What a horrid mess!

Yesterday evening, my cousin Yi-Ann paid me a visit at my apartment. The place was a mess. There were papers strewn over one end dining table- power bill, phone bill, Indian food advertisement, religious newsletter to the previous tenant, junk mail and official correspondence from the banks and mistresses (if any). At another location of the dining table, dishes from breakfast and dinner the day before waited to be washed. On the floor, a few plastic bags left over from grocery shopping, footwear diffused haphazardly around the doorway, telephone and computer network cables snaking about underfoot and the odd pair of socks curled into adorable little fuzzy balls.

“Oh my goodness,” was what I thought Yi-Ann might have said. Nevertheless, she maintained a politely diplomatic silence and made no exclamation.

This was her first visit. “Let’s have a look at your room.”
Oh dear.

My desk was another case-study in mess.

[Paragraph omitted]

“Don’t you clean up your room?” Yi-Ann asked me with a morbid curiosity of a motorway accident spectator.
“Well, just that I haven’t got round to…”
“But look at this mess. How can you put up with this?”
“No, I know what you are trying to say. Its just that…well….” I stammered around for a half-decent reply. None was forthcoming.

She had asked some very fundamental questions for which I absolutely had no real answer to. While similar questions have been posed before by my parents, the questions were mostly dismissed with a half-hearted attempt or some doubtful excuses, and everyone promptly forgot about the issue. This situation, however, was quite the opposite. I can’t just wave my arms in the air and declare “I’ll do it later.”

Subsequently, the apartment was tidied up. I’m glad to have that refreshingly different point of view presented to me.

Endnote

In my defence, I must stress that while slightly untidy, hygiene was never compromised.
In Yi-Ann’s defence, she did not mean any offence, in case the above inaccurate portrayal hinted otherwise.