you about the shoes with polaroid pix on the front of the boxes displaying the contents and stacked according to the same stringent standards as the clothing placement? (but the move to the dorm room with what can barely be called a closet when the divorce started destroyed that fashion utopia. it’s okay. we will rebuild.) i also run a tight ship in all of my domestic departments: in the kitchen, all cans & food goods face the same way and are alphabetized according to type with tallest items in the back. there is no drawer lacking excessive amounts of perfectly fitting modular containers filled with color coordinated utensils. no spice is without a rack. in the bathroom, there is no hair care product apart from its brethren or out of a basket. no toiletry roams free allowed to float aimlessly in a drawer or a cabinet. all things must be properly contained & corralled. paper goods lined up by type. i have my own hot line to call for emergency label maker tape refills. hell, my entire basement & kitchen remodels were thinly veiled excuses to build glamorous storage spaces designed to hold beautiful high end containment systems. i built a fucking cedar closet outfitted with cedar hangers. i searched tirelessly for hours to find just the right bin and there was no organizing device i wouldn’t buy. i have my socks in grids. by color. and type. my bras & panties (which, i am sure you have figured out, must match) are stored as a set separated by color by drawer dividers. why i am not next in line for ceo of The Container Store (my heaven on earth) is a mystery to me. and there is no doubt that i successfully passed the organizing gene onto to my kids.
my kids have learned my insane habits too. miss 9 year old is painfully neat & won’t allow a single stray item in her room (which is really just a glorified container for her things since she pretty much lives with me in here in the cell). she also likes to throw everything out and has to be watched like a hawk just like me as a child. “you are going to want that in 25 years.” “no, i won’t.” “trust me. you will and you won’t be able to buy back your judy blume diary on ebay.unfortunately, i know.” (i certainly don’t want her to make the same purging mistakes i did as a young novice. i never had an organizing mentor.) miss 6 year old is truly a slob at heart, but does clean when asked, BUT she calls it “organizing,” and she can’t seem to tidy up without embarking upon huge re-organization projects that involve emptying every single thing she owns onto the floor and assigning new placements to each – which is the same exact way i clean. and by the way, i couldn’t wait for her to read so she could read the labels on all the bins and be organizationally self-sufficient. at one point after i had sold all of my own & the girls’ purged items on ebay, i dubbed my self The Tidy Terror and and i actually had an entire schtick going in which i helped people organize by going through their stuff and selling it for them on ebay. that was a decent gig for awhile but i had to store too much crap in my house and it conflicted with my personal domestic organizational scheme and just really began to stress me out, man.
you can immediately read my mental status by how neat & clean my house is. when i feel perfectly at ease in my life, the order in my home rivals that of a military barrack’s. when i start to lose it, you can see that by the deterioration of my home – stuff will be all over because i just stop caring. but then the mess stresses me out, so i go into a tornado of cleaning in order to feel more in control. a kind of chicken & egg conundrum really. so you can only imagine the manic depressive organizational cycles my home has suffered over the past 21 months of The Less Than Amiable Divorce Proceedings. and the reality of living immigrant style in one small room with my 2 girls, has taken it’s toll on my neatness as evidenced by the buffet of food stains that was formerly known as, The Carpet. so, naturally, it also follows that as the divorce winds down & i feel a renewed, but cautious, sense of hope & control over my own life, i was inspired to spring clean. the other evening i was feeling so elated about A New Development in The Divorce, that i sorted my enormous bag of free samples into a plastic expanding file AND labeled them appropriately with the professional grade DYMO 3000: cleansers, moisturizers, skin care, hair care, and makeup. OMG. that is soooo insane, even for me, but i was so full of self-satisfaction i that slept without a care in the world that night. but i don’t stop at my own domicile – i have to keep feeding the beast.
i dont fuck around with my organizing.
i have been known to invade other peoples’ homes with my cleaning tendencies if they will let me or are just too weak to resist. like when my mom was sick in december, i seized that as my opportunity to “help” her by organizing her life. first i pounced on her kitchen and cleared all the counters. i can’t stand so much stuff being displayed. then i emptied her pantry, fridge & freezer and scrubbed until it all shined like the top of the empire state building as miss hannigan had demanded of annie. i was completely disgusted with the state of her fridge – there is no excuse for mystery sticky messes & crumbs. i firmly believe that where you keep your food should be pristine. after eliminating the extremely past due food items, i returned it all to the shelves but it was merchandised perfectly: all labels facing out, products in alignment, condiments with condiments, juices all together, cheeses stacked by type in the drawer. next, i hit that mass of papers she likes to call The Office. i labeled all of her hanging files, filed all the piles of papers, and made her look through every loose scrap of paper, coupon, and article she pulled out that will never be read unless god forbid she was saving them for me (but she knows where i file all of that helpful advice – the circular file). then we made lists and lists of lists (oh god how i LOVE lists) and she pledged her devotion to a new life of organization and told me she would reform her wayward ways as soon as she was well again. it was 48 hours of restored health before things returned to their natural state & the sanctity of The Organizational Oath was violated. sigh, you can only do so much for some people. but i have new arenas for expansion.
now that i am gainfully employed, there is a whole new level of organizing i have undertaken that i never even imagined existed: The Paint Department. i like to keep busy all day at work – i am not one for standing around which drives the slackers who were hired before me nuts since i probably make them look bad. it’s not on purpose or to be a suck ass (what kind of ladder can i climb, other than orange, there anyway?) but as you can see, inventory control just comes naturally to me. obviously part of my job is to stock the shelves. now, most employees fill in “The Holes,” as well call them in The Business, only as a blatant need arises. i am busy pulling out merch from the back of the 6 foot deep shelves that hasn’t seen daylight since the store opened 13 years ago. it’s like an inventory Land Of The Lost back there. but i don’t sop there. oh no. i climb that 65 foot orange ladder to the roof-line so i can pull the boxes down from the top & properly label them with my corporately approved black sharpie. i put like items together into the proper bay’s overhead area directly above the same items on the shelves (we pros call it “striping”). why are those spray cans from here stored with the paint brushes over there? harummpf, i say. of course i get so involved in this fun, i forget that i actually have to mix paint for customers sometimes. but i have to tell you that the spray paint aisle has never looked so beautiful. it brings a tear to my eye. i found some colors that weren’t even out for sale! the other day, one of my associates commented, “girl, i walked by you today, and you were so far back into those shelves, all i could see were your feet.” plus the frequent squatting down to fix all of the items on the floor, gives me a great opportunity to show off my butt crack thanks to the popular low waisted jean styles of today (about which one of my pals commented, “maybe that is why the working class wears such unfashionable clothing.” she may have a point). but paint sales have risen in the past month…
today the paint department, tomorrow the entire store. next week, the world. muah-hah-hah.
