Tidy Not Clean

describes me. And it is a dichotomy I find interesting. People you would would think were neither tidy nor clean turn out to have strong opinions about which (cleanliness or tidiness) is more important for their personal comfort, as do people who, in living-space-descriptive terms, have attained both.

I am tidy and not clean; I hate clutter on surfaces and things left sitting out, but dust does not worry me.

Still, I think it would be suaver (cooler, really, to dig straight to the heart of my seventeen-year-old soul) to be someone clean but not tidy -- someone who rigorously washed and dusted and swept and de-grimed, but could care less about the outward orderliness of it all, someone who left piles of books on the coffee table but each and every one of those books was dust free.

I imagine mid-century fiction identifying that attitude as one of natural aristocracy, an unconcern with outward appearances and a profound concern with inner truth. My identification may be a product of my own insecurities (a friend and I had identical Skipper dolls back in early 1983; I was convinced that hers was better) or a response to some kind of objective truth out there in the world.

Also, perhaps, it seems so much harder to me to be clean than to be tidy, and I assume that to be true for everybody, and so I admire the clean for not taking the easy way out.