I’ve Also Been Avoiding Finishing This Post

I like to think of myself as quirky. Every once in a while I start to worry that my strangeness isn’t so much cute and endearing as a sign of an actual mental illness. But then I come here to the internet and find out that TONS of people are weird! And only SOME of them are crazy! Definitely not more than 60%. The rest of us are fine, really. No need to worry or keep us away from sharp objects and firearms.

So here’s the quirk I’ve found myself facing a lot in the past few weeks – I often suffer through something I dread and hate instead of fixing it, even if fixing it would take almost NO EFFORT.

Exhibit A: When we were still deep in Baby Evan’s constant puking stage (aka the first 6 months of his life) I kept a pile of old-fashioned cloth diapers around as burp cloths. In my stash was one weird cloth that must have come from a box of hand-me-downs. It was too big and not very absorbent and I hated using it AND YET every time I did the laundry I put it back in the pile. This cloth was free. I had 45 other, better cloths. I had no attachment to this cloth. WHY DIDN’T I JUST THROW IT OUT rather than spend so much time dreading the moment it was on the top of my pile?

Exhibit B: I HATE cleaning up the family room and kitchen because cleaning up means I’ll probably have to throw something away and the trash can might be full. MIGHT be full. Or close to full. Or halfway full, which means I’ll have to deal with it soon. This problem could easily be solved by simply taking out the trash…but I don’t want to. I just avoid avoid avoid dread hate worry avoid until E gets fed up with the overflowing trash and takes care of it. If E went out of town for a month I suspect we all might suffocate under piles of garbage. The saddest part is I don’t even have to go outside to throw out the trash – I can reach the cans from our side door – and yet I STILL hate it.

Exhibit C: My underwear drawer is FULL of underwear. I hate almost all of it. AND YET I will put on a pair I KNOW are uncomfortable and wear them all day as if there was a rule saying I must wear every pair at least once before I can repeat. I could easily solve this problem by just throwing away the old/too big/too small/too itchy/too pinchy underwear but I just…don’t. Instead I just dread those pink ones with the flowers that are supposed to be “boy-cut” but really just mean front-wedgie.

Exhibit D: I keep a lot of stuff that isn’t silverware in our silverware drawer. Serving spoons, the baby’s old meshie feeders, bamboo skewers, a jar opener. It makes the drawer hard to open and close because stuff is always getting stuck and every time I’m fighting with it I think “GOD WHAT A STUPID WAY TO STORE THIS STUFF. WHAT KIND OF IDIOT PUT ALL THIS JUNK IN HERE?” And the answer of course is ME. I did it. I continue to put stuff in that drawer and then HATE MYSELF for doing it. Why don’t I just put it one drawer down where there is room and I already keep other, very similar stuff? WHO KNOWS.

Actually, I moved a bunch of stuff to another drawer last week and now every time I open the silverware drawer I think “Wow, I’m a genius! This is so much better!” and conveniently forget it took me FIVE YEARS of living in this house to do it.

OK, now you show me yours.

Tags: , , , , , ,

19 Responses to “I’ve Also Been Avoiding Finishing This Post”

  1. Swistle says:

    One I recently fixed is an underwear-drawer issue: I had two pairs of very similar-looking underpants, but ONE pair was great and the OTHER pair was stupid and I never wore them. Recently I figured out which pair was which, and threw out the bad pair. This situation was in place for YEARS.

    I always leave out the Christmas card stuff after I finish doing the Christmas cards, because it always happens that I find I need just one more for this and just one more for that. Last year, the pile of photos tipped off the table and spread over the floor. I found this so discouraging, and so representative of what my life had become, I left them there for MONTHS. When I finally picked them up, it took seriously 10-15 seconds.

  2. Michelle says:

    Um… I thought this was normal. ;)

  3. Lisa says:

    We recently bought our first house, and my husband thought that the best place for the litter box was our tiny master bathroom. We had it in the one bathroom in our apartment because that was the only space where it would fit, but there are clearly other options in the new house. Having the litterbox in the bathroom means that a bathmat would constantly get covered with litter, and at the apartment my husband would throw it in the hamper after a day or two. This meant we spent 95% of the time with no bathmat. It was a pet peeve of mine at the apartment (can’t the damn thing be vacuumed or shaken out!?), but now we’ve lived in the house for 3 months with no bathmat in the bathroom and I’ve developed an irrational fear of falling while getting out of the shower (probably because I’m 5 months pregnant and my sense of balance seems off… worse than my usual clumsiness). Now I almost exclusively take baths upstairs (where we still haven’t installed a shower curtain). I could remedy this problem by 1) moving the litterbox and retraining the cat, 2) buying a ton more bathmats so when my husband throws them in the hamper we’ll have a clean one, or 3) Putting a shower curtain up in the upstairs bathroom. It’s been 3 months, and I have yet to do any of these things.

  4. Robyn says:

    I do this with underware too, and also socks. Oh, and i insist on keeping hair care and body care products that i have bought and hate, and will probably never use again, but yet can’t bear to throw away.

    • bebehblog says:

      I have an entire shelf of those products, taking up a lot of storage space I need for stuff I DO use.

