The Human Tornado

Alright everyone - let's all relax about my last post. -deep breath- There, that's better. I wasn't murderous or anything, just defending my baby after someone gave him a rash of shit and made the mistake of mentioning me. I wasn't that mad, I'm just very gifted with my claws. A'ight? :)

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Something Special K posted last Saturday has compelled me to make a confession. Why, you might be asking, do I feel the need to spew to the internets one of my many secrets and bad habits? Because you must know. And how many times have I told you that my purpose in life is at best, to educate, and at the very least, serve as a warning to others? It's my calling, so suck it.

I am a slob. A tried-and-true beast of bedraggled bedlam. I am Princess Pigpen. Nice to meet ya. (And I'm not alone, am I girls? No, I didn't think so).

I don't exactly know when this all started. I grew up in a house with an anal-retentive stay-at-home tennis-club goddess mother and lots of off-limits stuff. You know what I'm talking about. The coveted living room so pristine it was one step away from being wrapped in shmeg-proof plastic. The good plates. The good couch. The good silverware.

The guest towels. Ooooooo, the guest towels. DO NOT FUCK WITH THE GUEST TOWELS. EVER. If you want to make it through you life without terry-cloth scars, refrain from even thinking about the guest towels people. You will spend eternity sucking the devils dick if you use the guest towels.

If I had a quarter for every screech followed by a bellow finished by a damp towel thrusted into my face. "THESE ARE THE GOOD TOWELS. THEY ARE FOR GUESTS. YOU IMPOTENT TWAT". OK, my mom never called me a twat, but she nearly beat me with a wet, green, cotton one once.

What the heck was I supposed to do? We only had 2 bathrooms in the house I grew up in. The one in the 'rents room and the other one. Not my bathroom (I say with a snotty scowl), thank you very much, I was not permitted to claim the hallway lavatory. I was not allowed to hang my towels in there. I had to keep my scummy wet towel in my room only to mold the top of my wicker hamper. Then I got in trouble for that!

If it's not one thing it's your mother!

And my mom is so hyper-clean and fast to organize every scrap of whatever comes into the house she's forever forgetting where's she stashed something. Not the greatest filing system eh there mamacita?

"I just had it a minute ago and now I can't find it".

"Well, where'd you put it"?

"I don't remember".

"You don't remember where you put something you just had in your hand 5 seconds ago"? "What, you got the alzheimers or something". "BAHAHAHA".

-SMACK-

"I will help you look for it".

And my dad is the same way. If I visualize him mentally he's medium height, salt-and-pepper hair, wrinkly face, and has a vacuum cleaner as a right arm. Wah? Seriously, I've never seen a man run a vacuum so much. And he is The Lint Police. The man is 79 years old and has the eyes of an eagle for fuzzies. Can't hear worth a shit, and he'll probably crash into you one day on the road, but he'll chase your ass down if you have a microscopic sweater ball on your butt.

Sometimes I speed up as he's reaching for me and he just barely misses his little nubby target while tripping after me with outstretched pinching lint grabbers for about 20 feet. Hee, makes me laugh.

This leaves me perplexed. Being reared in a home that was immaculate inside and out, complimented as being professionally decorated by my mom's amateur gift of objet d'art organization and filled to the brim with quality goods, should have rubbed off on me a little, no?How did I get to be such a pig?

I can thrash an entire house in a matter of minutes. My mother calls me the hurricane. Clothes strewn across every inch of carpet. Hair balls at my feet. Dirty dishes piled to the ceiling growing science experiments in their nooks and crannies. Globs of toothpaste adhered to the sink. Cobwebs wafting from the corners. Stinky laundry spilling down the hallway. Cat hair. Oh god. The cat hair.

How did this happen? Did I begin to rebel at a tender age? Wait, don't answer that. I was and always will remain a pill. But seriously, why doesn't this shit bug me? Or better yet, why does it take SO LONG for it to build to the point that I'm either going to spend 4 days cleaning or take a match to my house and start over.

What doesn't matter to me doesn't matter only works when you don't have a swarm of fruit flies clouding the kitchen because you've let a sweaty bag of nectarines fester foam and ferment on the counter. And I've made more penicillin than Eli Lilly.

I had the audacity in college to mark the roommate preference section on my dorm questionnaire as "cleanly". Who the fuck was I fooling? I knew by the second day my side would be a land-mine of shoes and underwear and fast-food containers. Luckily she had lied too. Unluckily for me, that wasn't the only thing she fibbed about. Sloppy I could handle, raving night-terrors with a butcher knife lunatic I could not. We lasted 3 quarters, but she lived so, you know, win-win.

I do try harder as I get older, but I can't bullshit you, it can get really bad. When I was super sick I had a free-pass, but now, not so much. And I'm in so much trouble because whitey is a complete neat freak. My garage gives him hives. Granted, it's a mess that stresses me out too, but how am I going to maintain a tidy home when he comes to San Diego? I'm a lazy sack! The only time I really clean now, not just put things away and straighten, but actually clean (sponges, water, scrubbing, etc.), is when I have plans for a visitor.

Wanna come over?

And yes, baby, the coffee is still in the pot.