Once Brett told me that in college he discovered he produced more lint than the average person. By lint, he meant those mysterious balls of dust and shed skin cells and unknown particles that ball themselves under a dorm bed. Not to brag, but I think that I produce an average if not low amount of personal lint. Scooter, on the other hand, is a fucking lint machine.
I only clean my house twice a year because cleaning literally makes me sick. More on this later. Since getting Scooter, however, the durations between house-cleaning have become much more dicey. Sometimes I will be watching t.v. and a gigantic tumbleweed blows 'cross the bed, except instead of being made of weeds, that tumble is formed of gray and white bunny hair. As it passes, I reach out to pet it. Soft! Sometimes I will catch one of these hairballs out of the corner of my eye and think that it's Scooter. "Come here, baby. Come here," I'll say, and since Scooter doesn't respond to entreaties anyway, I won't notice that the hairball is inanimate until I get down to scratch behind its non-ears.
Because this past Saturday marked October 1st, a.k.a. the official start of My Birthday Month, I thought that I, as a preparatory gift to myself, would do a top-to-bottom cleaning of my apartment so that I could head toward my 26th feeling like an angel. I'm not a nasty-dirty girl, as in old food under the bed and milk spills on the carpet, but I'm a disorderly-dirty girl, as in many, many US Weekly's splayed across the floor and shit, I haven't dusted in ten years.
The problem with me and cleaning is that I get really nauseous. My mom laughs at me whenever I insist upon this, but a large part of the reason for the nausea is because I have a very low visual tolerance for repetitive motions. So when I'm wiping down the counter with the pre-moistened Swiffer cloths (I am wayyyy too lazy to spray my own cleaning product) and my hand is going round and round, round and round, I end up wanting to puke. So then I lay on the floor for a few minutes, waiting for the dizziness to pass. You can see how this might make cleaning a very time-consuming endeavor. And maybe you're saying to yourself, "Why don't you just shut your eyes while you're wiping, Andrea?" except I have tried this, and the sensation is akin to that of being in the tilt-a-whirl at a county fair, and you are worse off for having your eyes closed because then your brain is free to concentrate on the nausea.
Cleaning is emotionally taxing as well, since I will inevitably find spiderwebs in corners, likely still active, and feel like a totally bad person for wrecking something that the spider put such earnest effort into building. As I take the spider out into my backyard, I apologize profusely, giving a quick little pep talk about how I just know the next web s/he will build will be even better and stronger than the one I just destroyed, and if I was a spider, I would bite me.
I concluded my cleaning Friday afternoon and by evening a major migraine had set in. All that repetitive motion, I'm sure of it. What I am not sure if is why we don't have Cleaning Lady/Man Day when we have Secretary's Day. This seems a massive injustice, as at least in between answering phone calls and drafting memos, when you're a secretary you can chop up the circle by fucking around on the internet or eating some jellybeans. Anyway, I spent the evening writhing around on my bed, trying to pinch various pressure points to see if I could alleviate the cranial pain. Lately, a lot of people have been telling me I should really try acupuncture, and in a moment of weakness, I considered getting the needles out of my mini sewing kit and just poking them around on my forehead and temples to see what would happen. Too deep in pain to get up to get the needles, however, I instead found my sharpest nail edge and poked myself with that instead. There was no relief. I badly wanted to watch Amy Poehler's appearance on Conan O'Brien because she is so lovable that she kills me, so I turned upside down on the bed, squinted one eye, pressed a hand to my forehead and two fingers to the top of my skull, and listened carefully to her adorable conversation through my groaning.
When I woke up with my head cleared, I thought I would feel fantastic. My house was clean! So clean! And I could embark upon my birthday month with a clear mind and spirit. Right after cleaning, I suddenly feel emotionally balanced. But, of course, this relief is only temporary. Because about an hour after waking up on Saturday, I began to get stressed out about how clean my apartment is, and how impossible it is to maintain this level of cleanliness. I'd see a lone Scooter hair flying through the air and leap to catch it. A crumb from my raisin English muffin would fall to the tiles, and I'd be on the floor, searching manically. The natural world was doing everything it could do to reverse time, to restore my milieu to the state of anti-order that it existed in before my cleaning, and I was but a mere speck struggling against it.
And, as often happens, I saw that human life is just the hand upon the tile, continually wiping, wiping, wiping in circles.
But anyway (again), while cleaning out my bathroom, I realized that I jumped the gun and bought red-hair-maintenance products before I actually considered how long I was going to keep my summer look. Because I can't stand wastefulness, I am looking for a reader of the blog (near Los Angeles or Irvine please, since I'm too cheap to ship shampoo (heavy!) and will be dropping this off on your doorstep) who would like the Andrea Red Hair Gift Pack. Look, it's my first blog giveaway! In this pack, you will receive dye that will take your hair to a bright shade of fuchsia (highlights if you please), a temporary dye to try out a reddish autumnal shade, and then a color protective shampoo and conditioner set to protect your vivid new hue! All new and in original containers. Email if interested.
If more than one person wants it, we'll do some "guess what number I'm thinking of." Or maybe we'll just do "guess who lives closest to me, thus making my errand the easiest." The final decision will be made next Sunday.