I'm One Dust Bunny Away From Going Gilbert Grape on This Fucker.

Sometimes I get so down on my house, so overwhelmed. I clean constantly, I clean all day long, I clean the same things over and over again. I wipe, I scrub, I disinfect. But the place never looks clean. My husband comes home and has no idea I've even done anything, because he can't tell. There's just so much clutter, and so much stuff I'm never able to get to. Sometimes I just want to go Gilbert Grape on this mofo and burn it to the ground. No matter who or what is still in the upstairs.

If there's always one thing I've wanted to treat myself to, it would be a deep, deep housecleaning. Especially with all these deals I see on Living Social or Groupon ("Three hours of deep house cleaning for only $49!" or "Two 4-hour sessions of all natural, organic cleaning for just $69! Regularly $249!").

I want to do it. I want so badly to do it. I want to come home to a sparklingly fresh home cleaner than I could ever get it. But I can't.

As I've mentioned, even though my OCD means that all the touchable surfaces in my house are bleach-clean, like anyone else the dust and clutter and grime in my house does tend to build up in the nooks and crannies. I may have cleaned the deepest, darkest recesses of S's house like a whirling dervish and sanitized like a white demon, but that was easy because I was starting with a clean slate. My house is already so lived in that the thought of a true spring cleaning, like, where you get out an old toothbrush and scrub the baseboards, makes me want to faint. I do not have that kind of motivation. I may have OCD but, as mentioned, I am one hell of a lazy ass.

So the perfect solution would be to hire a housecleaner! Right? Right! Right? ...Right?

Except I can't bear the thought. Because I'm so afraid that my house will end up germier than it started. Sure, it will be neat and tidy and glisteningly fresh: clean to the naked eye. But what of the germs? OH GOD WHAT OF THE GERMMMMS?

I would have no control over whether the cleaning person used the same sponge to clean the floors and the counters, or if she used the same tools at the last home as she used at my home. I would have no idea if she changed gloves after cleaning the bathroom before she went to work on the kitchen. I have no control over whether she has an eye for cross-contamination. I would be a sweating, dry-heaving mass of What Ifs. I would be roiling bundle of nerves. I would be beside myself with panic.

So it wouldn't exactly be a decadent luxury for me, not if it caused this much fucking anxiety. Christ.

Thus, every time I see a Living Social deal that I can't pass up, I have to pass it up. Because I can't see myself calling them up and being like, "So, I know this is weird, but do you cater to people with OCD? Do your maids take off their shoes before entering the premises? Do they have all-new tools and scrubbies? Do any of your employees have infrared eyesight and the ability to see germs as if they were hotblooded robbers on the getaway? Just wondering, because I've got a touch of the crazies, see."

Sucks. Because I really, really, really, really want someone to come in and clean all the things I never get to. I want to come home to the freshest, cleanest house I've ever had. I really really want it, and my house really really needs it. But I don't think my brain can allow it.

Not to mention...

Why is the Merry Maids car designed like a slug?

This does not inspire confidence, guys.

Anyway, maybe this is another one for Mr. Obama's Job Creation Act: Housecleaners for the OCDers among us. They would remove their shoes upon entry or at least wear shoe hairnets; they would wear rubber gloves and change them with delicious regularity; they would use new (straight from the package) sponges; they would use all new tools or at least those that had been certified disinfected; they would clean the rooms in order of germiness: bedroom and living rooms first, then kitchen, then bathroom, with all new sponges and rags and gloves each time; they would use vast amounts of bleach; and so forth. Maybe they'd even have an inspector watching them at all times, like my Cook Area Inspector (linked above). This would be Cleaning Area Inspector. They would ensure no cross-contamination. Then maybe I could do it. Then maybe I could hire a housecleaner. God knows how much I'd love to, God knows that even though I disinfect constantly, this whole place needs a good head-to-toe scrubbing.

Anyway for now, I will have to suffer through having a cluttered but Cloroxed homestead, and deal with dirty base molding, dusty picture frames, and a cobweb or two on the ceiling. Sigh.

Things I Do, Cont'd.

We have't done one of these in awhile. Let's continue the non-exhaustive list of Things I Do.

