I took a Mental Health Day yesterday. Most people might spend that day shopping or lazing around and reading a book or watching tv. Not me. You know what I do? I clean.
The kind of cleaning I am talking about is floor-to-ceiling, corner-to-corner cleaning. I move the furniture so that I can vacuum underneath and not just around. I clean out my closets to make room for the new clothes I keep buying. I scrub the inside and top of the refrigerator and get rid of anything that smells or breathes. And I put the oven that I never use on self-clean. Whenever I feel uneasiness in my life, I find that head-to-toe cleaning of my living space has some kind of calming effect on my psyche. Cleaning out my shit to get on with my shit.
Let me present to you the gloriousness of My Day Off.
Drinking in the AM! I took a break from cleaning to watch The View and they were talking their "hot topics" so I felt the only way I could properly participate in dishing was with drink in hand. So I made a martini. I'm a social drinker. But the episode was from January and they were talking about the "upcoming" Super Bowl and discussinig Nipple-gate AGAIN - a year later. So they weren't live and I no longer felt I was drinking with The Girls. So I drank fast.
Dancing! I did the at-home-whilst-raining-dance all damn day. Literally. It involves a lot of tail-wagging, some John Travolta a la Saturday Night Fever, some Beyonce, and a lot of Billy Idol fist-pumping. So as I was trying out all these moves in one tandem routine, I decided to try out The Upside-Down Microphone. It involves a Power Ballad, holding the mic upside down while you sing to the sky, or in my case, the Rain Gods. Then I wished I was at Karaoke. Cuz all these great moves were being wasted. Then, I needed another martini to stay in the game or my mind was taking a long walk off a short pier. I needed to blame it on alcohol.
Lot of exercise! Besides the cardio-burning dancing and general laughing my ass off, I know that vigorous house-cleaning also counts as cardio-exercise. You can burn 250 calories an hour! Who knew? Plus there was a lot of strength-training in there (furniture moving, vacuum pushing and mopping, and martini shaking) and some stretching (reaching up to the top of the fridge and closets, etc.).
All this exercising paved the way for guilt-free indulging. So I ate a pint of Dulce de Leche and four Peppridge Farm Nantuckets and a bowl of popcorn. And probably another martini.
At the end of the day, the best need for the clean house is that my bathroom floor is sparkly, shiny, lickety clean. So I can sleep on it. Which I totally do when I am drunk. Which is often. But I knew I wouldn't appreciate this truth when the opportunity came, so I put away the martini shaker, grabbed my quilt, and laid down on the bathroom floor. For that moment there were birds singing in my head. One was dancing, one was finishing the vacuuming, and one was in the corner drinking.
Y'all I cleaned myself to crazy.
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