The Slob BlogBecause slobs need love too!

To help me earn some extra cash, my dad offered me some easy work organizing and sorting through some of his business files.  He offered me, the most disorganized, cluttered, and un-sorted girl in his life, and possibly in the world, a job putting dated materials into a discernible and useful order.  Ironic, isn’t it?  What’s even more ironic, is that I seem to be doing a fine job.  I may even be good at it.

Is it possible that my pathetic financial state and total desperation have allowed me to overcome my slovenly ways?  Or is it what I have been saying from the beginning.  Being a slob is a choice.  It’s a lifestyle choice that I am drawn to, enjoy, and happily choose to pursue and perfect, and it is something that I COULD overcome if I really needed to, or more importantly, wanted to.  But I don’t.  I love being a slob, and so should you.  It suits me just fine, makes my life easier, and it’s part of why I am proud to be me!

If You are Organized and Get Everything Done, You’ll Never Have to Give Up Something You Want to do.

That’s crazy, there is not a single thing that I want to do less than get organized.  That means that any time I am devoting to doing so, I am missing out on something else that I would like to be doing more.

Things seem to go wrong for slobs more often than they do other people.  All my life, people have been telling me to spit out my used chewing gum into pieces of paper in order to prevent it from sticking to other things.  Everybody I know uses this chewing gum convention without any major hiccups.  Why, when I try this simple technique, does it go terribly wrong? 

The other night I was at Target buying my Halloween costume for our office celebration.  A coworker, who looks a lot like me, and I were dressing as twins.  As I reached for my wallet to pay for my purchase, a thin blue string of gum followed my wallet, stretching and growing like a blueberry spider web.  Oh no, I thought, this is gonna be ugly.  The gum I had spit out days before had escaped its paper enclosure and was now spreading throughout my purse in sticky blue explosions of gooey gunk.

It was on my food journal, my wallet, my makeup compacts…everything.  I ran out to the car and found a receipt with a thick blue blob in the middle.  Yesss! Found it before it got too bad.  Then I checked a few more items to make sure they were clear.  I grabbed my cell phone…sticky blue disaster area.  Why did have to be the phone?  WHY?  Then the real shocker.  I found yet another receipt with an even bigger, stickier blue blob.  Had I done this twice in one week?  Was the gum multiplying?  Had I created my own personal used gum breeding ground?

The only positive thought I can draw from the whole…excuse the pun…sticky situation, is that maybe seeing things like this happen to me will make people feel sorry for me.  Having people feel sorry for you is an excellent way to get them to lower their expectations, meaning you have to do less to please them.  It also means more favors, free stuff, and that they’ll forgive you faster when you do things to piss them off.  Yay!

Students often feel the greatest pressure to repress, control, and shame their inner slobs, but with a few simple changes, they can get back to embracing their inner slobs in no time – coming nowhere near their full potential but far closer to the ultimate happiness.

Despite having hit the snooze alarm three times this morning, I still woke up in plenty of time to get dressed and make it to the court house for jury duty.  So, your guess is as good as mine as to how I ended up leaving the house with only thirty minutes to drive all the way downtown in LA traffic.

Already panicked, I must have misread or misunderstood the directions I scrawled on a napkin, because I ended up in China Town.  I don’t know if this has to do with being a slob, or just being dumb, but it happened…so let’s move on, okay?  I finally found the right street, but realized that I’d have to take the long way back across the city to get to the right address.

Pulling into the courthouse parking lot a full 30 minutes late, I had images of being scolded and publicly shamed running through my head.  Worst of all, I worried that I’d have to come back and do this again, and maybe I’d even have to go back to work today! Oh no!

I pushed and shoved through the line at the metal detectors, and body checked a pregnant woman to land a spot in one of the casket-like elevators.  When I finally burst through the doors of the jury holding cell, I was surprised to discover that absolutely nothing was going on.  I didn’t need to check in.  There had been no orientation or missed important announcements; there wasn’t even a brawny female bailiff there to yell at me.

I quietly took a seat an realized that if there’s any institution that can be counted upon to be more disorganized than I, it’s the United States legal system.  God bless America!