• I always wash my hands before I unload clean dishes and put them away.
• I also always wash my hands after loading up the dirty dishes.
• I always wash my hands after putting a dirty load of clothes into the washer.
• I also always wash my hands after putting a clean, wet load of laundry into the dryer, as previously covered.
• I wash the top of pop cans, soup cans, veggie cans, well, all cans, before opening them. Especially tuna lids, because you use that lid to squeeze all the water out, and all the germs that were on that lid now find their way into your tuna.
• If I take my shoes off at another person's house for whatever reason, I change socks upon coming home.
• If I wore flip-flops that day and had to go barefoot at their house, I use alcohol-wipes on my feet when I come home. I know right?
• Hey, I didn't say I was proud of this.
• At least I don't go the Howard Hughes route.

• I wash my hands after cracking eggs.
• If I have to Have At my nose (scratching, rubbing, whatever), I wash afterward and then use hand sani too, and I scrape my nails across my hand-sanied palm to get the sani under my nails.
• On the advice of a friend, I use tea tree oil shampoo in Maya's hair to hopefully ward off lice from preschool.
• I Clorox-wipe all the items I receive in the mail, including sanitizing my sanitizer, and I order from Amazon constantly, so I am getting things like every day.
• And let's wrap up today's list with this gem: I always, always shake and flap my towels vigorously before using them to dry my body. I step out of the shower, grab my towel, and shake it. This comes from growing up in a house full of cats, who loved to lounge upon the clean laundry, so I always had to shake the cat hair off (GROCE). My husband and I have had cats at one point, who of course similarly lounged upon the clean laundry. But the thing is, we don't have cats now, and haven't for quite a long while, and I also was sans le chat for years and years in my young twenties, but the shaking of the towels is so, so ingrained that I will do it forever.

More Things I Do to come.

Things I Do, Hotel Edition.

So, hotels. *dry heaves* Pardon me. So, hotels.

It doesn't matter whether it's a nice hotel or a crappy motel. I've been to some gorgeous resorts, and I've been to some really shitty places. My reaction to them all is the same: horror, terror, and disgust.

• The blankets. The very, very first thing I do upon entering our room is either tear the damn thing off altogether, or fold the duvet and blanket all the way down, and then fold the top sheet over it all or part of the way. There is no way that duvet or banket is going to touch my flesh at any point during the night. (If I notice in the night that my husband has pulled it up over him, I will mull over a trial separation outright yank it back off him. Sorry, honey.) Neither will I sit or lounge upon the bedspread during the day. The top blankets get folded all the way down or thrown off. If we freeze in the night? Tough shit.

• I lift the top sheet and look all the way down to the bottom to make sure there are no unexpected, er, surprises.

• Then I flip over the pillows, because the duvet has been folded over them.

Although I realize that making the bed in this fashion also means that the duvet has touched the other side of the pillow, too. Lose-lose. :( I say a lengthy prayer to the Patron Saint of Headlice (and a quick one to the Patron Saint of Spooge) and hope all goes well. The one thing I cannot bring myself to do is bring a blacklight to a hotel room. I would never be the same. At the least, I could never travel again; at most, you'd have to commit me.

• The very next thing I do is attack everything with Clorox wipes. Everything. The bedside tables. The dresser. The dresser handles. The doorknobs. The closet doors. The tub. The toilet seat (even after disinfecting it, I still put down toilet paper on the seat before I use it). The toilet handle. The sink faucets. The phone. The alarm clock. And the remote. Oh God, the remote. I've even been known to disinfect it, and then still put it in a plastic bag. Just think how many people using that bed have just finished making filthy nasty deviant sweet sweet love and then upon completion, reach for the remote to find a nice program on the tee-vee to relax to. Just think.

• The suitcases never touch the carpet or the beds. They go up on a fold-out luggage rack, if possible, or I put a towel under them. This is common-sense advice, and word is spreading.

• The carpets. First, I will not walk in a hotel without my shoes on. I even take them into the bathroom with me so that after I've showered, I can stand right on the bathmat and put on my socks and shoes.

• The drinking glasses! Ye gods! I would sooner drink from a drinking fountain* than use one of those cups. At least not without a long, hot scrubbing. You KNOW those things aren't sanitized, even with those "nice effort, thanks for trying" plastic covers over them (that aren't sealed in any way). You KNOW the maid has just finished wiping down the toilet before giving those glasses a brief rinse. You KNOW they are festering with The Herp. Bygones.

*Just kidding, no I wouldn't. Drinking fountains are positively swarming with nasty bacteria and viruses, not to mention the occasional birdshit. And even though the water arcs away from the spigot, think of how water dribbles from your mouth right back down onto that spigot. So the water is arcing, yes, but arcing OUT of a spigot covered in nastiness. But I digest.

