I had a pet rat once. Her name was Misato; she was an extremely intelligent siamese rat, and she hated me.
She didn’t hate me because I rearranged my room once every three weeks. Actually, that was probably the highlight of her time with me, other than when she figured out how to open the latch on her cage door and roamed free about my dorm room for a month. Rearranging the room meant that I was putting her into close proximity with even more random stuff for her to chew apart. I gave that rat every damned rat chew toy I could find on the market, and the only things she used them for were litter posts, but she delighted in shortening her ever growing incisors on my stuff.
I wouldn’t have any stuff left, in fact, if it weren’t for the monstrous pile of boxes of even more stuff that didn’t manage to be put on display in my dorm room.
I realize just how much stuff I have about every three weeks, when I rearrange my room.
I cannot give you a definitive answer to why I rearrange my room so often. Perhaps it is that I’m trying to arrange my furniture in a way that maximizes the proper chi flow through my bedroom. But since I don’t really buy into the whole Fing Shewi thing, I doubt that’s it. More likely its that the only time I find I can really, thoroughly clean my room is when I’m moving furniture about and blocking all the exits. All I really know is that every now and then, the urge comes over me, and I must make things look different.
When I was younger, say in middle school, or high school, this was actually a fairly simple task. My tastes were not yet refined, and I was still very much experimenting with room arrangements and adornments. Things such as Sesame Street and Garfield top sheets tacked to my ceiling to make my bed look like a four-poster seemed gloriously inventive and sheik to me then. Of course, I since learned that tacks give into gravity very easily when someone’s tugging on the fabric that they’re holding up all the time, and that Sesame Street and Garfield, while fashionably retro and geek-culture-y, will never be “sheik”. I was generally working with a limited amount of furniture in those days as well, and sharing a room with my sister put a damper on just how much room rearranging I was allowed, so things usually only took a couple of hours to be completed.
Then I went to college.
My freshman year was when I established the “every three weeks” pattern. This was most likely a response to my roommate, Meg, who never EVER rearranged her end of the room, including when she arrived in the first place. My mother and I had spent three hours lofting my bed and figuring out the most useful position for my dresser and my desk, and she comes waltzing in, takes a glance at her side of the room, and that was good enough for her. By the end of my first semester, I was building bed-caves and improvising desk space using computer boxes, and her bed was slightly higher off the ground. My rearrangements required friends climbing in and out of windows because the door was blocked momentarily by the corner of a scavenged sectional couch, and she batted her eyes at her baseball player boyfriend to get him to move the tv over a couple inches. When we parted ways that May, it was the last we ever spoke to each other. I’m not even certain if she returned to campus the next year.
Sophomore year was a little less dramatic, due to the fact that I was living in an apartment on campus, and had a little more room to play with. I also managed to avoid the rearranging bug for a couple of months due to the fact that shortly after we moved in, one of the girls in the other room decided that she simply could not live with her roommate any more (even though they’d actually lived together for years), and demanded that we pull a switch. We rearranged rooms, and I was well satisfied until about November. This is when I discovered that I was not alone in my rearranging fanaticism.
My new roommate was a senior, and she well knew the stresses of living in dorms with cookie cutter furniture. All I had to say was “maybe if we put this bookcase....” and we would have a diagram of the room including all extraneous stuffed animals created in AutoCAD, giving us free reign arrangement simulations. We stacked things, bunked beds that the RA didn’t even know could be bunked, and had an all around glorious time doing it. Sometimes it was as simple as moving a desk, sometimes we reshaped the entire space into a maze of hallways surrounded by towering glowing things. But at the end we were always satisfied... for the next three weeks at least.
Monica claimed to have the same fever, so I went into my junior year with high hopes. I think she moved her bed once, so it was facing the other way on the wall.
Then I got my single. And my rat.
I think half the rearranging done that semester was based mostly on trying to work out the best place to put Misato in relation to Snort, my African pygmy hedgehog who loved me dearly (almost as much as he loved grass), and died much too young. Then it was a matter of trying to place Misato somewhere that I would have quick access to protective gloves when I needed to clean her cage. I had a hedgehog, a creature covered in sharp pointy objects of death, who would never, ever make it past airport security post 9-11, and I needed protective gloves to pick up my RAT.
Misato was a present from my then-boyfriend. That probably should have been a signal.
I went to London the next year, left Misato with a friend who it later turned out was ALLERGIC to rats, and didn’t rearrange my closet–I mean, bedroom–once in the entire semester. I returned, was handed my rat with a pair of tongs, and spent my time moving furniture in order to decipher where I could place Misato’s cage without having her climb out and nibble on my nose while I was sleeping.
Misato now belongs to a very nice girl named Jill, whom she probably loves dearly, and this year I’ve been able to satisfy my rearranging fits with slight movements of my bed.
Well, until tonight, that is.
Tonight, I will move each and every piece of furniture in the room.
The chi will be driven crazy, as will my cat.
It will be a glorious occasion, and if you see me climbing out my window, don’t worry, I’m just going on a snack run. My door is blocked by a pile of books and dresser drawers.
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