CLEANLINESS IS NEXT TO IMPOSSIBLE

Some people blog as a way to cleanse their soul. Today, I'm blogging because it is the only viable excuse that I have to not cleanse my townhouse. (Also, traffic to this blog has literally doubled this past week, and I don't want to leave you guys hanging without something new to read over the weekend!)

But seriously, folks, when are we going to develop the technology that will do our cleaning for us? And why haven't more guys dedicated their lives to solving this problem, as opposed to designing carjack sequences in the latest Grand Theft Auto game? Granted, jobs like that are important, but surely there has to be some gadgetry somewhere. I guess as our technology races more towards the era of the Jetsons, we as men have focused more on developing the flying car and have let the women worry about Rosie the house-cleaning robot.

Why is this?

I wouldn't be so worried about it if, for instance, the President of the United States was coming by my house. Because the President is a guy. And like all guys, he'd sit down, have a Coke and a slice of pizza, watch the Naked Gun trilogy with me, and never once notice that there were bacteria that could be entered in a rodeo surrounding him. But it's not the President coming, it's my girlfriend, and she has these things called ovaries, which allow her to detect uncleanliness on a molecular level. You single guys don't believe me? Just remember how it was with your mother. How many times as a child did you do what you believed to be a bang-up job of cleaning your room, by which I mean shoving excess magazines under your bed and duct-taping your closet shut so it wouldn't burst open and kill innocent passers-by, just to have your mother come in, bemoan the status of your dwelling space and the ecosystem it was spawning, when all the while you perceived it as being almost clean enough to host the Queen of England?

This is the problem that perplexes me today. I look at my apartment and see a perfectly viable area in which to live, but I fear feminine eyes might see a building that, at best, ought to be set afire, torn to scrap, and then sanitized with itty-bitty ash-cleaning cloths.

While I was cleaning earlier, the aforementioned girlfriend asked me this question: "what do you consider as cleaning?" Men, she asked it in just the tone that you're imagining in your head. You will never see a Fed-Ex airliner more loaded than this question. And of course, my male brain wanted to reply with simply "picking up my crap and putting it away." However, I've been around the block, so with great effort I added "vacuuming...and dusting...and wiping stuff down..." I may have said more things after that, but I was already suffering enough mental collapse trying to remember various elements of cleanliness and how they were accomplished. To me, the fact that I have alphabetized my CD collection and put them all in racks (as opposed to lying in various places on the floor) makes me think the job is halfway done.

One need look no further than my roommate to get a good case study of male cleanliness. I won't mention Jason by name, but suffice it to say, he's not next to godliness, if you catch my drift. The other day, he came bursting into my room uninvited, as he is wont to do, a huge smile plastered across his face, proclaiming "come look, I've cleaned my room!" Now I've known him for over ten years, and if he ever truly cleaned his spot, it would be the first time in the history of our friendship. So, naturally, I was curious to see. I peeked in, and sure enough he'd made his bed and arranged his shoes in a neat little line in front of his dresser. Forget the fact that there were papers lying haphazardly on his desk and junk shoved under his bed so tightly that it appeared his bed might at any moment be rocketed through the ceiling. Forget that there was enough dust to support agriculture caked atop all furniture surfaces. Forget the fact that the carpet had been left unvaccuumed and there were dirt particles approaching the size of boulders on it. This man truly felt, in a way only a man could, that he had cleaned his room, to the point that he was proud enough of it to actually bring me in to show me his work. Suffice it to say, this man has never had a girlfriend for a significant length of time.

You women out there are shaking your heads and thinking "this could be my husband/boyfriend/father/brother/other significant male figure." You're right. "And why are these men so unclean?" you ask, as a follow up question to your previous internal monologue. To answer your question in a roundabout way, ladies, I submit the following: you should be glad that your man even cleans at all. This is the truth, ladies, no matter how distasteful: if women did not exist, men would NEVER clean. I'm speaking here in matters of living space and of their own personal bodies. Don't think for a minute this doesn't apply to your man, either. Your man may be the most metrosexual human being on Earth, but if he did not have a woman around to impress, he wouldn't bathe for months on end so that he could win the "who stinks the most" competition down at the office. Okay, so that's not entirely accurate. He wouldn't have an office either. As for his home, if a man didn't ever have to worry about a woman cohabiting with him at any point in his life, he would NEVER buy a vaccuum or clean sheets. He might not even buy a house to begin with.

Other things that wouldn't have been invented without the advent of women: curtains, doilies, placemats, non-leather-upholstered furniture, mats of any sort, picture frames, dishwashers...really the list is too long to name. Suffice it to say that if Adam were to have never had his Eve, regardless of the extinction of our species, the only thing that would furnish men's homes would be a naugahyde sofa/bed, empty pizza boxes, empty beverage cans, tacky posters, and 70 inch plasma widescreen HDTVs with Dolby 5.1 surround.

Well, I've frittered enough time away as I can justify, so now I have to get back to it. All I can say is that I'm glad she's got herself a hotel room and isn't staying here with me, because I can't imagine what she'd do to this place while I'm asleep. Maybe I should go alphabetize my DVDs now.