telophase | How Clean is Your Conscience?

Say what you will about the classlessness of How Clean Is Your House?: my vague feelings of guilt at the schadenfreude I experience when watching it are completely offset by the fact that it somehow managed to spur me to be on my hands and knees at 1:30 AM scrubbing the bathroom baseboards and behind the toilet, which hadn't really been touched since I moved in. Well, when I moved in I had an injured ligament in my back and couldn't do that for a year or so, and after that, it was more a matter of looking at it, sighing, and saying "I'll do that tomorrow."

For those who have no idea what How Clean Is Your House? is, it's a British show in the vein of those organizing shows running on every channel where the hosts and a TV crew go into a completely trashed/messy/squalorous* home and clean it out and make it all nice and shiny and totally never address the mental, emotional, or physical problems that made the homeowner start to live like that, and pretend that they've changed the homeowner's entire life.

The twist for this show is that they concentrate on the cleaning part, instead of the organizing part, and go into houses and apartments that haven't been cleaned (as in dusted, washed, scrubbed, etc.) for years. They wander through the place, banging dust out of things and scraping grime and smelling everything with appropriate expressions of disgust, then get the homeowner and lecture him or her for a while, then the crew comes in and throws out 90% of the stuff that's accumulated - the places have the clutter problem, too, not just the grime problem - and then they have a cleaning crew come in and scrub everything from top to bottom while the hosts show the homeowner various tips and tricks for cleaning things. They also take samples from various surfaces in the home and send them to a lab to be cultured, then show the homeowner the huge accumulations of horrible types of bacteria that they've been harboring in their house, in an attempt to scare them straight. (I live for the ones that have Yersinia in them. It's never Yersinia pestis, the Black Plague bacillus, but a relative, but one day I'm sure they'll find plague. XD)

And in the later seasons of the show, they come back two weeks later to see if the homeowner has managed to keep it up. Some do, some don't - and I expect that those who know that a TV crew is coming to film them again in two weeks and still don't manage to keep the place clean that long have some serious problems that have not yet been addressed. The ones who do probably managed to fix their problems before the show came to film, and they just needed the help of a crew to get the massive job done.

OK, I've managed to type long enough that my cleaning-induced alertness is gone and I'm sleepy again, so I shall stop typing and go the hell to bed.

* If that's not a word, it should be.

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The show has the complete opposite effect on me. I see the really horrible houses on display and decide that mine, while squalid and extremely dusty, is not so bad after all. Also, I figure that if the huge populations of deadly bacteria in my sink haven't killed me yet, I've probably built up some resistance to them.

I do wonder how they choose the houses though. I stopped watching it for a while, because some of the people seemed to be more disturbed than messy.

Definitely a guilty-pleasure show for me, which means I don't use the Magic of TiVo to save any of them, I just flip to them when idle. Makes prioritizing some cleaning time feel more urgent, really.

Aside: it would be squalourous. Yes. *grin*

I do have some of that, thinking that at least mine is nowhere near that bad, and I'm not a fan of completely sanitizing the house, as the evidence is mounting that living in an environment that's not got enough bacteria is one of the reasons behind the mounting problems of allergies and asthma. I don't know why it makes me get up and clean, but as my mother is due to come here on Thursday, I'm totally going with it. XD

(It might be part of the AD/HD thing - it helps me get into hyperfocus on cleaning. Last night I was definitely hyperfocused on it. But my baseboards do look quite pretty this morning, after I got the accumulated grime and cat hair off of them. :D)

ETA: Or, come to think of it, it might be that my life has spiraled so far out of control this past week that I am desperately trying to reassert control over some part of it. Well, whatever works.

And yeah, I do think that the problem with most of the people on the show is depression or other problems like that, and that most of them will go back to the same patterns of behavior that caused their houses to get like that. The successful ones will be those whose depression or other issue had lifted, or who had someone helping them change their behavior. (The guy whose pregnant girlfriend had called the show, for one thing - I expect that if she moved in after that, that she'd be doing cleaning and making him do it, too.)

The U.S. organizing shows all over the networks now I suspect have a success rate of close to 0 in the long term, since only one of them even comes close to addressing people's behavior, and a few minutes of talking with the person on camera about the reasons why they accumulate stuff and never take anything out isn't particularly effective therapy.

I set the TiVo to get them after I noticed the effect, but I expect once I've seen all of them, it'll stop doing that. :D

ETA: Or, come to think of it, it might be that my life has spiraled so far out of control this past week that I am desperately trying to reassert control over some part of it. Well, whatever works.

*nods* I do this. Laundry is my favorite chaos wrangling control thing, but I also favor sinks (mine are usually old enamel that get clean only if you soak them in bleach), tile, and ripping out large weeds. I know it's bad when I start to work on the grout. Always a bad sign, grout cleaning.

All that bacteria strengthens your immune system! Really.

They mentioned in passing on one show that the only reason the people living in those conditions, with the huge bacteria counts, don't get sick is that they've developed an immunity. However, they do point out that someone without that immunity coming into the house could easily get sick, and that if something happened to their immune system, as happens when you age or when you get very sick from something else, the bacteria could then be a serious problem.

I think there's a happy medium somewhere in between the two, though. :D

Indeed! But if there's a national pandemic crisis, we should put these slobby people at the front lines, with their natural resistance and all....

I find that if I manage to get into the groove, I don't mind cleaning so much. It's getting started that's a problem. Plus, I've got a lot of stuff, much of which has never found a permanent home, and the constant trying to make decisions and rearrange stuff when tidying or picking up is wearing.

I am deliberately attempting to downsize before I move in the spring, because the less crap I have, the easier it is to move. The problem is, that means a lot of trips to the dumpster, which is yet another thing I have a hard time making myself do. They boy is coming over sometime in December, however, and I've already informed him that he will be helping me take stuff to Goodwill and to the dumpster.

I don't mind it too much either, except for dishes, which are The Devil.

Interesting. You know, I'm good at putting stuff in trashbags, but it takes an act of god (or gods) to get me to haul them to the dumpster or Goodwill. I wonder why.

I dunno why I don't. Maybe if I actually started taking each bag out as it filled up, I'd stop associating going to the dumpster with many trips carrying several heavy bags?

That's what I keep telling people. That and Quentin Crisp's theory that "after the first four years, the dust doesn't get any thicker".

Sorry, that was me. And I do seem to be pretty resistant to infection!

There was a series called Life of Grime over here a year or so ago, that followed local authority cleaning crews around as they dealt with Horrible Things of different sorts. One programme was about a man who lived just up the road from me. He had originally come here from Poland, just after WWII, and after his family grew up and left, he just stopped throwing stuff out and began collecting rubbish from the streets. He'd lost everything in the war, and I suppose he was afraid of losing it again. He was a very sweet old chap and the neighbours were very fond of him, but every so often the cleaning crew had to go in and clear his garden out, at it was attracting rats. They were surprisingly gentle with him, but he got very upset, and of course the collection began to accumulate again as soon as they'd gone. I understand he had been offered therapy, but wasn't interested in it.

See, there ya go!

I saw a show on hoarders once and they had one woman on there whose apartment had been "cleaned" (everything thrown out) by the authorities because of fire-code violations, but then six months later she had just as much stuff. I haven't seen the show you're talking about, but most people with really messy houses do have something beyond, "I just haven't had the time to clean."

I've wondered the same thing about a lot of those "makeover" shows -- like on "What Not to Wear?" are they still keeping the "style" chosen for them a year later?

How Clean is Your Conscience?

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