Why I hate the second law of thermodynamics
Entropy. It drives me crazy sometimes.
In case you don't know, entropy is a term from physics, related to the second law of thermodynamics. It has numerous complicated definitions, but in simplified layman's terms, it refers to the idea that any system will, given enough time, tend toward disorder and disintegration. There's no such thing as perpetual motion; everything slows down, declines, decays.
Need an example? Just come over to my house.
On Friday, my house looked great. Eric was coming home after an exhausting week-long business trip, and I wanted him to walk in the door to a clean, welcoming, peaceful house. Mission accomplished. Floors vacuumed, beds made, cute little pumpkins lined up on the front porch. It was so clean that Eric, who doesn't generally comment one way or another on the state of the house (which is usually a good thing!) told me how great it looked.
By Saturday morning--less than 12 hours later--things were a mess again. Breakfast dishes all over the table, pans from last night's dinner soaking in the sink, shoes strewn all over the floor.
Sunday, I cleaned again, and again things looked nice...for awhile. Then we had an afternoon and evening full of Halloween fun, followed by a busy Monday morning of hustling kids off to school, and then a big beginning-of-the-month grocery shopping trip.
Now there's a pile of school worksheets on the table, alongside a stack of newspapers, a half-drunk cup of milk, and a towel that Lucy used to wipe up the yogurt she spilled. Buckets of Halloween candy are all over the bookshelves, and I'm finding little wrappers everywhere. There are bags full of groceries covering every surface of the kitchen, a stack of mail on my desk, and somehow the laundry hamper is overflowing again, even though I swear I just did the laundry.
Sitting next to me in the office is a purple plastic plastic tea tray that my daughter brought in here this morning. It contains, among other things, a rubber bouncy ball, a sparkly Hello Kitty shoe, and several tinker toys. Ten little items on that tray. And each and every one of them has a place. An order. A spot for it to go. And yet the daily rhythm of life is such that each and every one of those items is out of its place.
Tending toward disorder. Chaos.
It's entropy. And it defines my life.
4 comments:
My daughter is big on collections of strangely unrelated items. She's especially fond of taking a used gift bag and packing it full of toys and odd objects that don't seem to make their way out for a week or more.... UGH!!
me too!
I am regularly amazed at how quickly a tidy house can spiral into chaos.
I feel your pain! It feels worthless to clean up sometimes, but I know I will regret it if I let it get too bad. :)
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