I'm almost all moved out of the Dorchester apartment.  It was a nice space.  I'll definitely miss the light there.  The thing about the space is it's perfect for a couple, but it's just too small for two people otherwise.  That's not why I'm moving, I'm just stating the obvious, I guess.

The kitchen (pictured above) was the only room in the apartment that needed some serious work.  It has one of those sheet linoleum floors designed to conceal dirt, grime and spills. 

You see this sometimes in fast food restaurants—the table tops have some pattern obviously meant to obscure the filth of the place.  That's the interior design version of a whore bath.  It's like splashing on cologne to conceal bad BO.  It's the worst of both worlds.  You know the BO's there, and it's got to be bad if the measures to conceal it are so extreme.  No one is fooled.  And in the final analysis, the "cure" is probably worse than the "disease."

What you think when you see a kitchen floor like this is, "Jesus, they must really be filthy pigs if they're going to such measures to conceal their filth."  But you're also thinking, "how lazy do you have to be to buy a floor that looks filthy to conceal your filth, instead of installing one that you might have to mop once or twice a week but could at least tell when it's clean?"

I mean, you don't even have to mop nowadays—you can put on some Devo, get out the Swiffer—and just get your kitchen-cleaning freak on.  It's fun!  (And it's going to be an Olympic Sport by 2010, guaranteed.)

But there is that consciously self-deceiving strain in human nature that prefers the dirty-looking linoleum floor solution to things, isn't there?  It's like how some people (roughly half, it seems) have at least one clock in their homes that is set intentionally ten minutes fast.  The people who set them KNOW they are ten minutes fast.  They KNOW that when the clock says 6:30 a.m. it is in reality 6:20. 

Is this practice evidence of an exceptionally clever mind?  Those who do it seem more often than not to think so.  But there are questions here about how clever you really have to be to fool yourself.  And I suppose if you really are fooling yourself with the old Clock Trick, you could look at it either way.  Either you are extremely clever, or incredibly stupid.  Or I guess you might see it a third way: the part of you that is fooling yourself is much smarter than the part of you that is being fooled.  But then the question arises, how many of you are there?

I am a very simple person, really.  If something is dirty it should look dirty.  If it is clean, it should look clean.  I have absolutely no use for things that look dirty when they're clean.  Why even clean them then?  And that's exactly what happens, innit?  You feel defeated when even after a mad hot Swiffer session, you can't tell that the floor's clean.  Why bother?  And so the presumption of filth becomes a reality.