I’m sure there is some obvious trade secret I’m missing here.  Either that or there is 
some magical storage space built into these people’s houses that whisks away all the clutter at the touch of a button.  In fact, there probably is one of these spaces in this very house we’re living in.  Yet the joke is on us as no one is telling us where it is.  I’m sure as soon as I leave the room, people whisper about how clueless I am, and laugh at all the piles of junk that mock me everywhere I go in my house.

What I want to know is, when people take pictures of the interior of their houses, do 
they strategically move cluttery items from place to place before composing the 
photo?  Or do their homes look like that most of the time?  What do people do with 
old bank statements, credit card bills, health insurance statements, and their 
countless numbers of AOL-there-is-no-way-I-could-use-up-all-those-free-minutes-
even-if-I-stay-online-all-the-time CD-ROMs?  Ok, I know what people do with the 
CDs, at least I know what I do with the CDs.  And it usually involves something 
sharp, and lots of brute force.  And no, I’m not talking about The Rock.

Granted it is different when people don’t have any children of their own.  For in our 
house, the Kiddos’ belongings make up a good majority of the clutter.  But even in 
other people’s homes who have kids, somehow they always seem to be much more 
uncluttered than our home.  In fact, I’ve noticed that in a lot of these homes, there 
is nary a toy to be found in any of the common public areas.  What is up with that?  
Do these kids not like being around their parents already, and have sequestered 
themselves in their own private abodes?  I mean, I know that highly misunderstood 
creature called a “teenager” does that, but at age three?  Come on, surely us parents aren’t that dull to be around.

I’m not saying that we’re slobs by any means.  We don’t sit around on our butts, 
eating food in front of the TV, only getting up to refill our drinks, letting our garbage 
and dirty dishes build up around us.  Our carpet gets vacuumed - from time to time.  
Our dishes get washed – from time to time.  Our bathrooms get cleaned – fairly 
regularly.  In fact, our house is clean most of the time.  What it isn’t, however, is 
uncluttered.  

I find that both Jen and I have a variety of interests that leaves us prone to having 
certain things lying around – books, CDs, DVDs, a collection of long, pointed objects 
(don’t ask).  And since we use these things fairly regularly, it becomes quite a hassle 
to be putting them away all the time, only to have to take them out the very next 
nanosecond.  I figure if we did that, we’d never have any time for our various 
interests as we’d be spending more time cleaning than we do on the actual activity.  
What kind of life is that?  I’d rather live amidst some clutter, yet have time to do the 
things I want, rather than keeping a pristine house that requires me maintain it 
every microsecond of the day, even when we’re asleep.

Some people are fastidious housekeepers, and there is absolutely nothing wrong 
with that.  But when I go to that Big Place in the Sky™, I’d like to think I enjoyed my life and spent time doing things with the People I Love.  Somehow I doubt saying, 
“well, I sure cleaned a lot and kept a neat house” will earn you any brownie points.  I guess it all comes down to a matter of priority.  Some people put their priority in a 
clean, uncluttered, spotless, I’m-going-to-work-my-butt-off-to-keep-it-that-way 
house, where that is further down my list – way down.  But I’m not above receiving 
any trade secrets that I may not be aware of.

So when people tell us, “please excuse the mess,” and I say, “don’t worry, your 
house isn’t nearly as bad as ours,” I really am not merely being polite when I say 
that, for our house 99.99999% of the time really is messier.  But what is our 
purpose here on earth?  To spend it constantly cleaning the same things over and 
over again?  I think not.  

Our clothes are clean when we need them (yay Jen!), our dishes are clean when we 
need them, we’re not constantly tripping over things, nor are our bills buried under a 
ton of hated junk mail, AOL CDs, or go-into-more-debt-credit-card-applications. 
As cluttery as our house is, I still feel like I can find things as easily as the person 
who keeps a neat house.

And now, I’m going to go write a note using one of those aforementioned long, 
pointed objects.  If I can find a piece of paper, that is.