Filed under: Life in general
“If you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’ll keep getting what you’ve always gotten. It’s called the Mystery Method because I’m Mystery and it’s my method.”
Filed under: Growing up
I have an Oreck XL vacuum cleaner. My parents discovered it about 5 years ago– it’s only one piece, relatively light and will suck up just about anything. Except for some reason, a plastic twist tie. Thinking that such a machine might be exactly what my sister and I need but would never purchase of our own free will, our parents went ahead and bought us each one for Christmas that year. Despite the dismay I felt opening up this huge box, only to find… a vacuum, it’s turned out to be just about the best Christmas present I’ve ever received. Ranks right up there with the gumball machine I pined for as a young child and finally received when I was in junior high school– the only reason I left it on the Christmas list was sheer principle.
I was just vacuuming and remembering how my father would never let me vacuum our house because he didn’t think I could do as good a job as he could. Which is actually true, since he would swipe through the same spot at least three times, lift sofas and move chairs, and re-vacuum an area if foot imprints appeared on the carpet too quickly– it wasn’t hard to take a less OCD approach. The labor involved in vacuuming was compounded by this three piece heavy-duty vacuum (this one could suck up a plastic twist tie) that my father thought was the zeus of vacuums. Even after they moved into a home that had the pan-house vacuuming system, he’d drag out his trusty, heavily bandaged, squeaky-wheeled Electolux. My parents liked to have their friends around and my mother was a fantastic cook so growing up, we had people over nearly every weekend. He’d drag it out to clean the house before the guests arrived for dinner; he’d drag it out again after everyone left– even if it was 2am in the morning and he was wobbly from too many Budweisers. It was a shared family ritual that I hated at the time; now looking back, I almost miss it.
This is not a compulsion that was passed on to me. I live in perennial clutter. My home represents the absolute antithesis of feng-shui. But on days like today– with everything clean and in order, I almost feel like it’s home.
For four years– starting in my junior year in college through my 2nd year in medical school, I had my life down pat. I was so methodical, I could tell you down to the minute where I would be, what I would be doing and how long it would take. Friends knew to schedule time in. There would be no more last-minute cramming for tests or papers started on the day they were due– I finally had enough of the all-nighters that barely pulled me through my first two years. The Dean’s request to see me was a wake up call– I wasn’t a legacy, I wasn’t an athlete, I eschewed extra-curricular activities– in short, I was there for what was in my mind alone, which by that point apparently wasn’t even making a double-bogey. I’m a slow cogitator and studying in staccato spurts in between long periods of mental inactivity clearly wasn’t working.
Over the years, I’m still a compulsive list-maker and still get enormous pleasure from the physical act of scratching the words out with a blunt pencil tip, but somewhere along the way, my obsessive need to scatch everything off by the end of the day is long out of gas. Every Sunday, I look at my weekend’s list to find it curiously devoid of pencil marks and the day becomes a mad race to pare the list down.
Where’s life’s dean when you need one?
