keep my house neat

• put away all the clothes in the bedroom
• straighten up the second bedroom: general clutter, stuff on desk
• weed t-shirt drawer
• pull wool sweaters for drycleaning

I haven’t had a chance to bring in Rosita yet; she’s left messages for me but I don’t have a phone number for her.

A subgoal here is to keep clutter from starting. I think this means bringing mugs and plates to the dishwasher when I’m done with them, and dealing with mail right away, not just putting it in a basket to look at months later. So very hard for me, though. Perhaps these tasks are amenable to the timer method.

I think I’m actually going to take the yuppie, bourgeois step of hiring a nice Salvadoran woman to clean my apartment every couple of weeks. That will force me to straighten on a regular basis, and I think I can handle that.

I want my time back. I want to spend my weekends writing music and playing, not scrubbing the bathroom floor, which is not happening as a result of my resentment, and by extension I can’t have anyone over.

Homer and Langley Collyer were brothers who lived in a Manhattan row house in Harlem in the early part of the 20th century. Their story is bizarre and illustrates the depths people will go to hold onto anything and everything.

The discovery of just how bad the Collyer brothers’ hoarding was came to light in March 1947 when an anonymous person reported there was a dead body in the Collyer residence.

The authorities did not have an easy time gaining entrance to the home. They started by trying to remove tons of garbage from the front foyer, which consisted of newspapers, phonebooks, furniture, boxes, and other miscellaneous debris. Unsuccessful in their attempts, a patrolman broke a window on the second floor in order to gain entry. After climbing through junk for two hours, he found the body of the elder brother Homer among the boxes and trash. Missing from the home, however, was Langley, the younger of the two recluses.

The hunt for Langley began, and authorities searched for him as far away as Atlantic City. A disturbing realization took place three weeks later, unfortunately, when Langley’s body was was found ten feet from his older brother’s. Because of the vast amount of garbage in the house, his body wasn’t unearthed until then. Langley had been crushed to death by one of his many booby-traps that he had made to deter people’s entry into their palace of junk. Langley actually had died first. He was crushed while bringing food to his elder brother, who was blind. Langley fed Homer a diet of one hundred oranges per week to try and restore his sight. Believing that the diet of oranges would restore Homer’s vision, Langley also saved every newspaper so that Homer could eventually read them when his sight returned.

Authorities eventually removed more than 100 tons of trash from the Collyer brothers’ house. Some of the more unusual items included human pickled organs, the chassis of an old Model T, fourteen pianos (both grand and upright), hundreds of yards of unused silks and fabric, the folding top of a horse-drawn carriage, and more than 25,000 books.

To learn more about the Collyer brothers, read Frank Lidz’s famous account in Ghosty Men: The Strange but True Story of the Collyer Brothers.

I tackled the tub. Tomorrow, maybe a couple of windows, or the kitchen floor.

I can totally do 15 min/day! and maybe it will be less than that once I’m all caught up.

I find I am getting rid of clutter more easily as well, and putting things back in their places.

at putting things away when I’m done with them.

a little. I am at least rather more aware that this helps, and sometimes I remember to do it.

whether I’ve gotten rid of the centipedes.

The plan this morning was to vacuum in the corners where things have gotten really nasty. Now, as I understand myself, I hate vacuuming. But as I got into it I started thinking, “Hey, this isn’t so bad,” and I ended up doing the whole apartment!

The trick will be to remember, the next time I need to do it, that it wasn’t as awful as I thought.

I noticed that I was feeling bad about filling up landfills, which caused me to avoid throwing stuff away. (Thinking I might use it again is a different class of mishegoss.) This is irrational. For example – empty shoeboxes, that I realistically don’t have a use for, or old shoes (non-donateable) for that matter. If it’s waste, it’s waste, and it’s gonna have to go to the landfill sometime (assuming it can’t be recycled), and better in the landfill than in my apartment. Out with it!

P.S. I have had a gratifying time the last couple of weeks unloading stuff on freecycle and craigslist. Anyone want a monitor?

Vigorous housework first thing in the morning could (1) burn calories and (2) boost my energy level. Need to make sure that I fit this in on a regular, if not daily, basis.

I am finding myself really jazzed about keeping a neat desk at home (at work, forget it, but I’m outta there in a week and a half anyway). The desk goes so nicely with my sleek new monitor, a simple copy stand, a coaster, a clipboard for my list, a jar for my pens pens, a comfortable-looking beanie baby, and a couple of very neat and temporary little piles. And it’s been over a week already!