So, one of the many things mentaljr and I butted heads on was the cleanliness of his room. I tell you, that boy is messy. Whenever I would tell him to clean it, he arugued that it wasn't that bad, etc. When he finally broke down to clean it, he would spent some amount of time in his room, but nothing would be cleaner, just sort of rearranged, shoved under the bed or under other furniture. There would inevitably come a time, about twice a year that I would tell him that if he didn't actually clean his room, I would clean it. He would spend some time rearranging the garbage as usual and tell me his room was clean. I would say are you sure? He would assure me that yes, it was clean. I would go look, and of course, it would not be clean. I would say, OK, I am going to clean your room. He would be mad at me and yell that I was expecting perfection, blah, blah, blah. Usually, there would be some amount of time, say a day or a couple hours, between me saying I would clean his room and me actually doing it. You would think that he would take that opportunity to actually clean it, since he knew what was going to happen when I cleaned it, but nope. He just sulked.
When I cleaned his room, I usually took out several bags of garbage (broken toys, broken CDs, random bits of weirdness, things that I figured if he wanted them so much, he would have picked them up, candy, candy wrappers, other food items, gum stuck to furniture ...) and several bags of paper recycling (tons of pieces of paper with a partial drawing on it or some chicken scratch, again, if it was important, he should have picked it up off the floor). I was ruthless -- if it wasn't put away, it was garbage. (I don't literally mean garbage. Some of it would go to charity, or if it was a special, sentimental item, I would hide it away in his "special box," but most of it actaully went in the garbage because it was garbage.) He would come home (I usually did it when he wasn't home to avoid conflict) and be very angry and quiet. Whatever. I told him to clean up.
Now, mentaljr is out in the world on his own. Mick and I visited his apartment a couple of weeks ago. His room was literally six inches deep in stuff from corner to corner. Garbage was spilling out of his room into the hallway. Apparently, what we saw was "nothing," since his roommate had shoved the bulk of the stuff in the hallway back into mentaljr's room to make the apartment "look nice" for our visit. I reminded mentaljr about how he didn't want rodents to move in, and did he remember the time he shoved all that candy under his dresser and the mice found it and we had a bad mouse problem for a while because I didn't know about the candy stash? He said, yes, rodents are bad, blah, blah, blah.
So, a couple of days ago mentaljr told me that his apartment manager was going to give him 30 days notice if he didn't clean his room. I asked how his manager saw his room. He said that a worker came into install new closet doors in all the apartments, saw mentaljr's room, and reported it to the manager. She came to have a look and told him to clean it or move out. Apparently, she doesn't want a rodent problem, either. Mentaljr said he cleaned his room. Hmm. I've heard that before. I just hope he doesn't show up on my doorstep homeless in 30 days.
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