kukla_tko: (Particpation!)
Cleaning house is always kind of weird for me.

I've finally come to grips with all the things that converged to create the messiest child ever. I understand now that I was taught to "put that away when you're finished with it", but not how to tell when I was finished with it. "Why are these toys still out?" I wasn't finished playing with them. And I wasn't done with that craft project, and I also wasn't done getting dressed.
What?

I also understand that while I was being taught, "A place for everything and everything in its' place", I was living with a Magpie (Oooh! Shiny! Gotta catch 'em all!) and a Packrat (Don't throw that away, it could be useful someday!) and that I was being given more toys/clothes/crafts than I had places for them to go, without a viable way for any of the older stuff to go away. (Heck, my mother STILL has a suitcase-full of her old toys. She sure wasn't going to make ME throw any of mine away...) Some of the toys from my single-digit years were donated to pre-schools and daycare facilities, but most of the toys I had from about 8 years old on are *still in my possession today.*

Add to this my complete inability to commit to a chore unless there was some kind of role-play involved, which was easy when I was little and Mom could play both Wicked Stepmother and Fairy Godmother in a carrot-and-stick kind of motivation system.

Which brings us to the other reason why I can't ever seem to get simple mundane things done (though I can perform magic and create the most amazing things): I have always had a "problem with motivation".

Why do you think I want to host stuff all the time? It keeps me somewhat honest.


But here's another reason why cleaning (which is a long, boring, and complicated chore) and I don't get along in my own house: I'm really easily distracted. For example, I'm typing this post.
For another example, I found my answering machine(s) and hooked one up so that if you call my land-line, and no one is here to answer the phone, *you can now leave a message for us!*

It's a big accomplishment! It's something I meant to do for MONTHS now, ever since I initially found the answering machines. But did I stop playing with the internet or my dolls to do it? No.
I had to wait until there was a bigger chore with a scarier deadline to be completely immersed in before I could go do this simple thing.

LOL.

Wanna see me accomplish something amazing? MAKE me do something else. The something else will NOT get done. The other stuff I do will knock your socks off.


I'm a contrary little cuss, ain't I? And I'm brilliant at cleaning OTHER PEOPLE'S space. Seriously, nothing to distract me there. I can get the grubby corners clean enough to eat off of. I can do days worth of dishes, laundry, and even clean the windows. I was a good cleaning person, I really was. Why? Because YOUR stuff is unlikely to distract me by discovering unfinished business or shinier objects.


Oh, yeah. One more thing:
When you come over tonight, coo over the house, or at least say something like, "Great job!" "You worked hard, didn't you?" or "Wow, you have a beautiful home!"

Do not, under any circumstances make back-handed remarks like, "Oh, yeah, it looks way better than the hack job you did for Christmas" or "Well, it looks LESS like a storage facility, so good job." Or even, "Oh, we know that you live in filth and squalor, and we accepted it years ago. Oh, look, a clean spot..."

Remarks such as these are incredibly counter-productive and require an awful lot of my wrangling with my inner demons. Be kind and don't go there if you actually LIKE me.

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kukla_tko

January 2019

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