Nothing Can Be the First Thing 🍝

Something I've discovered, mostly by doing things wrong, is that almost nothing you want to do can actually be the thing you do first.

Take tonight. Tonight I want to make pasta. Simple. Pasta. But the pot is in the dishwasher, and the dishwasher is full of clean dishes, and the clean dishes can't come out because the drying rack is full of other clean dishes from yesterday, and those can't move because the counter they'd go on is covered in mail and a bread maker I haven't used since 2021. So to make pasta I first have to empty a drying rack, which means putting away dishes, which means clearing the counter, which means dealing with the mail, which means finding a pen, which means locating the pen behind the couch with the approximately nine hundred other pens that have rolled back there since the dawn of time.

By the time I find the pen I no longer want pasta. But I've started, and this is the trap.

It's worse with cleaning, because cleaning has rules that nobody wrote down. You have to vacuum after you dust. Not before. After. If you vacuum first, the dust you knock off the shelves later settles onto the freshly vacuumed floor like a fine gray punishment, and now you're vacuuming again, and this time you're angry.

I learned this the hard way, which is the only way I learn anything. Last spring I decided to deep clean the living room. Just the living room. I made a list. I'm including it here so you understand the depth of my situation.

1. Remove everything from shelves.
2. Dust shelves. (Dust falls on couch.)
3. Vacuum couch. (Couch cushions must be lifted, which reveals things. A Lego. Socks, obviously — it's always socks. A photo of an ex's dog. You will look at the photo for a while.)
4. Vacuum floor where couch was. (Couch must be moved. Couch is heavy. Moving couch reveals a region of carpet that has clearly not seen sunlight since the Obama administration.)
5. Vacuum revealed carpet region.
6. Wipe shelves. (Shelves must be dry before items return, or you're just putting dusty stuff on a damp shelf, which is its own kind of gross.)
7. Return items to shelves. (Half the items no longer fit because you threw some away in step 3 when you were emotionally compromised by the dog photo.)

The whole thing took four hours. The living room looked exactly the same as when I started. Not similar. The same. I could find no evidence the cleaning had occurred.

And this is fine. I'm fine. But here's where it gets truly diabolical: projects. Same dependency problem, except the dependencies are invisible and some of them don't exist yet.

I'm redecorating a bedroom. Or I was. In February. Currently the bedroom contains: a can of paint, a roller, a drop cloth still in its packaging, a lamp with no bulb, and a bed stripped of its sheets, because I read somewhere that you should wash everything before you paint, and then I never got to the painting part. So now we sleep under a blanket like pioneers, except pioneers didn't have Wi-Fi, which we do have, which I mention only because I used it to order a second lamp, which also has no bulb.

The paint color is wrong, by the way. I can tell now. I couldn't tell in the store. In the store it looked like "greige," which is a word the paint industry invented to sell you the same color twice.

My partner asked, helpfully, if I could just pick one thing and finish it. One thing. As if I could finish the lamp without first buying a bulb, and buying a bulb requires knowing what color the room is, and knowing what color the room is requires painting the room, and painting the room requires an empty room, and an empty room requires somewhere to put everything currently in the room, and somewhere to put everything requires shelves, and shelves require drilling, and drilling requires finding the drill, and the drill is behind the washing machine with approximately nine hundred pens.

I don't know where it started. I don't know where it ends. I know that this week I will find the drill, and when I do I will not have the wall plugs, and then I will be in a hardware store at 9 p.m. on a Thursday buying wall plugs and a bulb and possibly a second, better paint color. And the first paint can will sit in the bedroom corner forever, unopened, a small beige headstone for a project forty-one steps from happening.