I cleaned my bedroom today, sort of.

What I hate about cleaning is not actually the cleaning itself. It's the figuring out what to do with things that have no place. Scraps of paper with potentially important information that I may forget, like the bank slip with my PIN number on it; the statement from York University with my account balance on it (why does it say I owe them $145 all of a sudden? Wait, that's exactly what I currently have in my account ... maybe it was a computer error? I'd better not throw it out); the instructions for putting some piece of Ikea somethingorother together (what if, for some reason, I need to take it apart and put it together again?); some piece of paper with my student number on it, which I need to remember since I never bothered to get a student card made; an adorably sweet note from James, which of course I'm not going to throw out, but I should really find a box or drawer to put my sweet James-related bits and pieces in, but I don't have one yet, so it will collect dust on my dresser a while longer; freshly printed photographs which need to be either framed or tacked up on my wall, but I haven't decided which yet, and I'm leaning toward frames, only I don't have any spare frames yet, so they'll just sit around a while longer, too; a piece of paper with someone's email address on it, and I can't remember whose it is, but just in case it's important I think I should be holding onto it, and ... ARGH! I never know what to do with that stuff. I can't just put it all together in some drawer, because then I'll never sort through it and never be able to find anything in there when I need it.

If only everything always had a place to go, my personal surroundings would always be spotless. I swear it.

Then there's the office across the hall from me, which I am seated in right now, which my mom says I may now use as my own, thus giving me the entire third floor to myself. This is very generous of her. However, it's still filled with all of her stuff. A shelf of books and documents and disks, a container of screws, nuts, and bolts, envelopes, papers papers papers. She's got far more scraps and pieces than I do. I wouldn't know where to begin, so I need her to help me ... but she's a busy woman, and still doesn't know where she'll be storing all of this stuff, if not up here, and if it's going to be my room, I want everything to have a place. I want to get a small couch and put my tiny TV in here and get rid of this massive, cluttered glass desk, and set up a little sewing station for myself. Then I'll move the rats and gerbils in here so that they won't keep me up at night with their scurrying and play fighting. But right now, it's a wasteland in here.

It looks like the neatfreak in me that I thought was just a phase is coming back. See, when we lived in Burlington, I was always a slob, had been one my whole life. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, I became really anal about keeping things clean. I liked it though, it made me feel better in my surroundings. Once I found myself in Toronto I grew slobbier and slobbier once again, feeling disjointed (is that even the right word?) and strange, and knew that the apartment we were in was only a temporary dwelling. Then I moved to London, Ontario, and lived in a miniscule bachelor apartment for a month, and I kept everything clean because I was bored, lonely, and horribly depressed, but I still hoped to achieve something there, and cleaning was something to do, something to distract me from my misery. Then I moved back in with my mom in the Toronto apartment and let it all go again, feeling safe at home, but sad and slovenly, because it just wasn't worth it, being tidy. Tidiness is for when there's hope, or for when life is good, or has potential to be good.

Now it's good, and has potential to be great. And now I find myself wanting to clean again. So here I am, swimming in a sea of papers and scraps, wondering what to do next.

Oh, I am such a dork.

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