That’s my bedroom floor. I wish I could tell you that it never looks that cluttered ever, but I would be lying very blatantly to you. And then you would cry because you would know then that I am really, really, really going to hell—not just because some kid on myspace said so), but because I lied about my cleaning habits.

Let’s talk about the varying degrees, in clockwise fashion from the top, of pure wrongness immortalized by this cameraphone photograph and my refusal to do anything remotely normal or neat sanitary with my living conditions.

The fan. The fan has been broken for somewhere around two months. Before the fan stopped biting the dust (ha, because that’s what fans do), I had to do what my sister Meadow (Daniel, did you know?) and her husband Justin had to do with their matching fan—take the front cover off of the blades so I could give it a running start every time I turned it on. I’d leave the fan on for Ethel in the streak of over-100-degrees-outside days we had way back when I still didn’t have functioning air conditioning. I’d come home, let Ethel out, and watch her try to get close to the blades before meeting SHOCK when they popped her nose far more times than was reasonable, but still very funny. One day I came home and the fan had lost its will to circulate air during the day. There was nothing anyone could do. It had a long, good life. It’s in a better place. Except wait, not really because it’s still standing, faceless and lifeless, in the middle of my bedroom floor.

The vacuum. I really love my vacuum. My mother may learn that I’ve said this and frame it over the fireplace in the living room as proof that I have actually grown a human brain. It’s cheap and I’m not above that at this point in my life. And it sucks something awful. Because it’ll be a while before I can purchase an appliance that I will want to spend the rest of my life with, this one will do for now as sort of a dust-busting friend with ponytail-holder-sucking benefits.

The plastic. The apartment has been overtaken by these dark plastic characters. Ones which have taken Ethel by the muzzle and made her look deep into their eyes until she is hypnotized by their plasticness and simply cannot avoid chewing, tossing, and clawing at them for the rest of the days of her life. I opened a new toothbrush last night and it was all she could do to keep from throwing me to the ground in the seven seconds it took for me to clear the device from the encasement and offer it to her. And sometimes I wonder what Ethel would say if she could talk—and I think last night, with the plastic laid out before her without even having to beg, it would have been, “HELL YES, WOMAN. NOW GO MAKE ME SOME BACON. PLASTIC, PLASTIC BACON.”

The cardboard. If there happens to be a moment in which the universe actually folds so far over that it collapses upon itself and I clean, and there is no plastic at that very moment for Ethel to devour ravenously, cardboard will do. And it’s not like she chews up the plastic or the cardboard and then leaves it for me, her lowly food-and-water-fetcher, to clean up—no, she forms emotional attachments to these bits and pieces of packaging and if I happen to throw away one she’s named Phil or Bobby, she’ll go rummaging through the giant, street-worthy trashcan I keep in the kitchen until she happens upon him—broken, shaken, but still breathing, barely. And she’ll stand over him, desperately pleading, “Phil? Bobby? One more go ’round? Please?” And then she’ll glance in my general direction, defiantly and exclaim, “I TOLD YOU HE STILL HAD SOME PLAY-AND-CHEW-AND-TOSS LEFT IN HIM. WOMAN, WHERE’S MY BACON?”

The bed. You wouldn’t be able to tell from looking at it, but the bed actually has a bedskirt on it. We’ll thank my supreme homemaking skills for this oversight, as it turns out that when you put the sheets on the bed, you have to keep the bedskirt from ending up halfway up the mattress/bedsprings with the sheets. Also, that black chair resting gently against the end of the bed? In month five of a standoff of wits. I am determined that one day it will just give up and go back to its rightful place in storage. One day.

The me. It used to be that I had fabulous skin and hair and no wrinkles all over my teenaged face. But then I moved to Utah. And my face exclaimed, “WOMAN, WHERE’S MY BACON?” because my dog is a bad influence. And my hair became subject to all kinds of chemical scrutiny. And my face, it worried—because how am I going to pay the car payment and rent? And also go to school? I just do not know.