Vindicated!

Anyone who knows me knows that tidiness isn't my strong suit. I am a messy person by nature. I tend to dress fairly neatly, and my thoughts are usually pretty organized, but the space around me is pretty cluttered. It seems it has always been this way. Even when I was a kid, my room was always a mess, and my closet floor was full of junk. My mother was always making me clean my room, but the lesson never really stuck. I was a mess in my college dorm, but my roommate kept me cleaning and straightening, mainly because there wasn't enough space to be messy. Then I got married, and my husband was a former Marine. You know I became a spiffy housekeeper, right? Wrong--he tried to reform me (and still does when he is up to it!), but it was a hopeless task. There are piles of paper on my desk, stuff on the kitchen table, storage dishes on top of the counter instead of in the cupboard, socks on top of the dresser instead of in the drawer... I could go on, but I think you get the picture. I used to hurry around and clean up when people came over, but I don't do much of that anymore. Everyone knows I am a mess! I was going to try to get organized when I retired, but I don't seem to have made much progress at that in the last year and a half. Of course, January is the time that you read all the articles about resolutions to get organized, and you see all the ads for storage containers. That means it is time to seriously start cleaning up, and I usually do make a stab at it. However, when reading the Sunday paper, I noticed a story about an author that wrote a book that states that neatness isn't all it's cracked up to be. It seems a messy area really is the mark of a creative mind. Apparently, smart and creative people are too busy doing these types of things to worry about the mundane issues of cleaning and organizing. This author states that neat and organized people simply don't have anything better to do with their time, and that they are humorless and boring people( he actually called them prigs). I don't know that I would go that far, but I do like the part about being creative and smart! Evidently all those piles represent ideas and things the creative and smart person needs to remember. I tend to agree in part with this. I am always tearing out pictures I may want to paint or recipes that I may want to prepare. I set them on a table, and then more things get piled on top of them. So I am done feeling guilty because I am such a slob! I'm just creative! Life is good!