seshat's blog post - Tidiness

So what happens when you're alone at home for a week? You tend, for example, to watch TV shows you don't usually watch.
So this week I ended up watching a show about hoarders and how they try to get their house cleared out. The first feeling I got was, as most people, a feeling of relief: phew, my house isn't THAT bad And then I got to thinking about my own messy tendencies.

Part of my messiness is down to my laziness: so much easier to leave something lying around where I used it than to put it back where it belongs. Another factor is maybe a bit ironic: the fact is that I love organising things.

Last summer I spent days and days sorting my e-mail at work. I'm talking thousands of mails, severals years worth. A while back I also decided to start a filing system for all of our admin documents: credit card statements, medical documents, invoices,... I first created choas, sorting stacks of unsorted papers into 'thematic' piles all over the sofa and ended up with a shelf of well organised papers. I also have a system for my books: according to the type of book (novels, poetry, theater, non fiction, dictionaries...), the language (English, French, Dutch, and also some Spanish and German) and in alphabetical order.

These kinds of organising projects seem to give me a lot of satisfaction. So much so that I'm guessing that it could be a reason why I leave things lying around: it's so much more satisfying cleaning up a big mess than it is to put everything in it's rightjful place immediately.

Another irony? While I always tend to leave things lying around, I can't stand anybody messing up my system. Put a pot of herbs between the rice and pasta, put a book on meditation between my French novels, stack a large bowl on top of a smaller one, and you will feel my wrath!

I never pretended to be a logical and coherent human being