Coming Clean About Housekeeping

To make a short story long, I'm a messy person. When I'm driving down the street in my car and I need to dispose of my banana skins, I don't think twice about throwing them in the back seat.

Too tired to get up from my bed and toss dirty socks in the hamper, I throw them on the floor. I never sit bolt upright in the middle of the night, worrying about the dirty spoon and saucer (and OK, maybe a few plates) sitting in the sink.

I know neat people must be grinding their teeth.

“I need to have things neat and orderly,” they insist.

As for me, I was born messy, and I'll probably die messy.

My philosophy is that if everything has “one proper place”, then there are fewer places to look when things disappear. If you've always put your keys on the hallway table for the past 30 years and the black hole in outer space suddenly sucks them in, where are you going to look for them, if there's “only one proper place”?

With me, there's almost never any shortage of the number of places my car keys could be:  Under a pile of my clothes from yesterday, in the bushes where I threw them when I was running for the phone or even still sticking out my front door.

There's a lot to be said for being messy. When it comes to choosing sides, the universe will always favor messy people. After all, it started out as a compact, neat little package and then exploded into a great big, cosmic discombobular mess.

Earthquakes don't think twice about smashing your good crystal, and autumn winds don't care about scattering leaves all over freshly mown lawns. In short, the natural order of the universe dictates that things go from being neat to messy, not the other way around.

Does that mean we should sit idly by, biting our nails and watching the dirty dishes in the sink multiply?

“Certainly not!” my grandmother would say.

As she swept up the broken glass in her Los Angeles apartment minutes after the last big earthquake struck, she shouted down at her frightened neighbors who huddled under the stairways below: “You have to take control. You can't let this earthquake get the best of you!”

I don't know. For me, I've always thought that being messy makes it easier to make friends. I mean, if you're a neat person, when someone comes to your house, do you say, “oh, please excuse my house, it's so neat?”

With a messy person, you know how it goes: “Oh, I'm so embarrassed. My house is such a mess!”

“Oh, really you should see my house. It's much messier.”

And then when your visitor goes on to tell you the unthinkable—the time she threw away the dirty dishes in the sink and bought a whole new set because she couldn't stand the smell anymore, you become fast friends. After all, if you can't share your dirty secrets with a friend, who can you share them with?

(Readers can e-mail Lisa at lisal@thegrid.net.)