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helenorvanaI am such a procrastinator, but while I'm just as prone to sitting on my phone watching Youtube or playing games as the next person, I will occasionally do something I call the Downward Cleaning Spiral, which makes sense in the moment, but otherwise is equally baffling to both Roommate Tina and myself. For example, my two most recent DCSs happened last night (which prompted this post, and was highly entertaining at the time), and when my parents were visiting in September, which was incredibly frustrating.
My parents had come up to visit for a variety of reasons to do with my mental and emotional state at the time, as well as bringing up stuff they'd gotten from various sisters as they were cleaning out their houses/moving in with husbands that I'd said I wanted. But they were staying with my aunt and uncle in the town next over since there's actually more family living there, and it's more centrally located for everyone. So either they would have to come down here, or I'd have to go up there to see them, and I had had an exhausting day at work, and then done the grocery shopping right after. I was looking forward to just getting clean (I'm a housekeeper, so I felt absolutely gross) and going up to spend the evening with my family/parents.
And then the bathroom flooded, and everything went downhill from there, leading to my rage-cleaning the entire house. Yes, the entire house.
First, I had to clean and mop the bathroom floor after getting most of the gross water up with all the extra towels. But I completely forgot we have a Swiffer mop since I never use it, so I broke out the bucket mop. And if I'm gonna get all that mop water anyway for my tiny bathroom, may as well sweep and mop the other floors, right? But if I'm gonna do that, I need to clean off the kitchen counters and table so I can sweep up the stuff I knock off. Gotta be efficient about this. Meanwhile, the laundry from the bathroom is going, and by the time I'vecleaned the kitchen, tidied the entryway/laundry room, shook out the rugs and added them to the laundry, swept the floors, and mopped finished up, I'm two loads in.
The plan at this point is to shower while those floors dry, then go up late for dinner with the family, right? But as I'm getting ready to get in the shower I realize I have no clean towels - they're either already in the machine or got used to sop up the original mess. It is 7:30. It is my parents' last night here. I won't be able to leave for at least another half-hour, and it's another half-hour drive to get there. I am so frustrated, and physically exhausted because Sundays at a hotel are the busiest days of the week and it was slammed, and I wanted to cry with rage at that point.
I throw in the towel, text my parents to say I won't be up for dinner on their last night here, when I haven't seen them in almost two years, and fucking commit. I hang up some of the pictures we've been meaning to get to for a couple months now, tidied up the living room, vacuumed, and finally got clean towels so I could shower off all the damn sweat I still had from work (I felt so disgusting). It is now 8:30, but if I cancelled on my parents because I was cleaning, I damn well wasn't going to stop now.
Into a spare plastic zip-up bag and into the garage went all of our (many) spare pillows from the guest room. The sheets from both my bed and the guest bed got stripped and added to the (enormous by this point) pile of laundry. Also my own bed pillows, since it's been a while since they were washed. Still waiting on laundry, so I cleaned the damn light switches. No, I don't know how that made it onto the list of Things That Must Be Cleaned Right Now. I really wanted to go to bed after that, and the laundry can wait until tomorrow, right? Except in my exhaustion, I had done the loads in a really stupid order: sheets and pillows in load #3, and my work clothes (which were all dirty, and I needed them the next day) in load #4 (currently in the washer, but only just).
Instead, I cleaned all four fish tanks - which are supposed to be cleaned on Sundays, yes, but I was so fucking tired I was just going to do them on Monday, but since I'm still waiting on laundry, I might as well clean something else. I was too frustrated and angry to read or watch something, and they needed done, so they got done. One of the tanks is a 75-gallon tank, which means by the time I was done cleaning all of them, I'd gone through a total of five loads of laundry and also made my bed with the sheets that were fresh out of the dryer.
It was 11:30 by the time I finished with the fish tanks. I had been cleaning since I got home at 5:15. Finally I could fold my work clothes and go the fuck to sleep, somewhere around 12:30 in the morning. Also, because my parents are awesome, they were going to swing by on their way back home to see me one last time, so I would be getting up early on Monday. On top of one of the most physically exhausting days I've had in years. Oh, joy.
