A series of angry questions about clean rooms
Cut for tl;dr rant. In which I am told to clean my room, do not want to clean my room, question the reasons why a room must be clean, and discover that I can find no satisfactory answers.
My room is, by anyone's standards, very messy. I know that. I admit it. It is messy because I have a great deal of things, nowhere specific to put them, and no good motive to find a place to put them. The free floor space in my room forms something of a U-shape around my bed, if you can picture that, and the bottom and left side of the U is, in varying amounts, either loosely littered or densely packed with things on the floor. I have six other pieces of furniture in the room, all of which have surfaces covered by things: one has my nightstand stuff, two have a collection of Transformers, one is a desk covered with notebooks, action figures, other books, and a few knickknacks, one is purely knickknacks, and one is a bookcase full of books. It is not neat.
However, I know where everything is. I can find, retrieve, and use what I need when I need it, with very few exceptions--no more exceptions than even averagely "neat" people have when they misplace items, so far as I have been able to determine from observating such neat people. It's true that bits of the floor are impassible if you don't have a certain amount of nimbleness and energeticness--but I am healthy skinny young lady. I am quite easily able to tiptoe through the "impassible" parts when necessary, but usually it isn't; I can pass over them to the places where it is easy to stand, and reach in to get whatever I want. No problem. People like, for example, my parents would not be able to retrieve things with such ease from the impassible zones, but there is nothing in there that they would want or need to retrieve anyway.
My parents have told me I need to clean my room this week during spring break, or else they'll clean it themselves. And there's no way in hell they'd do anything close to a passable job on it. They have threatened this before and never gone through with it, but that may only be because when they make such statements, I'll be properly threatened into moving a few things before the momentum dies and they stop caring about the room again. This week is another one of the cases of such a threat. I will, per orders, clean my room to some extent this week. The layout of the impassible zones will change, but no real progress will be made. I will no longer be able to find many of the items that pre-cleaning would be easy to locate. I will be forced to re-learn the layout of my OWN room, a task that will be even more difficult now considering that I don't live in it regularly anymore. And the cycle will begin again in a few months.
And so here's my questions, some of which I asked the parentals and some of which I thought of later and some of which I was smart enough to shut up about:
Who makes these rules that it's "necessary" to see the floor of a room? That the floor "has" to be visible? That furniture surfaces "have" to be visible?
If a furniture surface is covered with items, and if the only way to uncover the surface would be to move in a new piece of furniture (such as shelves) to relocate the items to, and if doing so would cause the room to acquire a new piece of furniture--which, unless I am mistaken, by its very nature will make a piece of the floor impassible--and would cause the currently-covered furniture surface to become barren and, therefore, absolutely useless, why should anyone choose the option that causes more floor to be taken up and a perfectly viable storage surface to be left idle, particularly if the person proposing this solution thinks the floor "has" to be visible?
If the owner of a room does not desire for their room to change, and the other residents of the household desire that the room should change because they "don't want to look at it" or some similar phrase, and if the other residents have absolutely no reason at all for many weeks at a time to be in and out of the room that they desire to change, why in the world can't they just shut the door and not look at it?
If the owner of a room repeatedly assures someone else that they can find everything they need in their room, how on earth is "cleaning your room will help you find things more easily" a valid argument?
If the current guest bedroom is cluttered and if a room that somebody currently owns is cluttered, why does it make more sense to demand that the room that somebody owns be cleaned up and converted into a temporary guest bedroom, rather than clean out the REAL guest bedroom?
If the level of physical and mental exertion it takes to navigate and live in the current room is MUCH lower than the level of exertion that would be necessary to reorganize the room and forever after maintain a state of cleanliness, why should someone perpetually exert their energy to engage in a battle to maintain structure and order when they can live perfectly in a consistent post-entropy environment that requires next to no energy to navigate, much less maintain?
I realize that some of the questions may sound a bit ridiculous. Particularly to someone who actually does have a relatively orderly room, which I suspect will be most of the people reading this. I mean, who asks "why does a floor have to be clean"? What kind of a silly question is that?
Give me a good answer that does not rely on any logical fallacies or unlikely hypothetical situations and I'll concede that the question is silly. Until then, I will maintain that it is, in fact, the idea that a floor MUST be clean in the FIRST place that is silly.
