The Conical Glass: Next to godliness

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Next to godliness

Occasionally, I have written about my ongoing battle with clutter. My particular problem area is anything involving paper: books, magazines, mail, newspapers, receipts, statements, etc. I have tried various methods to keep things under control, such as e-billing and reading the news online. And yet, I still struggle, with clutter and general housekeeping tasks.

A few years ago, I quoted Sandra Tsing Loh, who once said that she would never hire a cleaning lady for fear that she might turn out to be Barbara Ehrenreich. Articles like this one, which recently appeared in Salon.com, strengthen my resolve. Even though there are obviously people out there who need the money, how could I ever ask anyone else to clean up the long stray hairs I am constantly shedding? ("White surfaces and human hair have become the bane of my existence," writes the author of the Salon piece.) So I do the best I can. A few days ago, Joe complained that I had missed some cobwebs. I tend to have a sort of live-and-let-live attitude to spiders (it's not like we have brown recluses or black widows around here), so I told him that if he sees a cobweb and is bothered by it, he can get rid of it. Much as I'd love to spend my days vacuuming while wearing a string of pearls and a cute house dress, I have my clients to consider.

However, I have finally solved the cleaning dilemma. From now on, my home will be a bastion of tidiness. I will polish the wainscoting and promptly toss old magazines in the recycling bin.

What is my secret? A brand new program on the A&E Network called "Hoarders." A new episode will air every Monday night, and trust me, this show will motivate you to clean like you've never cleaned before.

Each week, "Hoarders" gives you a peek into the lives of two different troubled souls with hardcore clutter problems. On the debut episode, we met Jill, a food hoarder in Milwaukee, and Jennifer and Ron, a Kentucky couple with three kids. The family was pretty much your garden-variety set of slobs -- their "laundry basket" was their hall floor, and they ate all their meals on the bed because the kitchen table was too full of junk -- but Jill was in a league of her own. This woman was so bad that one of the professionals brought in to clean her kitchen had to run outside to hurl. The close-ups of rotting food and dead insects was stomach-churning for the viewers; I can't even imagine what it must have been like to have been inside her home.

Trucks from a junk-hauling service cleared out tons of stuff from Jennifer and Ron's place, but Jill fought tooth and nail to keep her expired chicken broth, convinced that if the container wasn't bulging, it was OK to eat. The fact that she hasn't dropped dead from salmonella or e-coli proves the woman must have a cast iron stomach. She obviously has severe mental problems that can't be solved by a quick fix on a reality show.

Nevertheless, once the show had aired, all I wanted to do was get out my stash of Method products and wipe down everything in sight. I set a TiVo season pass for the show, so I can watch it every week. It airs at 7 PM, which means there's a full evening ahead to spend organizing and tidying. After watching "Hoarders," not even the spiderwebs are safe.

posted by 125records @ 4:30 PM

1 Comments:

At 5:34 PM, vallerose said…

My father was a hoarder.It is a sickness and when one has experience first hand it becomes easier to throw things away.
Vallery