Spring Cleaning Finally Has Some Stakes
Spring has finally sprung, and it’s brought the usual warmer weather, steady rain, and tornado of pollen. Weirdly, this is typically the time of year that people realize they’ve been living in a dumpster with a bed and bath for the past season and decide to de-crust the toothpaste and pimple juices from their bathroom mirror. That’s right, it’s spring cleaning baby! But this time around, spring has brought a deadly virus to raise the stakes of dusting the countertops and sanitizing the doorknobs. Not only will many not rest until their shoes are organized by color, but they also won’t get a wink of sleep until their room reeks of enough disinfectant to accidentally start a fire when the owner of said bedroom lights a candle labeled “Energy.”
“I usually look forward to a good spring cleaning but I always think, man, I wish there was some kind of threat—some motivator—to get my room from a dentist’s-office-clean to a hospital-room-clean.’ Before I start spring cleaning by throwing out all the empty water bottles lying around my bedroom, I go to the store to get all the right tools and wipes. But no, not anymore. There’s no going to the store with COVID-19 out there, which I kind of love,” said Sasha Pierce as she dug around the apartment searching for anything remotely close to a wet wipe but only coming up with a used coffee filter. “I live for this time of year so I can appreciate how I can die if I don’t wash my hands for the duration of ‘Stairway to Heaven.’”
“If my book club hadn’t read ‘Spark Joy’ by Marie Kondo last year, I would have been long dead by now. When I spring cleaned in the past, I had always held up an article of clothing or an empty bottle of wine with a decorative flower in it and asked myself if it brought me solace,” said Maxwell Gibbons while talking to his best friend, Desk Chair, after social distancing for three weeks straight. “Not only did I organize my shoes, but I threw them all out! The spring cleaning fairy isn’t going to kill me this year. After cleaning my room I’d typically reward myself with a treat, so I decided to bite the bullet and purchase my burial plot online.”
While many may be finding the new stakes of tidying up their lives riveting, some might not be so ready to face the fact that their closet is a biohazard. If one’s town is under lockdown, it might be time to suck it up and take this self-isolation seriously and learn about how that bleach powder under the bathroom sink works when applied to a surface with water and a brush. The term “elbow grease” now sounds like an easily spreadable disease itself, so get to work before it’s too late.