Life Balance: My tank top’s dirty, but my toilet’s clean

One hundred percent, if I come to your house and your toilet is dirty, I’m gonna hate you a little.

I’ll wait for you to gasp and distort your face into all kinds of mispleased and offended horror. *pauses; taps foot* Ya good now? Ya know why you should be? Because you’re going to judge me for my dirty tank top. Stay with me here.

Here’s the thing about working full time, keeping a place, running errands, meeting social obligations, showing up for appointments, working even more, and sleeping: there is no – and I will repeat – NO balance. I don’t care what kind of inspired swill you’ve been reading about work-life balance, and connecting with your spiritual center — some of us are just not born to achieve this type of balance. When you are trying to accomplish all things in adult life, balance seems like a weird and almost annoying dream. How do some people get everything done and still manage to curl their hair in the morning? Not this breed, I’ll tell ya. I’m always heavier on one end of the completion record when it comes to obligatory domestic fulfillment than the other. Still, there are certain fundamentals in my book that need to be met if you’re out there hoofing it on your own. Here are two of them.

1. Clean your damn toilet. “They” (S.C. Johnson & Son, Inc.) make tools for this! Handy and easy-to-use tools as a matter of fact! You can pick up the Scrubbing Bubbles^® toilet wand and attachments at your local drug store or wherever it is that you shop. They even make a starter kit, for the sake of the gods! A few swipes around the inside of the bowl and you’re basically dunzo. Wipe down the rest of that sucker with Clorox^® Disinfecting Wipes, and that’s it for the week. It takes – and I joke you not – three minutes. Three. I’ve timed myself. Look, I get it – toilets are freaking gross and you never want to touch them, especially if you live with someone else and need to deal with their … remnants, but eff-all, if I show up at your place your toilet is a wreck, what the hell have you doing with all of your time?! Wake up three minutes earlier and help yourself. If not yourself, help your guests! I would rather crap out in your backyard than in your nasty, fossilized and poop-caked toilet. Stop it. Let’s all come together as adults and nod in agreement that regimented toilet cleanliness is one step closer to getting to those dishes you’ve got piled up in the kitchen sink, which brings me to my next fundamental …
2. Wash your damn dishes! Wet food crud. Do you like it? Enjoy it swirling around in the bottom of your sink where you need to dig it out of the strainer and smash it into the garbage while said strainer is slipping out of your hands because stuff has started growing on it? Oh, look at you, growing the cure for alopecia on there. Such a champion for humanity. Look, I get this, too – dishes are the worst, especially if you’re not lucky enough to have a dishwasher, but allowing them to rot in the sink is only going to cause you additional angst, disgust and time. “I didn’t have time to do the dishes.” *shakes hands in fury* Shut up, yes you did, you lazy, apathetic fool of a human! Washing a sink full of dishes takes somewhere from seven to 10 minutes. Yup, I timed myself on this one, too. Hey, the bottom of your sink should not look like the Flying Dutchman, OK?

“Wow, what a totally judgy post. This chick must really think who the hell she is.” Incorrect! As much as I have my toilet/sink combo figured out amid all my daily swirling and twirling through life — stumbling, if you will — I do my fair share of dropping the ball. Here’s my short list of domestic inconsistencies.

1. Laundry makes me want to punch kittens, and I suck at getting it done. I have good intentions, of course. I come home from work and put a load in that then proceeds to sit in the washing machine all night and until I inevitably need to wash it again because it stinks like old, wet laundry. Water waster! Well, not all the time, but really. I try to make my neat little piles of darks, delicates and whites, and I try to get them all done, but last week I absolutely found myself rooting around on the floor amid the dirty delicates looking for my one gray tank top that I absolutely needed to wear that day. I deemed it passable by way of the sniff test, sprayed that thing with Febreze fabric freshener and went on my merry way. I’m sure that one day I will manage to get myself in order when it comes to the laundry, but in the words of Aragorn II, son of Arathorn, “today is not that day.”
2. I can never manage to get my coffee cup into the sink. I know, it’s really random — an easily fixed problem, right? Nope. I have my cuppa every weekday morning at 6:30 am, and before I get in the shower, I leave it right on the table next to the couch so that it’s mocking me when I get home at night. I don’t know what I expect from the coffee cup. It’s not as though it’s got the Beast curse on it — it’s not gonna just hop up, sing with its mom for a while and wash itself. Nope, it’s going to sit there with a drying layer of coffee in it until I get home from work. What does this accomplish? Nothing. It pisses me off. I piss myself off when I do this, but hey, at least when I bring it into the kitchen the sink is empty.

Here’s the point: everyday life is hard. Managing domestic perfection when you’re trying to manage all other things is near to impossible as far as I can see it. So, if you accomplish even a fraction of cleanliness while trying to navigate through adult life, I salute you … unless your toilet’s dirty.

Cheers, guys.