I’m looking at my room right now and I’m borderline disgusted with myself. My room hasn’t been this messy since I got home from college and I’m going to level with you and say there are unpacked boxes from college that I could throw away and never know what I missed. My room is what I imagine the inside of a homeless woman’s cardboard box to look like.
There is a crate full of office supplies, old greeting cards, term papers and colored pencils sitting in the corner. It’s stacked on top of a tub that is full of my most cherished grade school projects including a 20something page paper on the country Angola I did in 8th grade. The geography and english teacher were mother and daughter and they ganged up on 8th grade students every year with a horrifying project that incorporated both classes. You had to do a research paper on a country, not of your choice follow the APA format or whatever the fuck they’re calling it these days (it changed on me twice in college). Being black, I guess they thought I’d get excited about having to research an African country but I would’ve had more fun researching Butt Scratch, Indiana than Angola. The only fact of significance I remember about this third-world country was that their basketball team may or may not have went to the Olympics in 1988. I put so much work into the paper though I felt like it would’ve been sinful to throw it out.
I’m thinking if I throw the bin away I won’t miss anything in it but I know that my 7th grade poetry scrapbook is in there and I want that. I had to compile all these poems of my choice and create a little book out of it. So I chose to collect poetry about the seasons and creatively used construction paper, yarn, stickers and cutouts to illustrate the poems. I got an A. You know how you pull out some old projects and are embarassed that you did that? NOt this one, I would hang it up somewhere if it did justice to my filithy, nail-hole and tape reside covered walls.
There are books everywhere. Books I haven’t read (Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants), books I’ve half read (New Moon…I puked around page 200 and gave up) and books I’m not proud to say I’ve even finished (Twilight). The most overwhelming genre has to be cookbooks though. I say overwhelming because they are the only ones I will not pack up and am always tripping over. The cookbooks are brimming with neon post-its and sticky notes indicating that I want to try the recipe and sometimes with special prep notes on the sticky notes. Marinate chicken and chop all vegetables day before cooking. Buy bottle of wine and preserve 1/2 cup…drink rest before cooking. I love to cook because more than anything I love to eat and I think this is a direct result of growing up in a house where experimental soup was a staple on the menu.
There are piles of clothes everywhere, like someone just walked through and stripped down in shifts. A number of times. Clean clothes are mixed with dirty and I often go through a procedure of sniffing clothes before putting them on. It’s an automatic disqualification if there are deodorant marks because you don’t want your clothes to say “This is a sloppy girl who just picked this shirt up off her floor”. I find that people are either horrified or amused if you telll them you just picked your outfit off the floor. They’re particularly horrified if they just complimented your ensemble.
“You look fantastic!”
“Thanks! I wore this to a wine tasting last night and people seemed to love it.I’m using the belt to cover up the the Merlot I spilled…that was a casualty of glass number 11.”
If the clothes are hanging on my bed post it means they’ve been worn just enough to stretch out but not enough to smell. If they’re on the floor it’s anyone’s guess. Right now there is an assortment of dresses, flannel pajama pants and a couple of hideous shirts my mom got me from Costco. From time to time my mom, with the very best of intentions, gets me shirts from Costco probably in the hopes that I wear them and cover my boobs up. The buy is always a fail and these sad little polo shirts are going to end up in the donation bag or will end up as night shirts. My mom still thinks that I’m impressed with designer labels which I am if the design is good. My mom is pretty unmoved by designer duds for herself however she did buy an Ed Hardy window shade which I am still trying to avoid looking at every time I get in her car.
“What the heck is that?”
“A window shade. Four bucks.”
“Costco?”
“Yep. I got these travel coffee mugs too.”
“Mom we already have two of each of those already. I really wish you hadn’t bought that window shade. It’s hideous. And Ed Hardy is for tools.”
“It’s PINK Melia! It’s so cuuuute. And it’s got little bedazzlers on it. My favorite. What’s Ed Hardy?”
I am thoroughly unimpressed by last season’s we-have-too-much-in-stock merchandise by whatever designer that ends up at Costco. I always get a frantic call from my mom on one of her Costco trips whenever she stumbles upon a good deal.
“There are some Lucky jeans here for 19.99! What size are you?”
“Mom I don’t know, i haven’t had a pair of Lucky’s since freshman year when I was a size four. So I’d rather not discover the difference between my size then and now. Anyway you hated when I wore those because my crack was always showing.”
“MELIA! Nine. Teen. Ninety. Nine.”
“Saying it slower doesn’t make it any cheaper. I don’t want any. Plus they never have long sizes. Don’t forget toilet paper.”
“So cut them into shorts!”
“Goodbye mom.”
The only semblance of order in my room is an unpacked suitcase from a trip to LA I took two weeks ago and my shoe rack which is a shrine to J.Crew.
So where was I going with this? I have a purse graveyard right in the middle of my floor. Time for an intervention. Or for someone with Adrian Monk type tendencies to come in here and help me.
