The Slob BlogBecause slobs need love too!

When my boyfriend and I were first living together, we took great pleasure in our weekend morning routine of cooking a big breakfast, brewing coffee, and enjoying a movie or some mindless reality TV.  These days, we just grunt in a half-sleeping state, point at each other’s bed head and laugh mockingly, and stubbornly plop ourselves down on the couch until one of us grows desperate enough for caffeine to get up and brew some coffee.

One morning, we decided to make some of those buttery crescent rolls that come in a can.  These things couldn’t be easier to make, you pretty much just pull them out of the can, seperate them at the dotted line, plop them on a cookie sheet, and heat ‘em up.  No problem right?  Wrong.  The damn things require construction.

Unlike, biscuits which are just plop, bake, eat, crescent rolls must be formed into crescents.  These stupid pastries involved some sort of geometrically sophisticated maneuver in order to get them into the right shape, and for whatever reason, it was beyond my skill level.  I know what you’re thinking, and no…I’m not a monkey.  At worst, I’m a blond.

Normally, this situation wouldn’t bother me to much.  I’m a resourceful, problem solving type of slob, and just as I would if I had been alone, I got around my own fumbling incompetence by forcing the dough into a crescent shape with my fingers.  I molded it and pinched it, like Silly Puddy, into a pretty little moon shape.

My boyfriend, seized this as a golden moment to make fun of me ruthlessly.  He demonstrated over and over again how to roll the crescents correctly, but I just couldn’t do it.  By this time, I was ready to grab a snack bar and be done with the whole thing.  He made sure I’d never forget the humiliating incident by emailing me the manufacturers instructions, complete with diagrams, for rolling the perfect crescent.  Now I can’t even look at the moon without feeling resentful.

This situation was not my fault.  Furniture assembly requires instructions, delicious breakfast treats should not.  I am convinced that it’s not me who is too lazy and simpleminded, but it’s the world that is becoming overly complicated.

In yet another example of why truly organized people are out of their freakin’ minds, I submit table 20-1 from Organizing for Dummies.  The book suggests that mornings aren’t a great time for clear thinking (I agree wholeheartedly!), so one’s routine for getting out of the house in the morning should be planned just like any other project.  Um…no.  If I’m not thinking clearly, which I never am before about 10:30am, the LAST thing I want to get involved in is a project of any kind.  How does that make my life easier?  Getting out of the house is miserable enough…now it’s a “project”?  Delightful!

But the book goes on to provide this charming little mathematical equation, disguised as a to do list, so those of us hoping to turn around our disorganized ways can easily calculate how much time we’ll need to get out of the house.

Okay, I understand that putting a little thought into just about anything will make it easier to accomplish, but really, I can’t maybe ballpark this?  I need a whole chart?  And they’re not fooling me with this whole checklist concept, I know subtraction when I see it, and that’s my cue to start running.  I promise you that if math is involved, NOTHING is getting done faster.  Working with numbers is one of the most effective ways to slow my life down.  If it hadn’t been for math class, I’d probably have finished junior high school in three months.  I’m just saying.

So here’s the chart that’s supposed to simplify all our lives:

I resent the idea of this kind of chart to begin with,  not to mention the fact that they ask you to calculate coffee drinking and paper reading times, which I think just takes all the fun out of both activities.  I can also assure you that to actually make this chart work, if I was really going to bother with it, I’d have to take into account any number of impossible to predict variables that this chart blatantly ignores.  Oh, and by the way, you’re supposed to work backwards to come to the correct get-out-of-bed-time.  If these people are so efficient, why couldn’t they come up with a chart you can do forwards?

Here’s my version:

To use this chart correctly, I’d probably have to plan to go to bed during lunch the day before, a plan of which I don’t think my boss would approve.  I think I’ll stick with my current strategy of coming up with fabulously creative excuses for my lateness.  It seems to have worked for me this far.