Today I spent the day with some friends playing AD&D and watching tv in one of their apartments. Now, this apartment is scary. Boxes that haven't been unpacked since he moved in a year ago. Lots of empty bottles of various liquors covering a table in the kitchen. No tables other than that one. It's a bachelor pad.

This reminds me of how I used to be before I went to college. My room was a total mess: clothes and boxes everywhere. But it's an organized mess. I knew where everything was... sort of. Generally any item could be found with a little bit of searching.

When I attended college I spent my freshman year with two great guys. One was much neater than me, the other one outdid me in the slob department. A few months with them and I got out of being that sloppy. I started organizing my belongings neatly and didn't just leave miscellaneous items lying around.

I kept that up for a couple of years, then settled out of it to a level I could keep up with. Today I do keep my many possessions relatively organized. Few things are lying around without a purpose. If something is out it's because I expect to use it soon.

What I'm not is very clean. I don't really mind dust and dirt and oil building up on the counters and floors. So my stove is covered with grease and food bits. I tend to just leave out the frying pan and cook the next meal on it without cleaning it between meals. My bathroom shower and sink are havens for mold.

There's not much that I do to keep my apartment clean. I vacuum the rug every couple of months. Every few months I'll try to clean up the kitchen a bit, these efforts usually ending in dismal failure. Also every few months, I'll clean up the scum in the bathroom sink and try to do something about the toilet and shower.

But my level of discomfort about these things is rather low. I'm more bothered about having things organized than clean. Occassionally, my friend Dave goes nuts and cleans up the kitchen or bathroom. I feel a little bad that he feels he needs to clean up, although he doesn't mind.

Writing about this, it's funny that I don't like the outside because of all of the dirt. It's somehow different when it's in my apartment than out in the wild. The outside is the unknown, inside is the known... whatever, something else I don't want to analyze.

When I go home I'm aghast at the state of my kid brother's room. Was I ever this bad? Maybe not since Christopher loses things in his room all of the time. I suppose it's one of things that kids do, a way for them to establish some sort of individuality and independence from their parents. Or maybe I'm just talking nonsense.

I'm not the neatest person, nor the cleanest. I'm probably on the lower end of the scale. But I do have some standards and I'm annoyed when people violate those standards with my stuff. Oh well, such is life.