*Side-note: two things always happen whenever Tina is out of town for longer than a weekend. First, I do, in fact, do a pretty thorough cleaning of the public areas of the house. I just wasn't planning on doing it all in one day while my parents were visiting. And since she is the fixer in this household, something mechanical breaks when she's gone. I got lucky that time, probably because she was just out of town for an extended weekend, but of things that have gone wrong, the list includes: the heat going out in the middle of winter, the garage door opener dying of old age (I'd actually forgotten this happened until just now - all in the same winter, too), something with the water pipes (although I think we took steps to mitigate what we suspected might break before she left, that time), and most recently our dryer gave up the ghost right before she went home for Christmas.
Yesterday ... yesterday just kind of happened, and is more typical of the Downward Cleaning Spiral (much less rage-inducing/induced, much more bafflement and "it made sense at the time").
I want to be more tidy and organized this year, sort of a New Year's Resolution, and I stumbled across bullet journaling a while ago. Given that it's February and I'm still not done making my ~intro pages~ you can see how well I'm keeping up with it, but it has prompted some things, like an Unfuck My Desk page, which is what started this particular DCS.
I have a bookshelf by my bed, because it's a loft bed and otherwise I don't have any sort of nightstand up there. I still don't know what all I'm going to put on it, but for the moment it's got some framed pictures, sketchbooks, and my mister/diffuser, which is on the top shelf but not the top of the bookcase itself. This is important because I tried to put the top back on it from my bed a couple days ago, rather than climbing down the ladder and doing it from the floor, which led to the (unattached) shelf tipping and falling. This is important, I'll come back to it.
So. In working on my Unfuck My Desk page, I wanted to actually look at my desk, right, to get a general idea of what I'm working with/what I want to do. As I'm looking at it, I notice that my printer is just the right size to fit on my bookshelf, and it's been taking up a lot of space on my desk, so I wanted to go ahead and move it while I was thinking about it. In order to move it, I had to put my bookshelf back together, since all I'd done was mop up the water (I was very tired). Putting it back together led to discovering that the glass on a face-down picture frame had broken, which led to vacuuming around the area. Well, I accidentally vacuumed up something I really didn't want to, so I had to empty the vacuum to get it out (I have already lost the thing I didn't want vacuumed up, go figure).
Y'all, Tina and I both hate vacuuming. We don't do it nearly as often as we should, and we don't really notice how much shit is in the vacuum. This thing was way too full, and I got covered in dirt and dust cleaning it out. And me being me, I decided I should go ahead and clean the canisters and the filters while I was at this (not such a bad idea in and of itself, but if only I had stopped there!). Cleaning the filters meant I needed to access the sink, which was full of dirty dishes since the dishwasher was clean. So I emptied the dishwasher, loaded it again which got it full enough to run, and remembered that I had laundry I wanted to get done (laundry always seems to end up getting done in these DCSs, but to be fair I only have three work smocks so I do a lot of small loads anyway?). So I went and swapped over the laundry, which involved digging into the back of the cupboard over the washer to get to the dryer sheets. I have always hated having to dig back there for those, but they got put in that particular place when we first moved in and we've never done anything with them since, and I finally got fed up. So I spent the next five-ish minutes reorganizing the laundry cupboard.
That done and vacuum parts drying, I went and put the bookshelf back together and moved the printer. But since at least two picture frames got damaged, I didn't want to put them back on there yet, and while I was reassembling the bookcase in the first place, might as well organize that, too, and get some things put in more logical places?
This in turn led me to gathering up all of my journals from the bookshelves in the main room. (Which, a digression: I love me some journals. I have not written a damn thing in at least 2/3s of the journals I possess, but no two journals look the same! ...I will elaborate in a later post, I'm realizing I apparently have a lot of thoughts about journals. And I will get back to the journals in a bit.) The journals are on the same two shelves as my old massage textbooks, which I've wanted to dump for a while - why not now? This led to me cutting off and pulling out the wire bindings to throw away so I could recycle the paper. Since it's a pretty mindless task, and I'm just sitting there staring at my shelves while I'm doing this, and since I'm already planning to move all the journals anyway, I decided to flip through and sort through all the journals, to see which ones I've even written anything in.
