The Clutter Games

There are two AA batteries sitting in front of me on the computer desk. I have no idea whether they are new batteries or old batteries. Most likely, they are the ones my daughter removed from the mouse when it died a week - or was that two weeks? - ago, and they never made it any farther than the desktop.

Welcome to my house.

I am forever picking up small things here and there and putting them in their respective places. This gives me the illusion of putting things in order, but creates no discernible dent in the clutter.

You'd think that eventually I would get ahead of things, but that's not the case. Every pick-up spree has an evil twin - the "I'm too tired to put it where it goes" moment. Couple that with its "I don't have time now, I'll do it later" cousin and all too quickly, clutter is overtaking my house one battery at a time.

I could blame lots of things (and a couple of people, along with a few character traits), but the truth is there are so many things I would rather be doing than cleaning. And so I do those things, and in between, play little games with myself. Games like "how many items can I put away or throw away during a commercial?" and "can I get rid of this pile by picking up one thing every time I walk by?"
These games lead to dubious successes, along with a constantly relocated stack of things that gets moved from surface to surface in search of a home.

Every once in a while, I get the urge to purge, and so I attack an area of my house and make great progress. But life is busy, and these sessions don't happen often enough, so while my house doesn't resemble an episode of Hoarders, it definitely looks lived in.

My daughter just wandered in and I asked her about the batteries. Her illuminating response? "I have no idea."

Do I put them into something that requires AA batteries to see if they work? Bite the bullet and throw them away?

Not sure yet. But I know I won't fall for either of the twins or their cousin. At least not this time.