I am well-adjusted.

Every two weeks, my mother has a pair of cleaning people come in to scour the house. I endorse this, because for a house of three people with no children or dogs and an appropriately fastidious cat, the house gets a little, well, gross. I don't know how: I exist almost entirely within the confines of my bedroom; my father is only home and awake for a small handful of hours; and I'm reasonably confident that my mother is not running around the house dumping applesauce on the loveseat and shoveling dirt from the garden on the living room floor. But it happens. Well, not the applesauce. And the cleaning people -- is there a term for cleaning people that doesn't sound sort of condescending and vaguely derogatory? Because if so I don't know it. But so the cleaning people go buck-nutty; they're here for like two hours, washing and scrubbing and scouring until at least bits of the house look like a normal house and the smells always reminds me of coming home from school on Friday afternoons after our old cleaning lady had been there all day and it's awesome.

But thanks to whatever combination of bizarre neuroses of which my brain is composed, I am seized by a paralytic, inexplicable, and absolute discomfiture while they're here. Like it's vitally important that I hide in my room and avoid all social interaction, and I have no idea why. They're a nice pair of women, friendsish with my mother -- I think it's a mother/daughter pair who opened a cleaning business to fund college education -- this complex has nothing to do with them. But when I walk out to the kitchen while the floor is being mopped, I'm instantly filled with this cocktail of feeling intrusive, lazy, guilty, and uppish because I can't think of the right word, as well as suddenly convinced that I am somehow tracking dogshit all over house even though I am barefoot, have not been barefoot outside, and also don't have a dog.

So I hide. They don't bother with my bedroom, not because of any sense of privacy but because really what's the point. But I also have to kind of quietly and unobtrusively shut my door in case it's audible and they realize I'm shutting myself in, because obviously that's what people pay attention to when they're doing their jobs and trying to get on with their day. Obviously. Like I've had to pee for like two hours, and the bathroom is right next to my room, and I still haven't because I heard the sounds of scrubbing like a fucking hour ago and what if I open the door and I have to embark on nominal social interaction with someone who is scrubbing the toilet and clearly secretly ruminating on what a disgusting and slightly creepy person must be from the state of the bathroom and the glimpses of my landfill of a bedroom and the whole hiding-in-it thing. My brain and my bladder are locked in an epic battle of physiology versus neuroticism and I'm 100% sure both lost awhile ago.

Seriously, brain. I know you've had a lot on your... self, lately. I know you're worried about your/my job, and health, and the dead cockroach that will someday need to be dealt with, and what the fuck are you doing with your life oh my god. Do you really have need to build up routine housecleaning into a biweekly mental crisis of zombie apocalypse levels? At least you don't yet have me crouched behind the door with a baseball bat listening for the telltale sounds of Windex, but come on.