Like a Bear on Skates

I'm a really messy person.

When I lived by myself, I was kind of a pig. I'd go through every dish I had before I'd wash them. Sometimes it took 3 weeks to go through every dish I had.

I'd end up eating cold cereal out of a saucepot with a fork. That type of thing.

It was the same with laundry. Cleaning the bathroom. Whatever. My mum was always horrified when she came to visit.

I was pretty much a bachelor with tits.

Then I met Chuck. Total fucking neat freak. When I first came down here to visit, every time I put a glass in the sink, he'd pick it up behind me and wash it. I thought he was just being nice.

The longer I spent with him, I saw that it was because he couldn't stand to be in the same house as an unwashed glass in the sink.

You could practically hear the whistle-music from 'The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly'. It'd be a showdown between him and the dirty glass.

Chuck was always quicker on the draw. The glass had no chance.

I asked Chuck if being in the military had made him a neat person, and he said that he'd just always been that way.

The one time he came up to visit me in Canada, I had my place spotless. I took out four garbage bags full of trash the day before his arrival, so he wouldn't see what an oinker I was.

When I unexpectedly stayed in the US and moved in with him after his cancer surgery, I'm sure we drove each other batshit.

In fact, I know we did.

I wasn't working at the time, and my little messes here and there (sounds like I was pooping on the carpet or something, but I promise I'm not that much of a pig) would piss him off. His neatness would piss me off. His lack of a lung pissed us both off. It was fun times.

Don't smoke, boys. You'll end up losing a lung and gaining a messy-ass Canadian wife.

I was actually unable to work for about two years before I got my green card, as that would have been highly illegal.

In that time, I tried really, really, really hard to become a neat person. Chuckles never 'expected' me to clean the house, do the laundry, make him dinner, etc. He knew better than that. I'd had 'the talk' with him when we first met about how I wasn't ever going to be a 'traditional' wife. Expecting me to be the housemaid wouldn't fly, no matter what his previous live-in significant others had been like.

I said that while I wasn't working I would do all these things because I had nothing better to do, but once I was able to have a job, we would be sharing the housework, the cooking, the laundry, etc. I wasn't going to be working full time and doing all the cleaning. Fuck THAT shit.

During this period, something weird happened. I did naturally become a little neater.

I found that indeed, cleaning dishes as you go is a hell of a lot less work than cleaning them after you've used them all and left them sitting for three weeks.  And your cereal won't taste like metal. And that peeing in a toilet that you've scrubbed more often than Halley's Comet comes around is quite nice, actually.

I still found a way to be 'me' of course. Stickin' it to the MAN. The man being Chuckles.

I made a deal with him that stated if the rest of the house was clean, I would still be able to have a complete mess in two places and that he couldn't complain about it. Next to my side of the bed and in my closet. No. Complaints.

The current state of my closet...I think there may be a few gay dudes hiding under that mess. And maybe even Jimmy Hoffa.

Chuck agreed, and actually kept his promise to not complain about it. Mostly. (The windows in our bedroom are on my side of the bed, and if he ever has to come around and close them, he'll mention how he has to wade through a pile of dirty clothes to do it.)


Eventually I landed my current bookstore job, and we started sharing the housework more equally. Even though we'd had 'the talk', I think it was hard for Chuck to get used to me not cleaning everything all the time. Of course, he had a full-time job too, and didn't feel like cleaning either.

Do you know what happened? He got a little messy.

He discovered that the dirty glass could wait until the morning to be washed and the house wouldn't collapse around us. We could go to work without making the bed and the Bed Police wouldn't bitchslap us.

I got neater, he got messier. It's interesting what marriage does to you.

Have you ever heard a messy person say, "But I know where everything is! If I clean it up, I won't be able to find anything."

Drives neat people bugfuck. But it's true!

That's because many people who are messy on the outside are really organized in their heads.

My brain is neat as a pin.

Ok, we all know there's a multitude of shirtless hot guys hanging around in there, but on the whole it's a very organized place.

Even though I have a busy life, I never carry a planner. If I need any extra help remembering very important things because my head is too full of shirtless hot guys (who may or may not be kissing each other), I write them down on the back of my hand  or put up Post-It notes.

This blog has really helped to clear my brain out every week. Whenever I feel like my head is getting messy, I throw everything out into a blog post and I feel better. For you tree-huggin' hippies, you could call it 'thought recycling'.

One thing about having a tidy mind is not dealing with change well. Big changes, small changes. I've never dealt well with them.

My mum kept a baby journal about me for awhile, and she wrote something like 'does not accept change well' in there. Apparently I also bounced around when Michael Jackson came on the radio and was allergic to cow's milk, but I digress.

I barely ever change anything on this blog. The colours are mostly the same as when I started it almost two years ago.  So is the format. So was the header picture until yesterday.

I've been trying to train myself to accept change, just like I trained myself into keeping a cleaner house. I feel like a Russian circus bear most of the time, but you know.

Or maybe you don't.

I forced myself to change the header picture. That's the one place where I will always use a photo that I took myself and didn't lift off the internet. I'm going to change that and my sidebar pictures more often.

So far I like the change. I'd really like to change my blog colours, but I discovered I'd have to change the whole layout to ditch the green background. (Have I said 'change' enough times??) But I like the layout. And I'm not talented enough to make a fancy one that I'd really like.

Dammit! *clutches head*....baby steps Kyna, baby steps...

I always think that if I change anything on my blog, people won't like it and stop reading or something. But I tell myself that it won't happen just because I change the header picture.

Who doesn't want a giant Rodin vagina staring them in the face when they click my link? People who are not my kind of friends, that's who.

I'd love to change my blog title, because it seems like a big lie now. But that one really scares me.

It's like cutting all your hair off and dyeing it pink. It's a big change and not something you can reverse easily.  And your friends all think you've lost your mind.

Maybe I could hold a contest. Anyone have some good title suggestions for me?