Comment: Pretty house, pretty mind.

I think you can tell a lot about a person’s mental health based on what their house looks like.

Obviously I’m not the first person to notice this. Julie Morgenstern and Peter Walsh have made a fortune on books dealing with clearing clutter to make way for better mental health. There are even fix-it shows on TV now about hoarding, making OCD just another reality TV affliction that can be gawked at with both pity and shadenfreude. Tidying up experts are ubiquitous these days.

But I guess what I’ve noticed living in very small quarters these past months, is that all you have to do to know how I’m doing is take a quick glance at the apartment. If it looks good, it’s all good.

If it looks bad, it is.

It’s so simple.

Even with very little of our belongings in this temporary living space, we’ve still managed to overcrowd it. The difference is there’s very little point in investing in organizing systems and bins and containers for a place we’re only living in for four more weeks.

My son has been walking around saying “we have too much stuff, we’re rich.” He has a point; we’re not rich, but we have a lot of stuff we don’t need, and it’s depriving us of clean, clear airspace.

If this were our permanent home, some things would have to change. We’d have to have better storage. And, frankly, less stuff.

Wait until the moving van comes when we move into our new (much bigger than here) house. Oy. I’m going to want to rent a dumpster and just purge, purge, purge.

But here’s the tricky part (It’s the Big, Fig Newton!) (Sorry.): the house is bigger than anything we’ve lived in. But we probably do have too much other stuff. We just don’t have enough furniture to fit in this house as it is. And what we do have is at least 85% craptastic and only moved with us because we’re too hung up to buy new stuff. Maybe we’ll have to go minimalist chic. Or just minimalist.

Maybe even though we’re only here in this apartment for another month or so, it would behoove me (I love that word) to sort through what we do have, and cull it down some more.

Part of the challenge is to stop bringing crap INTO the house.

This is the never-ending dilemma of ingrained conspicuous consumption. Like Lily Allen says, “I am a weapon of massive consumption, it’s not my fault, it’s how I’m programmed to function.”

She may be only 23 but she’s got that right. I wonder what her house looks like.