      • merin says:

        I do the same thing! I swear I am going to use that weird, black clay face mask again one day. Or soak my feet in some fizzy DIY pedicure rocks or rub down my tired legs with that tingly minty Crabtree and Evelyn lotion (do they even make those products anymore???).

  5. TMae says:

    I can’t close or open my sock or underwear drawer there are so many extra, never-worn articles in each of them. I also have at least 4 pairs of jeans in my drawer that I never wear which is making that drawer also difficult to open. Last week I culled my sock drawer. I picked and pushed the masses of them around and pulled out the 8 pairs that I know I hate. The drawer still won’t open and close easily. How damn hard is it do dump the drawer out? I think I might strain something if it try it.

    Why change it when you can just work around it. That’s my motto.

    • Ginny Lynn says:

      Love this post. I have a problem with mail. I don’t open most of it, yet I leave it on the counter and don’t throw it out. It will gather for weeks and take up a large portion of the huge amount of counterspace I have in the kitchen, until my husband finally gets tired of looking at it. It seriously takes 5 minutes to go through all the mail- and if I just did it daily to begin with, it would take what? 30 seconds? Oh well!

      And coupons. I WANT to be good about using coupons. I’ve tried SO MANY TIMES. I’ve bought litte files and books and tried to keep them organized so I can use them. I’ve spent time to clip them every Sunday. And then I don’t use them. I forget them. I decide I don’t have time to look through them on this shopping trip, I’ll use them next time. Finally- I gave up and quit wasting my 15 minutes on Sunday to clip the coupons- because why waste 15 minutes to clip them if I’m not going to spend 5 minutes to look through them and use them.

  6. Veronica says:

    I do exhibit C to myself all the time as a punishment for allowing myself to get fat. So anyway I forced myself to throw it all away and lose weight. It is pretty fabulous.

  7. michelleJ says:

    Yes, yes, and yes! What a great post.
    And Ginny Lynn, I hear you on the coupons. I have contemplated giving it up but *guilt!* (The problem is probably going to resolve itself becaue I’ve stopped getting the Sunday paper.)
    Can’t wait to read more comments!

  8. MommaFitness says:

    Cleaning out my email inbox… it takes a few seconds to sort them into a file or delte them… and yet I have 15000 emails in my personal email inbox… and 676 in my business inbox. If I just blocked out 20 minutes for each mail box – I am certain it would be organized!

  9. Laura says:

    I second so many of these — especially the socks/underware (I finally cleaned my drawer out a couple of weeks ago) and the mail. I even avoid brining the mail in all together so I don’t have to sort it. Another one is the laundry. I’m constantly doing laundry — like at least a load a day. But there’s always a pile of stuff at the bottom of our closet that never gets washed. It’s the stuff we don’t really use very often and I always think, “I’ll get to it NEXT time.” My husband finally got sick of it and dumped it all downstairs this weekend and decided to do most of it himself. (He almost never does any laundry.) If I’m not careful, he’s going to start throwing away my things that are sitting in piles around the house. He often threatens…guess I ought to do something about them, but I’d rather just ignore them.

  10. Jennie says:

    My bra drawer is much like your underwear situation. I have several that are too tight, pinch, itchy, muffin toppy- but I never donate them. Instead they sit in the drawer and make it impossible to open/close.

    Cleaning out my fridge is the WORST! I have TONS of containers of leftovers that we won’t eat, yogurt post date, shredded cheese that has become a single blob- but I HATE cleaning out the fridge. I justify it as: it’s not trash day so all that stinky food will stink up the trash cans OR the dishwasher if full so there is no where to put the stinky dishes except in the sink and that will stink up the kitchen. SO they sit in the fridge until the stars align and it’s trash day AND the dishwasher is empty AND I feel like it.
    My husbands personal fav is that when I am done vacuuming, I never roll up the cord and put the vacuum away. I just leave it where I last vacuumed. Not sure why- it isn’t difficult to put it away. I just don’t wanna.
    AWESOME POST!

  11. molly says:

    Oh my God, I have tons of these but of course can’t think of anything off the top of my head. But yes to the underwear drawer. I wear the same type of underwear, much to my husband’s chagrin, but the fancy ones are still in there. Taunting me. Laughing at me.

  12. merin says:

    What a great post! I do a ton of these things, but one thing I am noticing lately is that I never put my jewelry back into it’s spot. I bought all these awesome acrylic containers that allow all earrings, necklaces, etc. to have their own spot, thus facilitating easy viewing, wearing and returning. But I have a pile of earrings sitting on top of my dresser (DIRECTLY ABOVE the drawers with the boxes) that I pass by every time I go into my bedroom. WHY????

  13. I keep old almost empty shampoo and conditioners in the bathroom closet, as well as hair products I’m probably never going to use… because I might use them someday. We’re not talking hoarder level over here, but still… I’m growing my hair out so what do I need hair wax and hair glue for anymore? And yet I feel so odd tossing them, even though they’re taking up precious bathroom storage space!

  14. Animom says:

    I have had the same plastic cutting boards in my kitchen for the past 7 years. I’m usually good about changing things out in a timely manner but, for some reason the cutting boards have stayed. They’re not dirty..the dishwasher cleans them pretty well but I’ve been thinking about getting wooden ones for a long time. I just don’t do anything about it.

Leave a Reply

CommentLuv badge