Which was more than I was expecting! But only one or two was actually finished. And there were all kinds of shit in them. I even had a yearly planner I'd gotten back in 2010 with vague thoughts of trying to write a little something every day (I don't know why I thought a planner was the best format for this). But yeah, some of it was writing bits, some were school notes, there was a journal I'd started using for my first Dungeons and Dragons character (...I still want to go back and finish that one, at least up until the point where we abandoned that campaign...), one or two were for Bible study notes. But a surprising number were actually attempts at keeping a regular journal. I say surprising, because most of them were the dinky little spiral-bounds, which I'm not a huge fan of but have never gone through and cleared out.
Well, I went ahead and moved all of the unused journals to the bedside bookshelf, but I've put the eleven journals (other than the big main journal, which is also on the shelf) that had more than two or three pages written in over by my recliner, because I want to actually sit down and properly sort through them, figure out what's worth keeping and what can be recycled. Being perfectly honest, this was mostly so I could finally get rid of those damn dinky spiral-bounds without regret.
That, thankfully, was the final stage of the DCS, because I then shifted over to a new project with the journals. If I wanted to keep the stuff that was in them, but didn't want to keep the journals themselves, why not just transcribe them into this handy Dreamwidth journal I have just sitting over here? I had vague ideas of posting to it more regularly, anyway, why not use a journal for its intended purpose and just back-date the transcriptions? This has led to my rediscovering Helen's Very First Diary from when I was nine, which resulted in unexpected self-reflection, which bears elaborating on in another post down the line, but not here. This was about the time when Tina got home, saw the state of our main room, saw the reorganized laundry cupboard, and said "Oh, honey."
So you see, the DCSs do have a logical progression? And I do try to make the most of them when they happen, because otherwise I rarely have the time, energy, or inclination to get any cleaning done around the house. And my tolerance for a messy house is a lot lower than Tina's, but she's usually the one who starts the cleaning, so I spend a great deal of time at home in general despair of the state of our house but unable to find a spoon to do something about it. But normally when I can spend a spoon on cleaning, it doesn't look anything like a DCS. Those are very distinctive, and outside of when they're actually happening, neither Tina nor I can make any sense over how my brain decides to prioritize what needs to get done in what order and Right Now, Above All Else. I mean, like, I follow the chain of decisions? I just laid it all out there, I can see the thought process.
But, like...why did I have to mop all the floors? I wanted to go spend time with my parents and my out-of-town relatives, why did it have to happen right then? If I'd just mopped the bathroom and waited for a clean towel, I only would have been maybe an hour late, rather than having to cancel altogether. Why the damn light switches? Or, in my more pleasant DCS, why the cupboard? There's not so much a logical stopping point in that one, but recycling the textbooks didn't have to happen right that minute, the cupboard could've lasted until we moved out (whenever that happens)...
There are two distinctive things about my DCSs, the things that make it a DCS rather than just a long or intensive fit of cleaning. First, rather than doing a bunch of separate tasks, like checking items off a to-do list, one thing just seems to lead to another. They were never things I planned on doing at the time but made sense to do it anyway, why put it of? Despite the fact that I had other things I'd been planning to do with my time instead, often things I wanted to do even more. Second, there is always that one random thing that doesn't seem to have anything to do with the list of things I was already doing. Like the light switches and the cupboard, and the pillows.
Fortunately, they don't happen very often - maybe one every couple months? Like I said, the last one was in September. I'll have mini downward cleaning spirals every once in a while, but those tend to only be two or three things at a time, and are easier to break out of if I really want to, not the full-blown DCS of six or seven things chained together where I just can't seem to stop myself. I don't hate them when they happen, with the notable exception of the September one, there's just no rhyme or reason to when they happen. They're weird.
