Point/Counterpoint: Cleaning Your Room

It’s that time of year, Wildcats. The time to move out of your old shithole room or apartment and into a new home. This transition can be a new beginning. You have the opportunity to break free from last year’s vortex of messiness. Do you capture it or just let it slip?[1]  

Clean your room:

Alright champ, this is the year. New year, new me. This is the year that I’m going to be actually organized. Gone are the days of tossing my apple core onto a pile of dirty laundry that’s resting atop the milk solidifying in a cereal bowl from six weeks ago.

I can just imagine how nice it will be to be able to find things immediately. I need a paperclip? Oh, well it’s in the paperclip drawer! I need to staple something? Look no further than the stapler shelf! My dirty clothes will be confined to the laundry bin, and my clean clothes will be neatly folded into drawers that smell of lavender. My shoes will be lined up with military precision. My notebooks and folders will be color-coded and cross-referenced by subject. Never again will I find my lab report crumpled inside a running shoe. No more tripping over a bird’s nest of cords and chargers. Not once more will I discover a pizza bagel in my bed. This room will be the envy of all messy rooms. The demo rooms at IKEA will pale in comparison to my sparkling quarters.

TO THE CONTAINER STORE!

Leave it as is:

I don’t fucking want to clean. No, I don’t WANT to live nested among empty beer bottles and crinkly edges of torn-out notebook paper. But I’d rather live in squalor than tackle this messy beast. Systems tend toward entropy, and who the fuck am I to challenge that? It’s a LAW of the universe.

God, my laziness is probably indicative of something very wrong with me. Like, maybe the real reason I don’t care about my room is that I don’t care about MYSELF.

Or maybe it’s because cleaning requires me bending down to pick things up. I really hate bending down. I get tuckered out. Could that be the reason? Am I really that simple?

Yeah, I’m definitely that simple. Fuck it.

[1] Eminem, “Lose Yourself,” 2002. He captured it. I probably would have let it slip.