The One With the Little Science Lesson

I used to have a housekeeper. My house was cleaner then. You're thinking, "Well, yeah... duh." But it's not what you think (unless you have had a housekeeper... then it is probably exactly what you are thinking). When I had a housekeeper, I used to spend hours every week cleaning so the house would be clean before the housekeeper came. It cost me about $100 every week for that. At some point I decided to pretend that the housekeeper was coming, and save myself that $100 every week. It didn't work. Not even for a week. In fact, I was so happy not to stress out over the housekeeper anymore that I would have paid $100 a week for them just to not come. Plus there was that time the housekeeper accidentally drank bleach at my house... that was pretty traumatic, I'm not gonna lie.

But now it has been three or four years since I had the housekeeper to make me clean (clean, the verb, not clean, the adjective). I'm looking around right now, and it is not good. I thought about taking a few pictures so you could see what I am talking about. But there are those among you who would still not be able to identify with my problem. In fact, you're thinking right now, "In the time it took you to write this post, you could have cleaned your whole downstairs. Scrubbed three toilets. Put away your Christmas decorations. Man, you just don't get it, do you?

It is not my fault. The laws of physics are against me:

1. Newton's First Law of Motion states that in order for the motion of an object to change, a force must act upon it, a concept generally called inertia. There are no such forces at work in my home, therefore all of the objects that are cluttering my house are doomed to stay where they are.

2. Newton's Second Law of Motion, translated from Latin, states: The acceleration produced by a particular force acting on a body is directly proportional to the magnitude of the force and inversely proportional to the mass of the body. There was this one time when Ethan and Dillon were racing toward each other after school so that they could walk home. They both came around the same corner at the same time, and the resulting collision sent them both to the health office. Ethan was nursing a head injury...although that was the year where I had to go to the health office six different times to sign that head injury form for Ethan, so I wasn't terribly worried about him...and the janitor was still mopping up the blood from Dillon's nose, which was clearly broken. But...I digress...Newton's Second Law of Motion has no application to my housework, because there is no force, and definitely no acceleration at work here.

3. Newton's Third Law of Motion: To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction; or, the mutual actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal, and directed to contrary parts. This one is probably my worst enemy. For every single object I pick up, there is not one, but several other people leaving/dropping/drooling/slopping/dumping/throwing objects much faster than I can possibly pick up. I am in this alone.

4. The Law of Gravity. This one is working against me as well. I have come to realize that the problem is too much horizontal space. When I put up the lid on my piano so that it is at a steep diagonal, then no one can leave their stuff there. What I need is for every surface in my house to be at a slant...preferably all slanting toward one big central vacuum system/floor drain, with an industrial-size hose that I can use to just hose everything down periodically. Then gravity would be working in my favor. You may have noticed that my blog is really neat and tidy. Peaceful. Almost soothing, right? Proves my point. It's always vertical... or at least at a pretty steep slant.

Listen. I could get into the Theory of Relativity, or Quantum Physics. It wouldn't matter. I will tell you right now, that none of them want me to have a clean house. Right now, I think I'm going to go bake something (physics loves me in the kitchen) and then lie down for awhile. The gravity is really starting to wear on me...