Remember growing up, when your parents used to tell you things to make you do something you didn’t want to do? “Eat your carrots, it’ll make your eyes pretty,” or “Finish your green beans so you can have a happy plate!”
What the heck is a happy plate anyway?
For me, anytime I left a mess somewhere, be it my bedroom or a plate I left on the table, my mom would tell me, “Your maid is dead.”
After I got over the shock of thinking I killed someone, I realized what she was trying to say to me.
She wasn’t telling me that I somehow caused the death of a helpless old lady but, rather, was reminding me of an age-old admonition that we should always clean up after ourselves.
Funny thing is, though, when we get to college, we like to rebel from some of our parents’ rules, just a little bit. We leave a couple of clothes on the floors of our dorms and say to ourselves, “Oh, I’ll clean it up later. My parents aren’t here.”
Soon those two socks and a shirt become 10 socks, two pair of jeans, three shirts and a missing shoe. We can become so comfortable with our own “little” messes that we forget what we are doing isn’t cutting ourselves “some slack” for all the hard years of work we had growing up of having to live in a spotless house, but we are making it harder for ourselves in the long run.
When we can’t even throw away that week-old empty bag of chips or wipe a counter full of our crumbs into the trash, this gives the impression to others around us, such as our roommates and close friends, that we have no sense of cleanliness.
Assuming later in life you end up getting married or live with someone else, that can easily start to become a strain on your relationship with that other person – especially if he or she has cleaner living habits than yourself.
I mean, those people may not change their friendliness toward you. They may not even say much about it – or nothing at all, for that matter – but many times they may be thinking, “What in the hell was I thinking living with this person?” or “Did their mama not teach them anything about cleaning up after themselves?”
You don’t want someone thinking badly of you, right? Plus, you’ll give your mama a bad name by not cleaning up after yourself.
As I finish up my last semester here at TCU and prepare to enter the real world, I may have some people from time to time who I have to or want to live with for awhile. Having a clean place gives people a better impression of you.
And when people have a better impression of you, this usually leads to better opportunities in life. So be sure to make your dorm a happy dorm.
Glenton Richards is a senior radio-TV-film major from Carrollton.