Ahhh....now that's more like it. This boudoir beast needs to aim for this kinda sleeping palace and grow up. I don't see any bras hanging from the ceiling in this joint, do you? No, only lovely damask curtains. Again, shall we repeat, ahhhhh.

Dear Ether, 

Have you read “Catcher In The Rye?”  If you have, you know the character Stradlater A.K.A. “The Secret Slob.”  Now, I’m not going to say that I’m a slob (I’m extremely hygienic, unlike Master Stradlater whom I believed used rusty razors and wore dirty underpants) but I’m appallingly messy.  You wouldn’t even imagine my clandestine dealings when you saw me on the street…well with the exception of my fingernails (but we’ve covered that one in http://www.oneof365.com/oh-so-talon-ted/). I’m pressed, coiffed and perfumed—I waft through posh shops where I’m complimented on my dress, or asked what fragrance I’m wearing.  If only they knew that the outfit I was donning was only hours ago in a ball, in a dusty corner, under a wet towel, in my room…that my dog was curled up on.  My bedroom…oh dear…my bedroom…it’s a no-go zone.  I don’t know why I can’t control it, but no matter how hard I try, it’s a district of disaster.  

It follows me wherever I go, this messy bedroom.  My dorm in college was famous by other students as being horrifying (and that’s pretty bad given college students aren’t the tidiest of folks), my flats in London looked like nuclear bombsites.  

I always move into a new place with the best of intentions hoping that THIS time a new me will blossom and the “Secret Slob” will shed its skin.  

This is how it all begins: I start off with a clean, fresh canvas.  My clothes, neatly folded in my bureau, hung up in closets (I even have lavender sashays and drawer liners in dainty Liberty prints!).  But it just takes that one night when I’m too tired to fold the dress I’m wearing and I just step out of it, and a week later there it is, lying crumpled under a layer of 100 other things that have amassed on top of it.  

It’s a curse.  I never can find matching socks, shoes go missing (and I always blame some sordid robber who REMARKABLY never steals anything but that one pair of misplaced shoes).  I step on and tear new clothing with tags still attached.  Bras hang from ceilings (that’s a joke, but you get the idea…).  It’s also a really horrible living situation psychologically.  I’m surrounded by a pigsty and feel like I’m living in squalor.  I want to live bright and happy, not dark and crappy. 

My partner, a total neat freak (the guy folds his ties into perfect pleats and balls his socks—boarding school—that’s what it does to you) can’t stand it and has lectured me about my beastly ways.  He spends as little time in the shit-hole as possible, works in his office as much as he can and even sometimes finds it so maddening that he sleeps in the guest room.  Yep, this “Secret Slob’s” sex life is even screwed (pun intended) by this too.  

The crazy thing is I love reading and daydreaming at the décor in Architectural Digest and Martha Stewart Living.  I dream of empty space and trendy wallpapers, rooms filled with fragrant amaryllis and orchids in vases.  I love apothecary jars with old labels neatly filled with cotton balls or a Diptyque candle burning elegantly on a side stand with a gorgeous oversized coffee table book.  Oh, to have a magnificent antique iron bed neatly made with crisp Ralph Lauren sheets, and delicately folded at my pillow freshly pressed Princesse Tam Tam nightwear ready to put on after a balmy shower. I imagine my room clean and inviting—just as I appear to the outside world.  

Every so often I’ll take a stand and gut my room with a bulldozer, (well, more like my hands and a large trash bag) make it very presentable and for a day or two and I’m no longer Stradlater.  But then, that dress slinks down my legs into a disheveled heap on the floor and the catalyst begins.  

My only hope is that when I roll into my 30’s or make the big bucks that I can have a walk-in wardrobe like Posh Beckham (that girl has it MADE).  Hopefully I’ll grow up and morph into what I look like on the outside and make it happen with my personal space.  Until then, I think my English gent wishes he had probably met a proper English rose who didn’t have a mouth like a sailor’s (I tone down my language for you lovely Ether’s) or a bunk like one either. 

Dedicatedly yours,

—One of 365