But today, if someone were to ask me if I was a neat or messy person, I'm not sure how I would answer. Sometimes I love living like a cockroach, and other times, I need things to be painstakingly ordered and tidy. I think a good way to describe my ideal conditions would be "organized chaos."
The state of my room, for example. It may appear disgusting to most, but I find it pretty tolerable. In fact, I often don't even notice how dirty my room is until someone else does first. Usually, that person is my mom, who comes in to check if I'm still alive, takes one look at my desk, and screams in horror. The rare times I do begin to notice myself are when it's difficult to make it to my bed at night without stubbing my toe on three different things.
But if it reaches this point (and it always does eventually), I'll clean it. That's the strange thing: I enjoy the process of cleaning almost as much as I enjoy rotting in filth. I have rare domestic moments in which I find myself happily committing hours to tidying up messes I clearly made myself. It makes me feel like a dumpster diver, unearthing something nice from underneath a pile of trash.
Another plus to cleaning is finding interesting things along the way, like old journals and failed quizzes, which gives me a review my life since the last time I cleaned my room (probably like a year and a half ago). And regardless of how dirty it was before, I can guarantee that the finished product afterwards is so clean, it makes a soap bar want to wash itself.
As a side note, while many may have found that moving into a dorm in college unleashed their inner slob, I became considerably neater after I moved. I guess you can say I clean up pretty nicely-- literally.
If I really think about it, my mixed messy/clean lifestyle extends into almost everything I do. When I was a kid, I dumped entire buckets of crayons on the floor for the sole purpose of neatly putting them back in the same bucket. Now in my classes, whenever I get a handout, I shove it unceremoniously into a single, bulging folder that contains notes for every other class I'm taking-- but eventually, I'll organize all of them at once. Perhaps some part of me just likes tidying up messy things-- the only catch is that they have to get messy first.
I had a job shelving books in my school's library this summer. I quickly learned that summer is the worst season for school libraries-- even though there's no one around, all the books that were checked out during the year come flooding back in one tsunami-ous wave, making the next three months dedicated to nothing but reshelving thousands of volumes and fixing overcrowded shelves.
As you may imagine by now, I had quite a joy ride.
I actually didn't think anything was unordinary about my activities until I noticed something about the shelving slips on my floor. To keep track of progress, the library has students fill out slips for each truck they complete. Eventually, I noticed that when I added a finished slip to the tray, the most recently completed slip on top of the pile was usually also mine. I decided to count them one day, to get to the bottom of the mystery. What I found was that out of the three student employees on my floor, I had filled out over 2/3 of the completed slips. I am not very good at math, but some part of me realized that this was probably not normal.
Perhaps when we call people messy or organized, we're not doing their personalities justice. People don't fit into categories as easily as we think-- most of our habits, even the oldest ones, probably have exceptions if we think about them enough. Variation makes life interesting. At least, that's what I tell myself as I trip over the same pile of clothes in my room for the seventh time.