• Showering is a tough one. I usually feel dirtier after showering at a hotel than before. After washing my feet in the shower, I re-wash my hands right then and there. Then, when exiting, I touch the shower curtain at the very tip-top, as high as I can reach, where other people haven't touched immediately after washing their own assholes.

And I lose my damn mind when the shower curtain billows in, touching my body, conforming to it, vacuum-sealing to it, like white on lice, no matter what I do. You know that's happened to you. It is horrifying.

But, you know what? Even after all of my attempts to clean and disinfect, I still touch everything with a Kleenex, Howard-Hughes style.

Because all the Lysol in the world couldn't kill 
what lives in a hotel. And I don't just mean in Room 237.

This Is Not My Beautiful House

OCD is funny sometimes. Well, I mean, no, not funny, not fun. But odd. You might think that because I'm a germ nut that everything about my life is sterile and spotless and perfectly orderly. You might expect to walk into my home and find sparkling, pine-fresh perfection. But my house is far from perfect.

First of all, it's too damn small for the four of us, so it's cluttered. Stuff everywhere, on every ledge, on every shelf, on every countertop, in every storage bin, in baskets. Stuff. Stuffy stuff. Everywhere. And it really does bother me (sometimes to the point of a near panic attack), but apparently not enough to be arsed to actually do a massive overhaul and throw shit out.

Plus, part of my OCD is that I show small signs of h...h..hoarding (YIKES)--I have an extremely hard time letting go of things even when they are of no use to me. It's not like I hoard newspapers, or Taco Bell wrappers, or cigarette butts--but trinkets and things that "just sit there," I can't get rid of. And my reasoning is because someone gave it to me. Someone cared enough to think of me, and someone spent money on it. (And if you remember, we was broke as a joke growing up, so I've never been one to waste my money, or someone else's money.) So how could I throw away, donate, or even re-sell something that someone gave me? Therefore, I have a massive amount of stuff around the house that Just Sits There. And yes, it drives me apeshit--however, I may have OCD but I'm also a lazy fuck.

Where was I. So yes, the house is cluttered. With things we need, with things we don't, with trinkets and nonsense and bullshit, and most of all with baby things. Toys toys toys. Everywhere.

Our house also gets pretty dusty, and if you look closely you might find that crap in the very corners/crevices of things that is so hard to clean out. There are always clothes on the bedroom floor. My older daughter's room can be a disaster. Our kitchen table is covered in arts and crafts and papers and pens and stray marks and spilled glitter glue. Our shower gets mildew or soap scum sometimes (but I do love me some bleach spray, and I use it liberally). My husband is middling-to-terrible about remembering to take the garbage out. Etc. I'll clean it up for guests, but like I said, if you look closely...definitely not spotless.

So OCD doesn't mean I live in a Stepford Home. Not to mention, believe it or not, there are Things I WILL Do. I will manually coax a hard poop from a constipated baby's butt. I mean fuck, I will coax a poop from a constipated dog!! We used to have a Greyhound who would get terribly constipated, and she would strain and strain, and I learned a trick: You everso delicately insert a matchstick, sulfur-end first, into their bum-bum (juuuust barely). And they will shit within seconds. I kid you not. Google it. But I did this, all for the love of the dog. I will do many things. I will clean toilets without complaint. I will let a cow lick my hand with its horrible, wonderful, slobbery slimy rough scratchy flabby tongue. I will kiss my dog on her head. I will kiss my baby's completely drool-covered mouth. I will let my cousin's tiny chihuahua lick Maya's cheek. I will chase down frogs in our yard and hold them. I even owned one as a pet ten years back, and I loved him so hard.

The frog I owned and held regularly: 

The frog I chased down just yesterday evening (after discovering him on our hot tub) and held:

I will even clean up three and a half, six, or fifteen feet (yes fifteen feet, it truly happened) of cat puke when necessary, and laugh about it, because if I hadn't laughed, I would have cried. 

Alas, I do not have photographic evidence of the fifteen feet of puke, but here is the three and a half. And I cleaned it up whilst wearing a very fancy red party dress after a Christmas party:

So, there ARE things I WILL DO. It's just that I, OMFG, wash my hands afterward. Imagine the hell out of that. (Well, truth be told I washed my hands four times after catching the wild frog yesterday, and applied hand sani twice. Bygones.) But see, I don't live I a complete bubble, and neither do my kids.