Anyway. More insight into my mental state when I'm cleaning than you probably wanted, but I figured I should probably record the phenomena for posterity's sake. Also it was a reason to make a damn DW post, which I have been meaning to do since the year started and just ... haven't. Hopefully I'll be able to make it a habit again.
My parents had come up to visit for a variety of reasons to do with my mental and emotional state at the time, as well as bringing up stuff they'd gotten from various sisters as they were cleaning out their houses/moving in with husbands that I'd said I wanted. But they were staying with my aunt and uncle in the town next over since there's actually more family living there, and it's more centrally located for everyone. So either they would have to come down here, or I'd have to go up there to see them, and I had had an exhausting day at work, and then done the grocery shopping right after. I was looking forward to just getting clean (I'm a housekeeper, so I felt absolutely gross) and going up to spend the evening with my family/parents.
And then the bathroom flooded, and everything went downhill from there, leading to my rage-cleaning the entire house. Yes, the entire house.
First, I had to clean and mop the bathroom floor after getting most of the gross water up with all the extra towels. But I completely forgot we have a Swiffer mop since I never use it, so I broke out the bucket mop. And if I'm gonna get all that mop water anyway for my tiny bathroom, may as well sweep and mop the other floors, right? But if I'm gonna do that, I need to clean off the kitchen counters and table so I can sweep up the stuff I knock off. Gotta be efficient about this. Meanwhile, the laundry from the bathroom is going, and by the time I've
The plan at this point is to shower while those floors dry, then go up late for dinner with the family, right? But as I'm getting ready to get in the shower I realize I have no clean towels - they're either already in the machine or got used to sop up the original mess. It is 7:30. It is my parents' last night here. I won't be able to leave for at least another half-hour, and it's another half-hour drive to get there. I am so frustrated, and physically exhausted because Sundays at a hotel are the busiest days of the week and it was slammed, and I wanted to cry with rage at that point.
I throw in the towel, text my parents to say I won't be up for dinner on their last night here, when I haven't seen them in almost two years, and fucking commit. I hang up some of the pictures we've been meaning to get to for a couple months now, tidied up the living room, vacuumed, and finally got clean towels so I could shower off all the damn sweat I still had from work (I felt so disgusting). It is now 8:30, but if I cancelled on my parents because I was cleaning, I damn well wasn't going to stop now.
Into a spare plastic zip-up bag and into the garage went all of our (many) spare pillows from the guest room. The sheets from both my bed and the guest bed got stripped and added to the (enormous by this point) pile of laundry. Also my own bed pillows, since it's been a while since they were washed. Still waiting on laundry, so I cleaned the damn light switches. No, I don't know how that made it onto the list of Things That Must Be Cleaned Right Now. I really wanted to go to bed after that, and the laundry can wait until tomorrow, right? Except in my exhaustion, I had done the loads in a really stupid order: sheets and pillows in load #3, and my work clothes (which were all dirty, and I needed them the next day) in load #4 (currently in the washer, but only just).
Instead, I cleaned all four fish tanks - which are supposed to be cleaned on Sundays, yes, but I was so fucking tired I was just going to do them on Monday, but since I'm still waiting on laundry, I might as well clean something else. I was too frustrated and angry to read or watch something, and they needed done, so they got done. One of the tanks is a 75-gallon tank, which means by the time I was done cleaning all of them, I'd gone through a total of five loads of laundry and also made my bed with the sheets that were fresh out of the dryer.
It was 11:30 by the time I finished with the fish tanks. I had been cleaning since I got home at 5:15. Finally I could fold my work clothes and go the fuck to sleep, somewhere around 12:30 in the morning. Also, because my parents are awesome, they were going to swing by on their way back home to see me one last time, so I would be getting up early on Monday. On top of one of the most physically exhausting days I've had in years. Oh, joy.
