1. So spotless you sometimes jolt awake in the middle of the night, when a particle of dust settles on the glass-topped coffee table
2. Paper messy – neat, contained piles of crisp white paper, untouched European fashion magazines and that day’s mail
3. Paper messy + professionally fluffed and folded stacks of springtime-fresh laundry, without a hint of wear or stains. Sometimes you just gaze at your laundry, before placing it on the linen closet shelves, where you imagine that the sheets and towels whisper their thanks, for the scented sachets
4. Strewn paper, haphazard but still clean clothing, but with the almost imperceptible sprinkling of breakfast cereal – it’s called gateway sloth
5. Unwashed dishes, stacks of newspapers, stale gym clothes – and it’s not a dorm room
6. Innappropriate food in inexplicable places: a stick of margarine in a shoe, a half-eaten power bar as a bookmark, a rotting apple in the medicine cabinet
7. You can’t tell what’s pet food, what’s dried vomit and what’s a wiglet
8. It looks like a fire swept through your home, and then a flood and there are empty animal cages
9. Is it a comforter or a dead body? And wouldn’t a dead body be preferable?
10. Your home looks like a sweeps-week episode of Hoarders, if your entire family, after eating another family, exploded. But you still tell the people from the Board of Health, “I know where everything is.”
