JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Migraine illustration by Dave Cutler

I spent all of Sunday in bed with a migraine, and on Monday my head still felt like an egg in danger of cracking, but I managed to go to the bank then to lunch, to buy the week’s supply of cat food, and to record my Trippies voice-overs despite bizarre misunderstandings with two Uber drivers, neither of them could find Glorietta 1—the mall where the airconditioning is as feeble as the dying exhalations of a consumptive mouse—and one of whom attempted to drive to Legaspi Village by way of Alabang. Some of the confusion was due to curious instructions from Waze, which would not have been an issue if the drivers were familiar with the Makati business district, and which were probably due to the faint, faint, disappearing internet connection on their phones. When I got home I tried to take a nap to preempt another headache, but I felt like my apartment was closing in on me like the garbage chute in Star Wars: A New Hope. I was suffocating in stuff. I needed space, air, blankness.

So I got out of bed, assembled a large cardboard box and started tossing in things I would never use again and had forgotten I owned. The key to housecleaning is ruthlessness. I knew I’d accumulated an incredible amount of garbage over the years, but even I was surprised by how much stuff was choking the place. Into the box went half a dozen unused, very dusty corporate giveaway umbrellas, sneakers whose soles had disintegrated from disuse and humidity, and shoes that hosted exotic fungi cultures. Next to the box went two once-pretty picnic baskets full of empty boxes and cans I had intended for various craft projects that were never started. And newspapers, magazines, tape receipts faded with age, papers reeking of cat pee and clotted with fur and dustballs. In went tote bags I suppose I could’ve laundered and saved, but what for.

Among the junk I found and saved three doorstops—biographies of John Cheever and Georges Simenon, and the journals of Sylvia Plath, a vintage Remington typewriter, pens shaped like cats, diskettes! and cat toys that had been ignored by my feline overlords, but which Jacob the new cat happily kicked around the house. In two and a half hours I amassed two big boxes and several trash bags of stuff that had been clogging my space, and threw them away. Immediately I felt clean and free, and my head was clear. I even considered firing the cleaning lady, who, it turns out, only pushes the dirt around and redistributes it among the corners, but quickly came to my senses (She is an excellent cat-sitter).

This cleaning frenzy is wonderful. Usually it seizes me once a year, but next week I plan to be irritated by the sight of my closets.