One day in college my roommate Louis came home to find me spring cleaning my bedroom. I had the furniture pulled out, a bucket of water to clean the walls, and was blasting Tom Petty as I scrubbed the baseboards.
"Holy crap, Mins. Did your fish die?!?!?"
To most, this would seem like an absurd question directed at a person who was just trying to tidy up a house she shared with SIX FRAT BOYS. But the more I thought about it, it made perfect sense. Although I am obsessive with cleaning (at least I was before I met Christopher), my strong spurts come when I get really stressed out. Some people drink under pressure, others smoke, I organize. And Louis had seen me through grad school applications and a host of other stressful events and assumed that something TERRIBLE must have happened for me to be cleaning so vigorously. (No, Tritan did not die, I really was just spring cleaning).
Fast forward to last night. I'm up, studying for my very last grad school final exam. I am, of course, running through my usual course of creating a hierarchical study guide by combining the lecture notes, extra research, and class readings into outline form. I am on page ten when BAM. It's gone. It just disappeared. All my work. All my beautifully organized work was gone. I looked at the clock. 3:50 am. I still had one essay to write for the take-home portion and a few more lectures to work through before the exam. Hyped up on my octuple-shot of espresso, too frustrated to work, and too wired to sleep, I had no other choice. I had to. It called to me.
I organized Christopher's closet.
"Holy crap, Mins. Did your fish die?!?!?"
To most, this would seem like an absurd question directed at a person who was just trying to tidy up a house she shared with SIX FRAT BOYS. But the more I thought about it, it made perfect sense. Although I am obsessive with cleaning (at least I was before I met Christopher), my strong spurts come when I get really stressed out. Some people drink under pressure, others smoke, I organize. And Louis had seen me through grad school applications and a host of other stressful events and assumed that something TERRIBLE must have happened for me to be cleaning so vigorously. (No, Tritan did not die, I really was just spring cleaning).
Fast forward to last night. I'm up, studying for my very last grad school final exam. I am, of course, running through my usual course of creating a hierarchical study guide by combining the lecture notes, extra research, and class readings into outline form. I am on page ten when BAM. It's gone. It just disappeared. All my work. All my beautifully organized work was gone. I looked at the clock. 3:50 am. I still had one essay to write for the take-home portion and a few more lectures to work through before the exam. Hyped up on my octuple-shot of espresso, too frustrated to work, and too wired to sleep, I had no other choice. I had to. It called to me.
I organized Christopher's closet.
Sick. I am a sick, sick person. Who does this when their computer crashes? Who decides to organize? (I took a picture because there is a slim chance it will ever look like this again). Having restored my sense of order and control with the world, and feeling only slightly ridiculous, I headed to bed. If only he were as excited about his right-to-left order by shirt type system as I am, boy we would be the PERFECT team. Oh well - they say opposites attract. ;-)
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