*Side-note: two things always happen whenever Tina is out of town for longer than a weekend. First, I do, in fact, do a pretty thorough cleaning of the public areas of the house. I just wasn't planning on doing it all in one day while my parents were visiting. And since she is the fixer in this household, something mechanical breaks when she's gone. I got lucky that time, probably because she was just out of town for an extended weekend, but of things that have gone wrong, the list includes: the heat going out in the middle of winter, the garage door opener dying of old age (I'd actually forgotten this happened until just now - all in the same winter, too), something with the water pipes (although I think we took steps to mitigate what we suspected might break before she left, that time), and most recently our dryer gave up the ghost right before she went home for Christmas.
Yesterday ... yesterday just kind of happened, and is more typical of the Downward Cleaning Spiral (much less rage-inducing/induced, much more bafflement and "it made sense at the time").
I want to be more tidy and organized this year, sort of a New Year's Resolution, and I stumbled across bullet journaling a while ago. Given that it's February and I'm still not done making my ~intro pages~ you can see how well I'm keeping up with it, but it has prompted some things, like an Unfuck My Desk page, which is what started this particular DCS.
I have a bookshelf by my bed, because it's a loft bed and otherwise I don't have any sort of nightstand up there. I still don't know what all I'm going to put on it, but for the moment it's got some framed pictures, sketchbooks, and my mister/diffuser, which is on the top shelf but not the top of the bookcase itself. This is important because I tried to put the top back on it from my bed a couple days ago, rather than climbing down the ladder and doing it from the floor, which led to the (unattached) shelf tipping and falling. This is important, I'll come back to it.
So. In working on my Unfuck My Desk page, I wanted to actually look at my desk, right, to get a general idea of what I'm working with/what I want to do. As I'm looking at it, I notice that my printer is just the right size to fit on my bookshelf, and it's been taking up a lot of space on my desk, so I wanted to go ahead and move it while I was thinking about it. In order to move it, I had to put my bookshelf back together, since all I'd done was mop up the water (I was very tired). Putting it back together led to discovering that the glass on a face-down picture frame had broken, which led to vacuuming around the area. Well, I accidentally vacuumed up something I really didn't want to, so I had to empty the vacuum to get it out (I have already lost the thing I didn't want vacuumed up, go figure).
Y'all, Tina and I both hate vacuuming. We don't do it nearly as often as we should, and we don't really notice how much shit is in the vacuum. This thing was way too full, and I got covered in dirt and dust cleaning it out. And me being me, I decided I should go ahead and clean the canisters and the filters while I was at this (not such a bad idea in and of itself, but if only I had stopped there!). Cleaning the filters meant I needed to access the sink, which was full of dirty dishes since the dishwasher was clean. So I emptied the dishwasher, loaded it again which got it full enough to run, and remembered that I had laundry I wanted to get done (laundry always seems to end up getting done in these DCSs, but to be fair I only have three work smocks so I do a lot of small loads anyway?). So I went and swapped over the laundry, which involved digging into the back of the cupboard over the washer to get to the dryer sheets. I have always hated having to dig back there for those, but they got put in that particular place when we first moved in and we've never done anything with them since, and I finally got fed up. So I spent the next five-ish minutes reorganizing the laundry cupboard.
That done and vacuum parts drying, I went and put the bookshelf back together and moved the printer. But since at least two picture frames got damaged, I didn't want to put them back on there yet, and while I was reassembling the bookcase in the first place, might as well organize that, too, and get some things put in more logical places?
This in turn led me to gathering up all of my journals from the bookshelves in the main room. (Which, a digression: I love me some journals. I have not written a damn thing in at least 2/3s of the journals I possess, but no two journals look the same! ...I will elaborate in a later post, I'm realizing I apparently have a lot of thoughts about journals. And I will get back to the journals in a bit.) The journals are on the same two shelves as my old massage textbooks, which I've wanted to dump for a while - why not now? This led to me cutting off and pulling out the wire bindings to throw away so I could recycle the paper. Since it's a pretty mindless task, and I'm just sitting there staring at my shelves while I'm doing this, and since I'm already planning to move all the journals anyway, I decided to flip through and sort through all the journals, to see which ones I've even written anything in.
