Cleaning & De-stressing

I'm going to preface this blog post with a warning. To anyone who responds with something to the effect of "if you like cleaning so much, why don't you come over to my place?", you're lack of originality, while serving to inspire like-minded individuals who write instruction manuals for vacuum cleaners, is a burden that the rest of society has to shoulder. I'd encourage you to remain silent in order to keep from reminding everyone of that sobering fact.

I've been under a lot of stress lately, between midterms, assignments, a Saturday course, all my friends dropping my only math class, and a thesis. I've been working a lot at home too, since the CS lounge has become very noisy after people actually started to use it. Careful what you wish for, I guess.

Anyways, I'm working at home and I'm dealing with stress. Something you should know about me: I clean when I'm stressed and/or trying to procrastinate. Something you probably already know about me: I drink a lot of coffee. I find it really hard to concentrate in a messy environment. I can't cook in a dirty kitchen, meaning if I had my way, I'd clean before and after I make each meal.

I've been having a hard time lately, because at home all I want to do is clean instead of working on, say, a roman numeral parser for Compiler Construction. As you are all painfully aware, housework is never, ever finished. You have to live in your home, and living produces a mess, which can always be cleaned.

Enter: caffeine. You sit down to learn about LL(1) parser grammars, but then instead you decide it'd be a great time to clean up your dropbox (even though you still have 20% free). Or you decide you could save time throughout the week by ironing every shirt you own, even though you don't really iron your shirts every morning (but feel bad about not having the time to). Or reinstall your operating system because it takes too long to shut down (even though you only shut it down once every month).

So what do I do? I've been reading online (it's another stress-reliever, except it's non-productive), and particularly, I've been reading on how to reduce stress. One of the things one article discusses (I can't remember which because my brain has been so scrambled by the Internet's information overload) is housework. I was intrigued. It said, since it'll never be finished, it's best not to try. Instead, limit yourself to, say, one hour per day or two or whatever works for you.

So I'm going to try. It'll be a fine balance between alphabetizing my spice cabinet and living amid todo stacks, but I need to find a balance. School got hard since I lost motivation, so I only have to stick it out two more months until I take the Summer off and land a sweet job where my work and personal life will finally, finally gain a degree of separation.