On Cleaning Your Room

Well, it's that time of year again. Schoolwork has come to a close (blatantly ignores EE and Summer Reading), I'm spending more time at home than not (being social is for chumps), and the dust bunnies and endless piles of used notebook paper have become entirely too much. That's right folks.

I'm going to clean my room.

And upon declaring the beginning of such an intensive journey, I've begun to realize something. Something I've been thinking about for a long time. The world can essentially be divided into three types of people. Cleaners, slobs, and livers.

1) Cleaners- They're those people. You know who I'm talking about. The second you walk into their room you have to double take for a second, because you swear you don't remember the sign signaling a freaking IKEA showroom floor

Please ignore the mess... and the price tags.

Not only do I feel extraordinarily jealous that there are people that really have such pristine rooms, but I get annoyed at the amount of time and effort they put into keeping it that way. And I know what you're probably thinking. It's not that hard to pick up after yourself on a regular basis since it only takes five seconds and blah blah blah. Whatever.

They aren't just putting things away. They're dusting and vacuuming and organizing and interrupting their train of thought every time there's the tiniest thing out of place. And I just don't understand it. It feels... impersonal. Like when people have elaborate dining rooms in their homes that they don't use or how the waiting room in a nice doctor's office always looks awkwardly new even when you know thousands of people have sat in those chairs and flipped through those magazines. If something's your room, it shouldn't be that pristine. Not until your thirty-five with 2.5 kids and a white picket fence. When you're a teenager, or even in your twenties, you should be occupying yourself with far more important things than how even your sheets are or crooked picture frames. Come on guys, you're young. Act like it.

Hey meme, we don't need your existential crisis right now.

2) Slobs- Okay, so when I say slobs, I mean slobs. Like, the kind whose rooms have mysterious food stains on their bed, weeks worth of laundry on the floor, graded papers left over from third grade, and some sort of horrendous smell you can't seem to put your finger on. You may have seen extreme versions of them here:

That's funny, because it's a sponge... I think.

But in a likelihood, you probably have a milder version in your life right now. Maybe they're lazy. Maybe they're too busy with other things. Maybe they insist it's part of their creative process and the clutter around them symbolizes what the inside of their troubled mind looks like (#writerproblems). However, regardless of how or why, the fact that their living space is disgusting is just as unacceptable as having a room that's too clean. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's worse.

I don't care if you spend 80% of your time at school or with friends or riding wild dinosaurs into the sunset. The other 20% still needs to take place in conditions condusive to human life (in which case, avoid the dinosaurs as well). I mean, I'm not telling you to conform or anything

Sanitation is so mainstream

but it's going to be pretty hard to keep your life together and organized with such broken and disorganized space to come home to. Whether or not you're the type of person that sits on their bum and grinds doritos into the carpet all day, you still have to get things done like homework and college apps and eventually bills and taxes, and it just doesn't work if you don't have a system of organizing things. Your room is a reflection of who you are and you need to treat it like you would an adorable puppy.

Take care of your puppy, dammit.

3) Livers

I couldn't resist.

I'm talking about livers as in people. People who, you know, live. Livers take up the majority of the population. They fall somewhere inbetween the Cleaners and the Slobs with none of them being completely Cleaner or completely Slob. Kind of like the political moderates and independents of the room cleaning world

Screw politics. Let's dance.

What's so great about being a Liver (because, you know, I am one) is that your rooms looks simply... lived in. It's not a disaster or anything, but it's not squeeky clean either. Most of your books are put away, but you still have one or two with bookmarks sitting on your bedside table, your floor is clean, but there's a few discarded items of clothing pushed in the corner because you were in too much of a rush to throw them in the hamper. While Cleaners have rooms like term papers and Slobs own spaces that read like jibberish, there's something about the room of a Liver that reads like a gripping story, told by the slight misplacements and shifts in an otherwise uniquely imperfect room. Livers are the rest of us. The ones they don't have a show or store dedicated to. But, like our stories, each one of us is still worth reading.

And now that I've gone on that profound tangent, it's three in the morning and I've accomplished nothing.

Ah, summer cleaning.