Is getting clean as fun as getting dirty?

My ex-wife has certain charming underminer tendencies. To wit: J.P. has had a series of rashes of late, along with a runny nose that hasn’t gotten better these past weeks.

The Horrible One With Whom I Once Lived interpreted these symptoms, not unreasonably, as signs of potential allergies.

Fair enough — every kid on the planet has allergies these days, so why should J.P. be any different?

This she follows up with a little e-mail about how dust sometimes causes allergies, and did I know that dust sometimes cause allergies, and didn’t dust cause allergies for me a few years back when we lived in L.A. and I was wasting her time trying to make it as a screenwriter, and didn’t dust actually cause my penis to shrink? Didn’t it?

Still not getting it?

Okay. My ex pokes her nose in my apartment from time to time, picking J.P. up, dropping him off — she even still walks my dog (don’t ask; it’s joint puppy custody).

The other day she sent me a message clearly implying that she didn’t think the apartment’s cleanliness met her standards. My bedside table, which admittedly hadn’t seen the good side of a rag in a while, was adorned with the following, fuck-you message, stenciled in dust:

Clean me.

Anyway, all this is a roundabout way to get to this little article on Babble about why “a messy house makes for a happy family.”

Here’s the author, Tracy Hahn-Burkett, on her housecleaning mores:

I rarely clean my house. Walk through my front door on any given day and you are almost certain to find dust collected on the coffee table and book shelves. You’ll spot books and magazines semi-stacked on floors and you might trip over those tiny, goody-bag toys kids gather like treasure. The windowsills between the inside glass panes and outer screens bear dirt deposited by seasonal storms and breezes, the wood floors do not gleam and there are blemishes pockmarking the bathroom mirrors — not to mention traces of toothpaste on the walls of the sink from kids who still haven’t learned to aim their spit in the center of the basin. In short, you will find dirt.

Or dust, I bet. She sounds hot.