Which was more than I was expecting! But only one or two was actually finished. And there were all kinds of shit in them. I even had a yearly planner I'd gotten back in 2010 with vague thoughts of trying to write a little something every day (I don't know why I thought a planner was the best format for this). But yeah, some of it was writing bits, some were school notes, there was a journal I'd started using for my first Dungeons and Dragons character (...I still want to go back and finish that one, at least up until the point where we abandoned that campaign...), one or two were for Bible study notes. But a surprising number were actually attempts at keeping a regular journal. I say surprising, because most of them were the dinky little spiral-bounds, which I'm not a huge fan of but have never gone through and cleared out.
Well, I went ahead and moved all of the unused journals to the bedside bookshelf, but I've put the eleven journals (other than the big main journal, which is also on the shelf) that had more than two or three pages written in over by my recliner, because I want to actually sit down and properly sort through them, figure out what's worth keeping and what can be recycled. Being perfectly honest, this was mostly so I could finally get rid of those damn dinky spiral-bounds without regret.
That, thankfully, was the final stage of the DCS, because I then shifted over to a new project with the journals. If I wanted to keep the stuff that was in them, but didn't want to keep the journals themselves, why not just transcribe them into this handy Dreamwidth journal I have just sitting over here? I had vague ideas of posting to it more regularly, anyway, why not use a journal for its intended purpose and just back-date the transcriptions? This has led to my rediscovering Helen's Very First Diary from when I was nine, which resulted in unexpected self-reflection, which bears elaborating on in another post down the line, but not here. This was about the time when Tina got home, saw the state of our main room, saw the reorganized laundry cupboard, and said "Oh, honey."
So you see, the DCSs do have a logical progression? And I do try to make the most of them when they happen, because otherwise I rarely have the time, energy, or inclination to get any cleaning done around the house. And my tolerance for a messy house is a lot lower than Tina's, but she's usually the one who starts the cleaning, so I spend a great deal of time at home in general despair of the state of our house but unable to find a spoon to do something about it. But normally when I can spend a spoon on cleaning, it doesn't look anything like a DCS. Those are very distinctive, and outside of when they're actually happening, neither Tina nor I can make any sense over how my brain decides to prioritize what needs to get done in what order and Right Now, Above All Else. I mean, like, I follow the chain of decisions? I just laid it all out there, I can see the thought process.
But, like...why did I have to mop all the floors? I wanted to go spend time with my parents and my out-of-town relatives, why did it have to happen right then? If I'd just mopped the bathroom and waited for a clean towel, I only would have been maybe an hour late, rather than having to cancel altogether. Why the damn light switches? Or, in my more pleasant DCS, why the cupboard? There's not so much a logical stopping point in that one, but recycling the textbooks didn't have to happen right that minute, the cupboard could've lasted until we moved out (whenever that happens)...
There are two distinctive things about my DCSs, the things that make it a DCS rather than just a long or intensive fit of cleaning. First, rather than doing a bunch of separate tasks, like checking items off a to-do list, one thing just seems to lead to another. They were never things I planned on doing at the time but made sense to do it anyway, why put it of? Despite the fact that I had other things I'd been planning to do with my time instead, often things I wanted to do even more. Second, there is always that one random thing that doesn't seem to have anything to do with the list of things I was already doing. Like the light switches and the cupboard, and the pillows.
Fortunately, they don't happen very often - maybe one every couple months? Like I said, the last one was in September. I'll have mini downward cleaning spirals every once in a while, but those tend to only be two or three things at a time, and are easier to break out of if I really want to, not the full-blown DCS of six or seven things chained together where I just can't seem to stop myself. I don't hate them when they happen, with the notable exception of the September one, there's just no rhyme or reason to when they happen. They're weird.
Anyway. More insight into my mental state when I'm cleaning than you probably wanted, but I figured I should probably record the phenomena for posterity's sake. Also it was a reason to make a damn DW post, which I have been meaning to do since the year started and just ... haven't. Hopefully I'll be able to make it a habit again.
