What Are You On About?

I’ve never been a fan of the deep dark secret. I always find that in books, they tend to be revealed as pretty anti-climatic – at least, in young adult fiction. Which, I confess, I do still read. Hey, I want to be a novelist, probably for young adults – I should know what’s out there.

Anyway, anytime someone comes up to have a secret I have a wager with myself. I try to guess it. Sometimes it’s blatantly obvious, working in tandem with cliche. Others it’s a bit more subtle and I praise them for not succumbing to the easy way out.

One novel I read, involved a character who appeared to be riddled with secrets. And I wondered, how many of these secrets would I have guessed? Looking through the book again, at least half.

Which brings me to the secret thing that people don’t know about me.

I like cleaning. If I told my parents that, they would probably give me blank looks. If my bedroom is being the basis for my liking of cleaning, it does not compute. I don’t mean to say that I enjoy cleaning up my room, which is I think paradoxical in and of itself. I mean that I like small tasks that can be done quickly.

Washing dishes is preferable to drying them. I have never been able to figure that one out.

I like the cleaning of, say, windows. Apply a bit of cleaning stuff, wipe off. Done.

Laundry is my favourite. So productive, yet so lazy: just dump the stuff in the machine, add detergent, press buttons and Start. Wander off, drink coffee, read fanfiction, whatever. I admit, I do sometimes just pile stuff in the laundry to be washed just so I don’t have to wash it.

I suppose you could say I like cleaning as long as it doesn’t involve lots of noise (no vacuum for me) or vast amounts of effort. So maybe it’s better classed as pretend cleaning, though the end effect is still quite real.

Besides, life is short. I don’t want to spend lots of time cleaning when I could be writing, or any of a million other things.

http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/07/03/daily-prompt-mysterious/