on being Monica Geller...

This post is my entry for 20SB's "Looking Back" Blog Carnival. I've never participated in any of the Blog Carnivals, because most of the time I spend entirely too long writing the perfect post inside of my head that I end up missing the deadline. (Which is awesome.)

Well, anyway, I found out about this month's topic and realized how perfect it was: Take a post from the first two months of your blog and re-post it. Um, hello? I do that all the time! I love it! Sign me up! And then I read that Ben & Jerry's is awarding free ice cream to lucky bloggers and readers. (Way to twist my arm arm a little, homeboy.)

Obviously, I need more ice cream in my life. I don't think you understand.

The post I decided to go with was from the first month I started this blog. I think that it highlights two things quite nicely:

1) I am seriously OCD. Don't judge me.

2) The first bit of marriage teaches you a lot about patience, compromise and things you have to learn to seriously shut up about because they are so not worth the argument (especially after having the same argument seventeen times in a row).

originally posted April 7, 2006:

Much to my dismay (more so to my better half), I have come to the conclusion recently that there is a side of me that hasn't manifested itself until this point in my life.

I am Monica Geller.

I would never have considered myself a neat-freak or a maniac when it comes to organization or cleanliness or what shade of green is the only acceptable shade of green for the towels in our bathroom. Yet, all of a sudden, after the wedding and I moved in to the apartment, I have these out of body moments where I'm watching myself throw a fit because there is a fleck of food left on the dish that my husband washed. I want to throw myself to the ground and yell, "WHY, GOD, WHY? WHY MUST I CARE?" I try not to, I really do. And yet...I care. It's odd.

My older sister was always the über organized, must-vacuum-her-room-every-week, drawers neatly organized, even-the-bulletin-board-isn't-cluttered one of us. Me? Well, I wasn't MESSY messy, but I will admit to paying my younger sister $1 to get myself out of vacuuming my room. Ah, yes, those were the days.

So, to make a long story short, I would have never guessed that I'd be this crazy.

To be honest, when I come home from work and there are papers scattered on every shelf, table and ledge, the dishes are all over the counter, and clothes strewn throughout the rooms (courtesy of the love of my life) I actually can feel myself tense up. I get angry and start running around, huffing and puffing, cleaning until everything looks the way I want. I know it drives my husband crazy. Especially when he's gone and helped me out with something, and I go and re-do it, so it looks "right".

I have no soul. It's a mystery to me, what I've become.

Maybe it's just different now that it's a place of our own. Maybe I am just accustomed to the way things were growing up, when my mom would clean the house every day, and would never go to bed with dirty dishes on the counter. Of course, here I am, and things are just different. I have to pay $1 each time I want to run a load of wash (and I have to run back and forth to the laundry room to do so), I have to hand wash every dish and glass (do you have any comprehension of how many dishes that two people produce?), and I have a linoleum floor in the kitchen that looks dirty no matter how many hours I spend scrubbing it. Mom made it look easy.

So. I'm working on it. Hopefully the husband won't choke me with the vacuum cord in the meantime. I'm so lucky that he has the patience of a saint.