And our house is nowhere near pristine. It's kind of like, in my brain, it's not our germs I mind. I mean, we still always wash when appropriate when we're home, and let me assure you, the countertops (though cluttered) are Cloroxed whiter than Donnie & Marie's veneers, and everything you touch is as clean as a clean whistle what has been bleached, but it's like, as long as the germs of the world are sent to their foamy soapy grave down the drain the very second we enter our house, then I kind of let go a little, and hey, our germs are our germs and how can I get rid of every last one?

I some ways my OCD has gotten far, far worse, and the things I do to avoid germs/clean germs are much more extreme than they were, say ten years ago. But if you remember, ten years ago, I would Fantastik every inch of my apartment every single day, even though it was only I who lived there. So I don't know, I guess I'm more lax on vacuuming and scrubbing out every crevice of my own home, but much, much more freaky about other people's germs.

Still, even at home, I do find myself very anxious when it comes to so many things ("Did you wash after you changed her diaper? Maya, did you wash after you used your potty chair? Hey, I saw you wipe your nose with your hand so go wash. Did Naomi's binky fall down? Go wash it! Did you use hand sani? Maya! Sneeze into your ELBOW!" etc.). I am still constantly on yellow alert while at home, especially regarding what others are doing, but it's a different kind of anxiety than being out somewhere like a restaurant or the grocery store or certain people's houses. After taking as many measures as are practical, I can kind of be OK with our own germs.

That's the idea behind washing when we get home--erase the sins of the world and start fresh. For example, who cares if Naomi spits up all the hell over me? I can live with baby puke about my person.

(And so, clearly, can my poor sweet husband:)

Or who cares if I lay her right on the carpet, nakeypie, and she piddles on it?

(Here I am in the process of mopping and Anti-Icky-Poo-ing it up, and Naomi is in the process of inviting you to the Gun Show:)

Our germs. OURS.

It's not like I'm a Howard Hughes though. It's not like in public I'm a germ FREAK and then at home I collect bottles of my own piss or something.

For reference:

"Hughes insisted on using tissues to pick up objects, so that he could insulate himself from germs. He would also notice dust, stains or other imperfections on people's clothes and demand that they take care of it." Yet...

"In December 1947, Hughes told his aides that he wanted to screen some movies at a film studio near his home. Hughes stayed in the studio's darkened screening room for more than four months, never leaving. He subsisted exclusively on chocolate bars and milk, and relieved himself in the empty bottles and containers. He was surrounded by dozens of Kleenex boxes, which he continuously stacked and re-arranged. He wrote detailed memos to his aides on yellow legal pads giving them explicit instructions not to look at him, to respond when spoken to, but otherwise not speak to him. Throughout this period, Hughes sat fixated in his chair, often naked, continuously watching movies, reel after reel, day after day. When he finally emerged in the spring of 1948, his hygiene was terrible, as he had not bathed or cut his hair and nails for weeks." [Later,] "Hughes only had his hair cut and nails trimmed once a year."

In other words, just because I am a germaphobe in public and much less so one at home (or, I should say, just as much of a germaphobe but notably less anxious), I don't think there's any danger of me ending up sitting naked in my bedroom with a pink hotel napkin placed over my genitals, watching movies for a year straight.

Or maybe I will. Maybe the next logical step with my disorder is where I jump from alcoholing-down my forearms after visiting a restaurant, to sitting nude in my attic, surviving on Lik-M-Aid and scotch, and collecting my spit in vials and urinating into empty wine bottles.

---

Anyway, So yeah. OCD is funny like that. You think that a germaphobe is a germaphobe in every aspect of her life, but it's not true. God how I wish for a sparse, gorgeous, immaculate home. I want people to walk in and remark with awe, "Oooh, it's a sparkly!"

And I'm never OK with the dust or the clutter, and it honestly has driven me to panic before where I am sobbing in my husband's arms, feeling so incredibly overwhelmed, but it doesn't rule my life. It doesn't invade my every thought. I don't (usually) obsess about things like dusty wedding pictures (or if I do, recall that I'm a lazy fuck), but if you come to my house and don't wash your damn dirty hands, and then you so much as touch my TV remote, I will play nice but then I will be spraying that fucker down with 25 seconds' worth of Lysol the moment you leave.