The winter purge

Come winter time I am usually overtaken by the need to cut the fat, both physically, mentally and well, physically. I always want to lose the baggage I carry around my waist, but I also have this yen to shed the clutter in my head and the clutter in my house.

Since I've been doing this on an annual basis for awhile now, I'm starting to have less clutter to expel. There's always some, because I've married a pack rat (who has his own room in our home where he can keep his crap thankfully) and because I hit a point where I have to stop myself or my OCD nature would have me living with nothing but three outfits, a toothbrush, my computer and a couple of tools for cooking. I just get really engrossed in the process.

I like order. It gives me a feeling of comfort and control that makes everything else in the world okay. Is it right? I don't know. What I do know is that if the world ends tomorrow, I'll be better off because I know that all of the instruction manuals for my appliances are neatly organized and accessible.*

When I do the purge there are some things from the past that I have traditionally clung to. School notes, projects, journals, bad teenage poetry and things like that. Every year I go through them reflect on the person I am and the person I was. There are things I find that I'm very proud of, but there are also things that make me feel badly about how messed up I've been at points in my life and I then clean ferociously for hours afterwards in a hope that it will make things right.

This year I made a choice. The things I was proud of, the certificates of my accomplishments in music, my diploma and degree, report cards, school notes of courses I actually still find interesting and other scrapbook worthy things I organized and stored. The things that made me feel continually broken, the journals where I wrote things that I don't even remember doing or feeling, the bad poetry... well I did something that I'm sure some people will consider awful, but I threw it all out.

I used to think there was some kind of benefit to holding onto all the bad things in the past, but I don't think that anymore. I know we are shaped by a combination of our positive and negative experiences, but by keeping those things I felt like I was paying the negative some kind of undue reverence.

I just don't see the value in holding on it all any longer. It's not like I need it to remind me that it would be a good idea not to get depressed again or that growing up can be great, but also really sad and messy. Those lessons, I get them. Life is short and I don't think I need to give those lessons any more of my time nor do I need to feel badly about things disturbing and long forgotten.

Really, I've got more important things to organize in my world than bad memories.

HRH

*in total truth, they are not. It's just something on my list of things to do this weekend. Just imagining how organized they will be makes me a little dizzy with delight. I'm not sure if I'm happy or embarrassed about that.

What lies behind closed doors

Every morning when I take the streetcar to work, I pass a series of houses that stress me out. It's a bunch of row houses on College street between Lansdowne and Ossington. These houses are small and not in the best shape, but you can see that the people who live in them do their best to take care of them.

Because I've looked at them almost every day for the past four years or so, I've noticed that most of them have porches that have been closed off and turned into more living space. A totally understandable, albeit kind of ugly, home improvement in that part of town where space is a premium commodity. The thing is, many of these people have filled their covered over porches with crap. Crap that is piled ceiling high. Boxes, cookie tins, exercise equipment... I can only imagine what their closets and the basement might look like if the crap has made it out that far.

Each time I see it, I want to jump off the streetcar, run home and start throwing things out. That's right. Other people's junk makes me want to get rid of my own. I can't very well bust down someone else's front door and make them clean up their act, but I can make sure that I never suffer the same fate.

You see, clutter is like bacteria. Unless you're on your game and you keep fighting the good fight against it, it will consume you and before you know it, you'll be having to cut off a gangrenous limb. Okay, more accurately, you'll find yourself living in a home where most of the good space has been overrun with kitsch and the more of it there is, the more painful and unappealing the clean up process is.

So why does it bother me so much? I like things being neat and tidy, that's the primary reason, but sometimes, the times when I get a little manic about it and it's going to sound crazy and more than a little dark, but I do it because of death.

"The hell?" you all say. Death. When I'm dead and people are going through my things (assuming there are people who are compelled to look), I want them to see that I had my shit together. Yes, I actually think like this. I think that someone is going to notice and reflect on the order that I've filed my books in.

