I Just Cleaned My Apartment and Now My Life is a Disaster
You won't believe what happened.
As a general rule, I find the idea of listening to a recording of my voice to be a horrifying prospect. I spend all day hearing my own voice, inside my head and as I mutter to myself, so the idea of listening to my internal monologues is not what I want. Thankfully, my girlfriend fills a lot of empty space that would otherwise be occupied by incredibly dispiriting and infuriating stuff, like the feeling of falling that comes with living within the slippage between what is legal/allowed and what is actually happening, and more broadly, living in a moment of such astonishing cruelty and stupidity. There is also whatever Chuck Schumer is doing. But there isn’t anything I’m doing to really solve any of that, so instead of reckoning with the end of the only sociopolitical reality that I’ve known, I look around my apartment and can hear my girlfriend audibly quipping, Why are there splash marks all around the stovetop, This shirt doesn’t belong here, These pans aren’t put away, How did you get toothpaste spit all over the bathroom mirror??
There’s some reason for hope in making positive changes around you and within your control, even and especially as I confront the horror of living without sugar, or my unwillingness to learn what nitrates even are. So to calm my girlfriend’s voices inside my head, I cleaned my apartment this past weekend, going as far as sorting the cabinets and drawers for optimal organization. I aimed for that perceived “Goldilocks zone” that’s somewhere between a squalid gooncave that is only hospitable to incel neckbeards and the completely sterile IKEA showroom that gives Patrick Bateman vibes. A shirt at the foot of the bed, tactfully placed stacks of books, and my bed of windowsill budding plants lend a tasteful chic that balances my girlfriend’s relentless Type-A tendencies.
It only took a few hours for the absolute collapse of familiarity and routine to set in. I went to get something and it wasn’t there. Amidst the fury of reorganization, my kitchen scissors seem to have disappeared into the abyss of logistical shuffling. As I was cleaning, I remember thinking to myself, Oh… I should put this object where I could easily find it. Now, I have no memory of where that place is. For years, I knew exactly where all my dumb, obscure shit important things were—and now it has been completely memory-holed.
Organizing my apartment was supposed to be some sort of life hack, but now it appears to be an ill-fated Sysephian faceplant that has gotten worse and worse in the hours since, and the only way to put this gambit into context is to consider every botched celebrity plastic surgery in their totality. Now I’m scrolling through Amazon to find a good deal on kitchen scissors, even though I know there’s still a pair somewhere in this apartment. I just can’t find it, and I know once the new scissors arrive and I put them away, it will be exactly where the old scissors are.
Why do we strive for positive changes when our outcomes are already set in stone? Like my grandma always says: “Never attempt ANYTHING.” I may have just lost some kitchen scissors, but more importantly, I might have lost myself along the way…
I learned my lesson. I’m never cleaning my apartment again.
Yeah. Truth.