It’s So My Mom.

Remember when your parents admonished you for not taking care of other people’s belongings? I do. My mother used to tell me, after a stained shirt or polish-stained rug incident, that one day I’d take care of my things, when I had bought them with my own money.

Nuh-uh.

Call me careless, immature, or unmaterialistic, to make up a new word. I don’t usually take care good care of my belongings. Bums would rightfully shun the inside of my car in favor of tidier street corners. (In fact, I got so tired of the hub caps popping off my Corolla that the last time someone followed me to let me know I had lost one, I went back just to watch it roll into a ditch.) My kitchen is clean now that I cook regularly—but when I merely dabbled in it years ago, only the flies and vomity smell reminded me of piling dishes.

I’ve always taken some sort of strange pride in this messiness. It placed my priorities in direct contrast with my mother’s: first comes work, which I like to think I’ve always excelled at; then friends and family; then, insert a million things here, including art house movies, which I rarely watch; and finally tidiness. My mother’s life starts and ends with family and a clean house.

This messiness is my last bastion against the transformation into my mom. I might be turning out just as crazy, but at least I have messy. My Alamo.

So Sunday I’m cleaning the dishes in the kitchen, quite relieved to finally have an empty sink (we don’t have a dishwasher in our awesome, new but circa 1920s-built apartment). It felt so good to have a clean sink that I did a little sweeping in the kitchen. And the kitchen is so close to the dining room, that maybe I should have snuck a little sweep in there too. I did.

And why stop there just because it was technically almost Monday morning? The suitcase in my bedroom—the one I had hauled a quarter of my clothes to the new apartment in about a month ago—needed to be emptied. And all the clothes on the floor needed to be sorted and picked up, too. Also, it was probably a good idea to purge my purses of all their 2009 receipts, for tax purposes.

I’m really, really hoping someone snuck some speed into that broccoli cheese soup I’d had for lunch. But I doubt it.

Because while speed could have made me manic, it couldn’t have accounted for my parlance: “Don’t you like having a clean place?” I asked my boyfriend, who would yell when he couldn’t find his dirty boxers or shoes in the random, mid-room spots where they had been left. “No,” he replied with sullen teenage angst from his computer. And I heard my mother’s voice echo through my head with a familiar but previously unappreciated mantra. “Don’t you like having clean sheets?”

Recycling. That my mother never did. And it’s decidedly un-Conservative. Yes, recycling is surely the answer.