I'll be cleaning or organizing something and if I'm tired and want to stop I will actually say to myself "What will happen if you stop now and you die and the laundry isn't done?" Any sane person would respond with "You're dead! The laundry is irrelevant." Me? All I think is "Oh no. That would be terrible. My loved ones will think about my death and it will always start with 'the laundry wasn't done'..."

All those who think I might want to take my morning tea with a side of SSRI, say "I."

HRH

Cleaning habits die hard

When I was younger and when I was living on my own, I used to stay up into the wee hours of the morning cleaning. I know, I was so wild and crazy it's hard to imagine how I made it through my youth with all my limbs and organs in tact. There would be days when I would decide that things had to be scrubbed, reorganized and reordered. Living with M for the last seven years ostensibly put an end to the late night OCD cleaning episodes.

Having to respect that there is, indeed, someone else in the house and that it can really mess up his sleeping patterns if I am up at 2 a.m. making all the books in the guest room line up just so, really helped with using the night for more practical things like sleeping. I have to confess that whenever he travels and I am at home alone, I go to bed in the cleanest of all possible worlds. I'd rather have him with me at night one hundred times out of a hundred, but the OCDist within has a special moment when things are properly sorted. I suppose it's a neurotic way of finding solace in being apart. I clean because I miss him?

Anyway, it's after 11 and I have no inklings of being able to sleep. I've been cleaning fairly intensely for a school night. I would have kept going if M hadn't retired for the night.

I guess I just have to go through this a couple of times a year. The last bout of insomnia brought the revelation that turning my clock away from me would end all the terrible clock watching, at it is wonderful to be free of that. Now I just have to sort out how to stop watching the jets on final approach to Pearson through the window all night. I must have passed an hour or two last night wondering about all the people on those planes. Where they were coming from, what their lives were like and if their homes were clean.

Today's sing-a-long song: "Sleep Tonight" by Stars

HRH

Lost in the land of styrofoam peanuts and lobsters

Whomever supplies those to the Bay, must be making a killing. Seriously.

I have a problem. A semi-serious problem. I can't get my house to stop smelling of lobster. Lobster is yummy, yes, but in no way aromatic. See, we had the gang over on Sunday night for a lobster BBQ, as Chris had been out east for the week and graciously brought back three of these oh so popular bottom feeders.

The dinner was delicious. Mike thought out some fantastic side dishes and we ate like kings. We then watched Brick, which is an amazing movie that everyone has to see. It will make you want to talk like you're in a film noir and it will be hard to resist the urge to teem with angst in every waking moment you have, but it's so awesome and worth it.

Sunday, a total, yummy success. But it lingers.

I've washed all the clothes, the sheets and the towels, washed the counters and the floors, fabreezed the fabrics I can't wash, lit candles and used aromatic home sprays (ick!)... Opened windows, emptied garbages... I even threw out a skirt which, even though I didn't wear on Sunday and I washed it twice, reeked of lobster because it was with the handtowels we'd used in the kitchen on Sunday in the hamper... And still the eau de lobster remains. Should I not be able to find a way to make the smell go away, I foresee me spending Saturday scouring my home with bleach.

What could the lobster smell have gotten into... Or maybe that's what angst smells like?

Today's sing-a-long song: "Rock Lobster" by The B-52s

HRH

Why did I choose white?

So I'm enjoying my new lululemon Scuba hoodie. I'm a huge hoodie fan and this is so well designed and so comfortable. But it's also very white. I know all the reasons why I bought it in white. It looks amazing, it's outside my usual comfort zone and combines very easily for layering. But it's white.

White? Me? Dirt? Remember dirt? Was a white hoodie really a good idea for an obsessive-compulsive perfectionist?

I've just realized that I'm going to have to carry a lint brush and a Tide-to-go pen with me at all times. I've done stranger things to have things look right.

Today's sing-a-long song: "Sweetest Perfection" by Depeche Mode

HRH