A Little Progress

OK, I'm still a pig of a man when it comes to keeping up my home, but it's not quite as bad as it used to be. My girlfriend is visiting for one day and two nights this coming weekend, and I've known about it for a month, but I'm just now starting to clean up my place and attempt to make it look like a human lives here and not a feral animal. However, when I think about all the women who visited my place when I had a Lake View apartment between 2002 and 2005, I realize that I've come a long way. "Shelley" tore a hole in her jeans when she walked too close to a broken chair that had a metal piece sticking out that I had neglected to throw away even though I broke it more than a year before Shelley came. In fact, each woman who came there either noticed the chair and was careful to avoid it while cursing me out or never noticed the chair, and instead of just throwing it away, I would just cringe every time one of them walked past the chair hoping they wouldn't slice themselves open. It's funny that Shelley was the one person who damaged her clothing, because she went on to make thousands of dollars by conning me into co-signing her student loan. Guess I paid for the jeans, and then some. "Karen" visited for an hour on Christmas morning 2003 before we spent the day with my family, and she was supposed to be my future housemate and potential wife and all that jazz, yet I still had to kick old newspapers underneath the chair she sat in. And this was three days after "Sarah" spent some time with me for my birthday, so it would have been worse had she not helped me clean up a little. In fact, the first time Sarah came to see me, she spontaneously plopped on the floor and started picking up my junk mail and other garbage and filled a few garbage bags for me. That was her maternal instinct. My apartment was always a little better off after Sarah left, not to mention my cock.

So my place now isn't nearly that bad. There are no broken chairs, and if there was, I'd just take it out because I honestly don't know why I would hang on to a broken chair. There's still some old newspapers lying around because that's my weakness; I hate grabbing a paper and not reading the whole thing, so instead of throwing out the part I've read I'll hold on to all of it and vow to read it when I have time. There's some dust bunnies making families in various corners as I type this, but I'll be zapping the little buggers today and tomorrow. The mop and Pine-Sol is ready and waiting for me to attack the kitchen floor and bathroom. The house won't be spotless for my girlfriend when she arrives this weekend, but it won't skeeze her out either. And most importantly, I'm actually going to make the effort to clean the place instead of kicking some garbage around and trying to hide it, and that's a reflection on how I feel about myself. A few years ago, I felt like a dirty, lazy piece of shit, so that's how I treated my apartment and my relationships. I'm not where I want to be yet, but I'm certainly making some progress taking better care of myself and the things I care about.