No mess

One thing I've learned from the mini-cruise that concerns me: it will be impossible for four months to generate any mess.

I live in a messy house. I am writing this entry from a computer on a table piled with an anarchy of papers, yarn, cat treats, and random objects that I find interesting or that I expect to find interesting or that I once found interesting and am not entirely sure are not still interesting. It's how I live. A friend tried to tell me it was bad mental health, and I laughed at her. Some people choose to live orderly lives. Do I tell them to let some dust accumulate in the corners of their minds? No. So they should not object to the dust bunnies under my mental (and physical) bed.

Anyway, it will not be possible on board. Leave the stateroom* for a stroll around the deck, and when you return, the bed has been made, the tables have been put into order, and the toilet paper has acquired that fussy little v-shaped fold on the next available sheet. Was there a fingerprint on the chrome? Not any more. Were the pillows left in disarray? They are now arrayed with geometrical precision and ordered from firm to soft on the crisply made bed, just as they were on the first day.

And it's not just in the stateroom. There are twelve elevators arranged in banks of four aft, amidships, and forward.** In each of them is a red carpet, into which has been woven the day of the week. When we first came on board, they all said "Thursday". When we awoke the next morning, they all said "Friday". This is not an electronic display, this is in the fiber of the carpet. During the night, someone took the "Thursday" carpets out and replaced them with the "Friday" carpets. We passengers are guaranteed never to sully the bottoms of our shoes by stepping onto elevator carpets which have not been cleaned in 24 hours.

Dear God! After four months of that, will I return having been Stepford-ized? Will I start vacuuming my condo and dusting bookshelves and wiping down surfaces with disinfectant***? Will I be unable to function if I cannot see the surface of the table on which I eat my meals? Will I start washing dishes the same day I use them?

Stay tuned. If you detect such un-Roberta-like tendencies, warn me. I will disembark at the next port and hitchhike home, even if the next port is Australia. I'll bet people on tramp steamers don't change the rugs in the elevators every day.

*To refer to the room in which I live as a "stateroom" feels very unnatural. I could go with "cabin", though. I wonder whether that's in any sense appropriate.

**Notice the way I used nautical terms there? Nanette, whose father was an internationally credentialed marine engineer, tells me I've got it right. I feel absurdly proud of myself.

***Lest you visualize me with crud climbing aggressively up my internal condo walls in lieu of ivy, there's a very nice lady who comes in once a month and does all these housekeep-y kind of things for me. I'm a slob, but I'm not totally lost to civilization. Of course, for 12 years I was totally lost to civilization, but my daughter Lizz cleaned my condo for me while I was in Russia in 2009, and I found I kind of liked it that way. Not enough to actually run a vacuum myself, of course, but enough to pay someone else to do it for me.