Saturday, February 5, 2011

Art of Persuasion

Other dumb cat

There's a hilarious little post on the Expat Blogs forum about how insane the Dutch are about cleanliness. And I, for one, will attest to the fact that this assessment of the Dutch is absolutely-100%-perfectly true. They may not have a sense of interior design or fashion, but they know damn well how to keep everything neat.

Left to my own devices, I will gravitate towards a happy medium of cleanliness and laziness, depending on how many other things need to get done and how often Karel is home (his shiftwork is highly irregular). But Karel likes our apartment Clean, by which I mean eat-off-the-floor clean, which can be just a tiny bit of a hassle if you have three fuzzbutts and two litter boxes. Over the past three years we've sort of reached an equilibrium between our two standards of cleanliness: alone, we'll both do the minimum that's required to keep our apartment Clean, but only when we're together does the place get a thorough cleansing.

For the longest time I resented this need for clean, mostly because it took time away from things I'd rather be doing, like going to see movies and birdwatching and what-not. Lately, though, I've become resigned to the daily rigamarole of keeping house, and all of the cleaning that entails. All thanks to our little FatBoy.

We adopted him in 2009, but it wasn't until the winter came and our apartment had to be sealed shut before we realized that I am pretty allergic to him (and just him, to--I can snuggle both Shadow and the Tweeb without problems). I started taking antihistamines, but it turned out that my degree of suffering wasn't consistent. There would be days when I had nary a sniffle, and days when I was literally too exhausted from sneezing to get out of bed. Eventually, we correlated my allergies to how clean the apartment is.

So really, the amount of housework that I do has absolutely no bearing on my personality. It's just a side effect of wanting to keep our cat.

1 comment:

  1. I used to share a house with someone who had a cat. I'll never forget how the hair got every where.

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