My room is, by anyone's standards, very messy. I know that. I admit it. It is messy because I have a great deal of things, nowhere specific to put them, and no good motive to find a place to put them. The free floor space in my room forms something of a U-shape around my bed, if you can picture that, and the bottom and left side of the U is, in varying amounts, either loosely littered or densely packed with things on the floor. I have six other pieces of furniture in the room, all of which have surfaces covered by things: one has my nightstand stuff, two have a collection of Transformers, one is a desk covered with notebooks, action figures, other books, and a few knickknacks, one is purely knickknacks, and one is a bookcase full of books. It is not neat.
However, I know where everything is. I can find, retrieve, and use what I need when I need it, with very few exceptions--no more exceptions than even averagely "neat" people have when they misplace items, so far as I have been able to determine from observating such neat people. It's true that bits of the floor are impassible if you don't have a certain amount of nimbleness and energeticness--but I am healthy skinny young lady. I am quite easily able to tiptoe through the "impassible" parts when necessary, but usually it isn't; I can pass over them to the places where it is easy to stand, and reach in to get whatever I want. No problem. People like, for example, my parents would not be able to retrieve things with such ease from the impassible zones, but there is nothing in there that they would want or need to retrieve anyway.
My parents have told me I need to clean my room this week during spring break, or else they'll clean it themselves. And there's no way in hell they'd do anything close to a passable job on it. They have threatened this before and never gone through with it, but that may only be because when they make such statements, I'll be properly threatened into moving a few things before the momentum dies and they stop caring about the room again. This week is another one of the cases of such a threat. I will, per orders, clean my room to some extent this week. The layout of the impassible zones will change, but no real progress will be made. I will no longer be able to find many of the items that pre-cleaning would be easy to locate. I will be forced to re-learn the layout of my OWN room, a task that will be even more difficult now considering that I don't live in it regularly anymore. And the cycle will begin again in a few months.
And so here's my questions, some of which I asked the parentals and some of which I thought of later and some of which I was smart enough to shut up about:
Who makes these rules that it's "necessary" to see the floor of a room? That the floor "has" to be visible? That furniture surfaces "have" to be visible?
If a furniture surface is covered with items, and if the only way to uncover the surface would be to move in a new piece of furniture (such as shelves) to relocate the items to, and if doing so would cause the room to acquire a new piece of furniture--which, unless I am mistaken, by its very nature will make a piece of the floor impassible--and would cause the currently-covered furniture surface to become barren and, therefore, absolutely useless, why should anyone choose the option that causes more floor to be taken up and a perfectly viable storage surface to be left idle, particularly if the person proposing this solution thinks the floor "has" to be visible?
If the owner of a room does not desire for their room to change, and the other residents of the household desire that the room should change because they "don't want to look at it" or some similar phrase, and if the other residents have absolutely no reason at all for many weeks at a time to be in and out of the room that they desire to change, why in the world can't they just shut the door and not look at it?
If the owner of a room repeatedly assures someone else that they can find everything they need in their room, how on earth is "cleaning your room will help you find things more easily" a valid argument?
If the current guest bedroom is cluttered and if a room that somebody currently owns is cluttered, why does it make more sense to demand that the room that somebody owns be cleaned up and converted into a temporary guest bedroom, rather than clean out the REAL guest bedroom?
If the level of physical and mental exertion it takes to navigate and live in the current room is MUCH lower than the level of exertion that would be necessary to reorganize the room and forever after maintain a state of cleanliness, why should someone perpetually exert their energy to engage in a battle to maintain structure and order when they can live perfectly in a consistent post-entropy environment that requires next to no energy to navigate, much less maintain?
I realize that some of the questions may sound a bit ridiculous. Particularly to someone who actually does have a relatively orderly room, which I suspect will be most of the people reading this. I mean, who asks "why does a floor have to be clean"? What kind of a silly question is that?
Give me a good answer that does not rely on any logical fallacies or unlikely hypothetical situations and I'll concede that the question is silly. Until then, I will maintain that it is, in fact, the idea that a floor MUST be clean in the FIRST place that is silly.