Never be Ashamed to Forget:

Everybody forgets things from time to time and it’s nothing to be ashamed of.  Forgetting is the brain’s normal way of dealing with the useless garbage we try to shove in there.  Remember all those lectures your mom gave you about waiting until marriage?  No?  Exactly!  You got rid of something you didn’t find useful.  Most of us do the same thing with math, geography, and our boss’s rules about not surfing the web on company hours.  What would be the point of busying the mind with these things?  The problems begin when our minds get so busy with all the little details of our lives, that they start taking the matter into their own hands.  Minds don’t have hands, but you know what I mean.  Our brains start dropping information that we could have actually used like birthdates, names, appointments, and the date of our last period.  (Men don’t have to worry about this, but for some reason when we ladies go to the doctor, he or she always wants to know this stuff)

Great Things to Forget

1. Forget you’re broke
2. Forget you’re on a diet
3. Forget you can’t sing when doing karaoke
4. Forget you’re a vegetarian
5. Forget your workout
6. Forget your inhibitions
7. Forget you’re afraid of heights when skydiving
8. Forget your ex-boyfriend
9. Forget the speed limit when speeding
10. Forget to be embarrassed when you fall down

The other night I went down town to see a show with a friend.  We each parked on the street, then took the mythical LA Metro (which is not as mythical as I expected) in order to avoid a parking cluster f***.  When we got back later in the evening, she asked me if she could hitch a ride back to her car.

I said, “Sure as long as…”

Without missing a beat she shouted, “I KNOW THERE’S TRASH IN THE CAR!”

A wave of pride swept over me (after, of course, a brief wave of thinking my friend was psychic).  Clearly, I have done such a thorough job of communicating my slobitude to friends, that I have completely eliminated the need to warn them about it.  They expect nothing less than an expert level of disorganized, cluttered, slobtasticness!!!

I love it!

Making those obligatory phone calls to keep in touch with friends is something I generally put off doing.  Mostly because they tend to take too long, and partially because I’m a major jerk who probably doesn’t deserve to have any friends.

You have to admit, though, that the longer it’s been since you’ve last talked to someone, the longer you know you’ll have to stay on the phone with them catching up.  An organized person would probably say that you should just call them more often to keep that from happening.  But who has the time to do that?

I say, do what I do.  Put the call off until A) The person has gotten so fed up with you that they dump you as a friend…meaning no more long phone calls yay!!! or B) You’re faced with a task that is so loathsome, that making those phone calls sounds like a great way to avoid doing it.

I have managed to keep most of my friends by choosing B) almost every time.  Making long-winded phone calls to long lost friends is a fantastic way to avoid doing my least favorite task of all: work.  Thank you, my dear friends, for pouring over every minute detail of your dating lives to such an extent that I’ll never have worry about falling victim to a bout of unintentional productivity.  I don’t know what this slob would do without you!

How Being a Slob Makes You Smarter, Faster, Better, and Stronger

Everyone knows that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger (and still alive…which is good too).  Well, disorganized slobs like us spend our whole lives making our lives difficult, and because of that, we may be the smartest, most talented group of people on the planet.*

• Chronic procrastination means that slobs leave themselves very little time to finish important projects and assignment.  So what happens?  We learn to accomplish everything a “normal” person can in just a fraction of the time.  (Generally between the hours of 4am and 7am )
• Excessive clutter turns your average slob’s house into a hazard zone.  Potential injury and possible certain death lurk around every corner and under every pile of dirty laundry.  Facing this risk on a daily basis helps slobs develop cat-like reflexes and the agility and grace of a Cirque du Soleil performer.
• Poor time management skills mean that disorganized slobs have to become excellent multi-taskers.  How many organized people can talk on the phone, apply a full face of makeup, drink a cup of copy, make a grocery list, and drive all at the same time?  Not many I tell you!
• Slobs are incredibly resourceful.  We have to be.  Constantly forgetting to buy the household goods and office supplies will help you think outside the box real fast.  We write down phone messages on the back of the phone bill, wash our laundry with dish soap, add water to that last drop of shampoo still in the bottle, and when there are no clean dishes left, we  eat entire meals while standing over the sink or trash can.
• We think on our toes.  Forgetting appointments, important meetings, birthdays, and some relatives leaves us with no choice but to learn conjure up a bevy of believable and valid excuses on the fly.  We can describe the symptoms of everything from the flu to a mild stroke.  We know every possible mechanical problem that can put a car, computer, telephone, or major highway out of service.   We no how to feign amnesia, gracefully change the subject, and stealthily flee any uncomfortable conversation.
• Slobs are delightfully spontaneous and easy going.  More than just a pleasant personality trait, we learn to go with the flow from years of not being able to find the DVD we really want to watch, forgetting which day tickets go on sale for the big concert, not checking the weather before heading out to the beach, and forgetting to throw a pair of tennis shoes into our gym bags.  We are the masters of lemons into lemonade, because if we weren’t we’d have no lives at all.

It’s so good to be a slob!!!!!

*Note that the use of the word “may” is a fantastic way to make claims that are almost certainly false and totally impossible to prove.