Okay…I should not have followed the links from Making Light to garbage houses and hoarding behavior over breakfast.

Not because it turns my stomach, I hasten to add–I came out of “Sweeney Todd” with a vague craving for meat pie–but because I had stuff I wanted to get done today, and instead I compulsively cleaned the house, just on the off chance that I was a single misstep from recreating the Collyer house in one bedroom.

This is, of course, patently absurd. About the worst that can be said about my apartment is that my decorating sense is more enthusiastic than discriminating and I don’t always make my bed. (I will not apologize for the tendency of art supplies to hang out in the kitchen, as I am a working artist, and occasionally roaming squeegees and silkscreening equipment living on the counter is just life.) The studio generates a certain degree of functional clutter, and my cupboards aren’t well organized,* but other than that…

Still, these articles make me twitch and generate an urge to clean everything, including myself and the cats, with scouring powder, just to ward off even the possibility.

I think it might be a genetic thing…I’m pretty sure that a mild, recessive version of that gene runs in my family (when my grandmother died, there were three households worth of stuff to go through, and the grandmother on the other side hoarded things in the way that childhood poverty often causes one to do.) and while no one in my immediate family suffers anything other than a vague tendency to save old papers, my mental immune system is hyper-vigilant and it doesn’t take much more than the sight of a rogue bottle cap or two inappropriate objects stacked on top of each other to send it off into a fit. “AAAAGH! There’s a used Kleenex by the computer!”  (…I’m using that. Right now, in fact.) “Aaaagh! There’s a pile of papers on the desk!” (That’s outgoing mail.) “Aaaaagh! The TV remote is sitting on top of a book on the history of cod!” (…okay, you’ve run out of things to actually worry about, haven’t you?)

So I know that this is vaguely absurd and I should get over it and work on work, plenty of which still needs to get done, particularly since I have Anime Night tonight and need to go out and already slept late and whatnot.

I know this.

Now, where did I put the mop?

*A fact which is starting to make me crazy. Perhaps I should take steps…. No! Must get Digger done first!