You have to understand something about this room right now: It's bad. It's really bad.
Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not a chicken when it comes to messy rooms. I've conquered my share of messy bedrooms growing up. I keep my room pretty clean now that I'm older, but there have been times in my life when I could really do a number on a bedroom. (Usually with a little help from whichever sister I was sharing a room with.) My favorite book has always been Jillian Jiggs because it's about a delightful little girl who has a delightfully messy bedroom due to the fact that she is delightfully creative. Every time she tries to clean it, she thinks of a new fun game to play using the stuff in her room & she gets sidetracked. Basically, she rocks. She is my hero. Growing up, I related to this book because I, myself, had such a horrendous room at times. I've had messy bedrooms that made grown men curl up in the fetal position & cry for Mama.
And I cleaned those rooms.
No problem.
In fact, I usually kind of enjoyed it.
My room right now, however, is in a league of it's own. I recently interviewed for a job teaching kindergarten in Northern Utah. Upon getting hired, I moved back up to Provo, got an apartment, & moved all of my stuff into it. All of my stuff. That means my own normal collection of clothes, shoes, books, goblets, etc. along with all of my stuff for teaching kindergarten. Kindergarten is very stuff-intensive. It can be hard to keep the attention of 25 squirrelly little ankle-biters, but if you bring out a puppet or a set of binoculars or a giant stoplight that really works, all of a sudden their eyes & ears are glued on you & they're ready to soak in anything you feed them. For this reason, I have A LOT of kindergarten stuff. My bedroom is currrently lined with boxes upon boxes of kindergarten stuff. Once summer school ends and I am able to move into my new classroom, it will all be gone, but right now it's in my room.
This makes unpacking very difficult. I have spent the last couple days trying to attack this beastly room by methodically sorting things out and going through them. I stacked all of the "my stuff" on one side of the room and all of the "kindergarten stuff" on the other side of the room. My room looks like a giant chess board with all the pieces set up on opposite sides of the board. I hope nobody moves a pawn out to the middle because that's where I sleep; In the middle of all the boxes, on a mattress that I just bought. The mattress isn't that glamorous; just a cheapy I bought at Ikea because it could roll up and fit into my car. I like it, though. It's definitely a step up from the sleeping bag I was sleeping on before. Between all the boxes, the mattress, the sleeping bag, the camping stuff, and the random picture of Freddy Kreuger that I somehow ended up with (how terrifying is that?), I find myself the owner of a very intimidating bedroom.
I figure that I have three options at this point:
1. Slowly, but surely start to chip away at the stony wretch of a bedroom that lies before me,
2. Consider it an opportunity for personal growth and learn how to pole-vault over the boxes to get from point A to point B,
3. Wait until I see some poor unsuspecting passerby out my window and then act out one of those dramatic scenes from the movies where the woman throws all the man's stuff out the window & yells, "And don't ever bother coming back!!!" (I think this option is my favorite. I think I like the idea of chucking stuff out a window to make more space & I'm sure I would relish the look of confusion & fear on the poor man's face when I threw "his" blocks & puppetts at him. Plus that, it would give the neighbors lots to talk about.)
Five minutes have passed since I wrote those options and I still can't decide which one I will carry out, so I think I'll just add "decide on option" to my to-do list and then I will go to bed.
