Confidential: Kitchen Chaos

Entropy is one thing you can always count on…

Just last week, the kitchen was looking dreamy. All spic and span, and ready for whatever I had a notion to whip up. Ahhh, bliss! Kept up with the daily duties. Prepared interesting foods. Lovely. Today it’s a different story. There’s dishes in the sink and dishes in the drainer. Various fruits and veggies are lying in piles, waiting for attention, with bread and pastry threatening to spill out from bags and baskets. All sorts of things are under the table, on the table, and next to the table. The counters are trashed!

How does it happen so fast?!? Amazing…not in an awestruck way, but in an astonishment way. How can not doing kitchen chores for, like, two days result in a kitchen environment that resembles some kind of hurricane/tornado/earthquake aftermath?

This is what happens when I forego doing these all-too-necessary chores to concentrate on clearing up the clutter in another room. Obviously, I have to find a balance, but it’s really hard when I get super motivated to tear into a big messy area and am determined to restore some kind of order to it…today! (Or maybe by tomorrow… Monday?) Once I get started working in one area of the apartment that really needs it, I don’t like to interrupt my flow to do something else, because then it’s hard to get back to this urgent project. (Although it certainly didn’t seem too urgent just a couple of days ago.) But if I don’t maintain the everyday tasks, like doing the dishes and picking up, then things get out of control and I don’t like to face them.

This is an ongoing battle for me. Some days I don’t want to face it, and other days I am certain that I can win it, only to find that I’ve overlooked something completely different. I want to feel positive, but the things staring me in the face don’t look very positive.

I once read how I should be thankful that I have dirty dishes, because that means that we have food to eat. Thankful for dirty laundry, because that means we have clothes to wear. Maybe I’m getting tired, but I’d rather just go naked than do another load of whites.

Naturally, tomorrow is Sunday. Hardly a day I feel like devoting to a slew of increasingly unpleasant household chores.