There is a cabinet in my bathroom. Well, there are a number of cabinets in my bathroom, but I want to talk about one in particular. So: Cabinet. Bathroom. It’s full of Useful Things, like spare toothbrushes and cotton swabs and cotton balls and a hairdryer and I don’t actually know what else. Stuff. It’s all piled in there precariously; opening the door is likely to cause a minor avalanche of deodorant bottles and unused packages of tooth whitening strips.

Every time I open that cabinet, I think: how hard would it really be to tidy this up? It’s all toiletries, mostly. They’re almost all in little rectangular boxes. But I never get around to it, because there’s always something else more important or more urgent to do at that moment. Like maybe applying the deodorant. (And look: right now I’m writing a blog post about not cleaning the cabinet instead of just, you know, cleaning the cabinet.)

It is possible that someday the minor avalanche will turn into a real avalanche—Dane will come home to find me either meticulously arranging the extra toothpastes, or unconscious underneath a mountain of said toothpastes—or perhaps one day my children will be grown and I’ll find that I have both time and energy to deal with things like unruly cabinets. Though I imagine I’ll never have difficulty finding non-cabinet-cleaning endeavors to fill my time. Even if those endeavors are mainly composed of sleep.

For today, I have decided that the messy bathroom cabinet will be a badge of honor: it proves that I have more important things to do than tidy cupboards that no one will ever see. (Can you hear the self-imposed pep talk behind that sentence?) When everything falls out and I have to clean it, it can be a badge of something else. Organization, maybe. A badge of organization. Or I guess it can just be organized. I probably have enough badges already.