The holistic-entropic school of house cleaning (original) (raw)
November 15 2007, 16:39
The definitive end of a depression is when I get up and clean the house. Sweeping, wiping, clearing the backlog of washing-up, taking out the recycling, picking up the mess of Mischa's chew-bones, doing any laundry baskets that have a full load in them, etcetera etcetera. When the place is finally ship-shape, I can heave a sigh of relief and get on with the business of living.
Aki and I have very different ways of cleaning. Both of us start with a disorderly house and make it more or less orderly. Aki works recursively: take an area, divide it into smaller areas, clean each area. I, on the other hand, have a perfectly efficient and sensible approach:
- Go somewhere in the house
- Pick a random item or location
- Reduce its entropy
- GOTO 1
The catch is in the "reducing entropy." All that means is that I do something. Dust the windowsill. Throw a dirty sock in the general direction of the nearest door. Dump an old magazine on the table. Throw an empty bottle in the nearest cardboard box. Pile two books on the stairs. Take the rug out and dump it by the back door.
And it drives Aki mad. He's selected a specific task—mopping the floors, say—and he needs me to finish my bit first. But I don't work like that. I do everything at once, apparently at random.
The secret, of course, is that it's not exactly random. Watch closely:
- I've dusted the windowsill onto the rug.
- Next time I go downstairs past that sock, I take it with me and drop it somewhere else—but always nearer the laundry basket.
- The books will go with me on the way back up the stairs.
- The magazine will be joined by a few used envelopes. It's the beginning of a waste-paper pile.
- The cardboard box is for plastic recycling. In due course I'll carry it to another room to collect the bottles there too.
- The rug... well, yes, I'll shake it out later. I'm not perfect. But at least that's the windowsill dust dealt with.
So my working method, while chaotic, is actually quite efficient: I get things clean as quickly as Aki does, but via peculiar intermediate states. If Aki's interrupted in the middle of cleaning the bathroom, he leaves a patchwork of clean and dirty areas—floor swept, bath and toilet mostly spotless, sink still icky. If I'm interrupted while cleaning the bathroom then I leave the used towels on the kitchen table, the Toilet Duck in the hallway, the toothpaste in the bath, the coffee machine half disassembled, the dishwasher running, a pile of dust in the middle of the living-room, the kitchen windows cleaned on the outside, and Mischa groomed to perfection.
Meanwhile Aki, who merely wanted me to finish with the bathroom so he could mop the floor, has given up on me and gone upstairs for a smoke. He'll finish up later while I'm out of the way taking Mischa for a run.