Sparkling clean and shiny tidy

Had a leetle clean up. When you live in a sharehouse (as I do), your bedroom can become the compressed space in which most of your ‘stuff’ lives. Before I lived in this house I was living by myself a few hours out of the city centre, in an upstairs apartment, in a quieter, more spacious town where rent was cheaper. There were two bedrooms, a kitchen, bathroom, loungeroom and study. It was definitely the biggest space I’d ever had to myself, and owing to a brief sojourn as a coupled houswifey thing rather early in my twenties, I have all the kitchen doodads and housey what nots to easily fill a space like that. Don’t get my wrong, a lot of my stuff was purged then, and has been collected since, and I have the rag tag collection of hand me down furniture and past housemates past housemates bookshelves etc, but I have enough of it to fill a smallish place of my own. Now that I’m back in the big smoke and sharing with (albeit lovely) housemates, I find the task of keeping all my stuff in it’s box and not having it accumulate and start to grow into toppling piles (books for eg) difficult. Anyways, still charged from a fast paced and exciting week at work (doing presentations and delivering training, working 11 hour days writing proposals to deadline – the kind of stuff that either sucks every ounce of energy, or if it goes well leaves you feeling super charged), I found myself launching into a bedroom declutter project today.

I even dusted.

I do find it hard to totally purge and get down to minimalist spacious and airy vibe, but at least I thought I could do without the floor clutter and dustballs. As way of explanation for my hoarding ways, hobbies and interests do seem to account for a lot of ‘stuff’. I like to cook, so my kitchen cupboards have dodads like blenders and muffin trays and tablecloths and all that jazz. In my bedroom I have books and bookshelves, a desk, a bed, linen, towels, my clothes, clothes racks, chest of drawers, fabric for sewing projects stored in vintage suitcases, summer clothes packed away for next season, whatever stuff I have to give away (at the moment this is a bag of clothes for the second hand shop after today’s purge, some fabrics to send to my grandma for her church craft group – optimistically sitting inside a post bag ready to send, some hand-me-down kids books passed on from my mum for a friend’s baby), some drawing gear, paints and brushes, a gazillion blank books that are home to a multitude of projects, potplants, modern big suitcase for travelling (which between trips houses my half done ambitious ‘make a blanket for my bed out of knitted squares project’), scattered boxes of jewellery, a bag of clay, music and music player, computer, a large etching I bought wrapped in paper which I haven’t taken to get framed yet, makeup (read lipsticks), random life paperwork crap – actually heaps of it, stuffed into a box for sorting later, button collection, drawing folder, handbag collection, – you get the picture. So, in brief, I am a bit of a sentimental hoarder with a love of novelty and variety, who also occasionally aspires to a clean, sleek, modern and funky looking abode, but is seriously constrained by space. Oh well. A lot of wiping with a lemongrass essential-oil infused damp cloth goes a long way towards conjuring a general sense of freshness.
And I tidied my underwear drawers (any gals out there who have suffered from commingled sock-knicker-bra-singlet-stocking fiasco will know the very warm glow that comes from ordering these slithery and high spirited garments into some kind of system, and in the process throwing away (or turning into shoe-polishing rags) any sad limp old cotton knickers whose elastic has atrophied long ago. Very satisfying sense of order over the domain of one’s life can be gained from a bright and cheery knicker drawer, and bras folded into neat little piles. I have even herded the stockings into a drawstring bag to stop them catching on god knows what in the drawer and somehow appearing with cheeky snagtoothed gappy grins (that’s holes and runs, to the more literal of us). Sure, if you’re me, this new world order of underwear drawer tidiness may only last for about a week before entropy (err, or laziness) leads to it degenerating into chaos once again, but hey, it’s nice while it lasts.

Sunny side up?

Also, I think I’m ovulating. It’s usually when I get the irrepressible desire to reorder the whole world, transplant sad houseplants, sew things, make things, stay up late working on projects, listen to loud music (I have a strange urge to listen to Janis Joplin) and sing my heart out. Amongst other things.

I read somewhere that women tend to dress in more sexually provocative/ fashionable clothes when they ovulate – I know I get a certain spring in my step… Went to see a performance Friday night that featured a skateboarder, acrobat, b-bop boy, dancer, singer and BMX bike rider. And while there were all sorts of interesting subcultural, nature-of-performance, dialogue between genres types observations one could make, all I could think about was ‘oooh, look at your tall slouchy understated posture, serious face and sexy BMX tricks – just the right mix of competent and slacker’ and ‘oh, I can almost see right up your very skimpy shorts when you wave your perfectly formed acrobatic thighs around like that’. I could quite happily have spent the rest of the evening with any one of the cast recounting to them in breathy undertones and hand gestures my appreciation of their performance. Aaah hormones. Does this happen to any other gals out there?

NB It was actually an interesting show, my sleazy commentary aside – was called Paradise Playground - check out Performance Space at Carriageworks in Sydney for more info.