stereotypical single woman

One of the side effects of me being stressed to the point of hysterics by a mountain of school work is that my apartment becomes incredibly clean. Case in point - you could perform surgery in my bathroom right now.

At the best of times I’m not what anyone in their right mind would call a good housekeeper. When I was younger my mother’s constant mantra was “I’m a mom, not a homemaker.” In retrospect I’ve realized that it was just her way of dealing with the constant mess and chaos of living with three children and a husband, but when I was younger I took it as free reign to be a slob. Since moving out I’ve definitely changed my tune, in fact in comparison to my sisters I’m a complete neat freak, but compared to the rest of the civilized world my cleaning habits are still sub par. But I’m gradually getting better. It’s not that anything is filthy, moldy, or likely to come alive and attack me. It’s just that the clutter gets pretty bad. And I don’t have a set schedule for cleaning. I only clean when things look dirty. Or when I need clean dishes to eat out of. Or when I know someone is coming over.

Anyway, my cleaning habits completely change when I’m stressed out and have a lot to do. Mostly because my brain, when confronted with a complex and difficult task that requires all it’s power to figure out, instinctively looks for any possible reason to not do what it is supposed to be doing. The soap scum in the bathtub, while there, wasn’t that bad. At least not bad enough for my brain to notice under normal circumstances. But a few days ago I simply could not concentrate on the differences between the Library of Congress and Dewey Decimal classification systems because, holy shit, there was soap scum in the bathtub. And on the shower walls. I did my best to ignore it. I tried reassuring myself that leaving it alone would be fine. It wasn’t that bad, and I would do a massive cleaning of the entire apartment once finals were over. That lasted for about five minutes. I then spent about an hour and a half locked in the bathroom with no ventilation (because I don’t need Marty getting hurt again) inhaling enough bleach to kill any brain cells that had stored the information I had spent most of the day studying. But at least the soap scum was gone.

So now it’s back to the handout for a group project I’m doing on library ethics that’s due on Thursday. At least for a little while. I made the mistake of using the broiler to make some toast this morning and I realized that the oven is filthy. I’m trying to ignore it, but I’m betting I’ll be scrubbing it out before the day is over.