bigger than you know
Monday, August 14th, 2006 10:41 pmI've been cleaning my room this weekend. Well, I've been trying to, anyway.
Used to be that I was neat. Oh, not when I was a kid--my bedroom was the kind of mess you expect when the resident is an argumentative child. But once I grew up and became responsible for my own cleanliness, I got to be quite good at vacuuming and dusting and throwing stuff away once a week.
Until 2003, that is. Early January 2003, after quite some time of trying to find a part-time job, certain that I'd be getting a good one any day now, it finally hit me that with my health and the state of the market, there really wasn't any way for me to get that job I'd been counting on to support myself after all. That realization of what seemed to be my complete and utter uselessness happened to be the trigger that sent me into a nearly year-long depression. On the plus side, that depression taught me once and for all that all the people who had previously tried to blame my health problems on depression were full of crap--there was a deep, qualitative difference between what I went through that year and anything I'd been through emotionally in the past. It was different from my griefs when people died, my reactions to the losses brought by illness, and everything else, different from anything before or since in a way that's pretty unmistakable.
But I was talking about cleaning my room. See, under the soul-sucking weight present for most of 2003, cleaning any damn thing seemed out of the question. And after I'd pretty much recovered from that, any time I even thought about tackling more than a little corner of this place I rent, I was simply overwhelmed by the magnitude of the... the... oh, there just aren't words for this mess. I didn't wanna do it.
So here, this weekend, I finally determined to clean this stupid place again. And I started. And then the vacuum cleaner started blowing dust everywhere, so I put it off for a day. It was only till today, though--I came back to it again, because like I said above, I had determined to do it. Today, then, I used a gift card to buy some strapping tape (the store didn't carry any duct tape), and I taped up that blasted vacuum cleaner and started to clean the blasted floor--for about five minutes, before the machine gave me another snootful of dust which I've been sneezing back out in great grey glumps all day. After a while, I got the hang of taping the parts together in a useful way and alternated between hand-dusting and vacuuming for some time... and then the bag started spraying dust out the bottom, at which point I snarled, dragged every useful-seeming part into the bathroom, washed everything up, figured out what had gone wrong, put everything back together again--properly this time, began cleaning again, and kept working on the floor until the vacuum cleaner's handle came off in my hand.
I will clean this room, even if it kills me. But this might take a lot longer than I thought.
Used to be that I was neat. Oh, not when I was a kid--my bedroom was the kind of mess you expect when the resident is an argumentative child. But once I grew up and became responsible for my own cleanliness, I got to be quite good at vacuuming and dusting and throwing stuff away once a week.
Until 2003, that is. Early January 2003, after quite some time of trying to find a part-time job, certain that I'd be getting a good one any day now, it finally hit me that with my health and the state of the market, there really wasn't any way for me to get that job I'd been counting on to support myself after all. That realization of what seemed to be my complete and utter uselessness happened to be the trigger that sent me into a nearly year-long depression. On the plus side, that depression taught me once and for all that all the people who had previously tried to blame my health problems on depression were full of crap--there was a deep, qualitative difference between what I went through that year and anything I'd been through emotionally in the past. It was different from my griefs when people died, my reactions to the losses brought by illness, and everything else, different from anything before or since in a way that's pretty unmistakable.
But I was talking about cleaning my room. See, under the soul-sucking weight present for most of 2003, cleaning any damn thing seemed out of the question. And after I'd pretty much recovered from that, any time I even thought about tackling more than a little corner of this place I rent, I was simply overwhelmed by the magnitude of the... the... oh, there just aren't words for this mess. I didn't wanna do it.
So here, this weekend, I finally determined to clean this stupid place again. And I started. And then the vacuum cleaner started blowing dust everywhere, so I put it off for a day. It was only till today, though--I came back to it again, because like I said above, I had determined to do it. Today, then, I used a gift card to buy some strapping tape (the store didn't carry any duct tape), and I taped up that blasted vacuum cleaner and started to clean the blasted floor--for about five minutes, before the machine gave me another snootful of dust which I've been sneezing back out in great grey glumps all day. After a while, I got the hang of taping the parts together in a useful way and alternated between hand-dusting and vacuuming for some time... and then the bag started spraying dust out the bottom, at which point I snarled, dragged every useful-seeming part into the bathroom, washed everything up, figured out what had gone wrong, put everything back together again--properly this time, began cleaning again, and kept working on the floor until the vacuum cleaner's handle came off in my hand.
I will clean this room, even if it kills me. But this might take a lot longer than I thought.
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