Laundry Day

I spent part of last night cleaning up my room. After a couple of weeks of lazily taking care of laundry it begins to form piles on my floor. Organized piles, strategically placed, but piles on my floor. There’s the spot for my white t-shirts, polo shirts, jeans, socks, unmentionables…you get the idea. You’d think after 2 weeks of walking around all my clothes, eventually I’d want to do something about getting things back in order. Of course you know what happens when you assume things.

Now stay with me here, eager-reader. I think I can loosely compare Diabetes to my laundry. Proper clothing care requires a bit of focus to make sure you sort your clothes correctly before you wash them. You have to measure out detergent and fabric softener. You have to calculate how much time the current load of laundry needs to spend in the dryer. And even though a wash cycle is ~15 minutes and a dryer cycle is at least 45 minutes, you still try to time the end of each wash cycle with a finished dryer cycle so each machine is in use for the exact amount of time necessary, but no more. Mental math ftw.

If you slack on doing your laundry on a regular basis then you pay for it down the road. Instead of dealing with a normal load of laundry on a Sunday (or whenever) you are suddenly overwhelmed by what you have to manage. Suddenly laundry takes the priority for the entire day, cutting into whatever other plans you might have had. If you don’t take the time to organize your clothes after, suddenly your floor becomes a game of minesweeper as you try to navigate from your bed to the bathroom without disrupting the clothing piles strategically placed. If you become lethargic and forget to pay attention to the task at hand, eventually your wardrobe devolves into chaos and it takes a mini-intervention to sort things out, to hang up the nicer shirts and make sure everything is sorted according to the color scheme of the rainbow. Or maybe that last part is just me. Roy G. Biv anyone?

My point is, if you don’t pay attention to your laundry, you can become overwhelmed and it takes a little extra effort to get things under control again.

Lord Diabetus can behave like this too. As long as you maintain your routines, for the most part control is the norm. If you start to slack, it takes a greater than average effort to regain that order that is required to keep balance in the force. If you start to slack, who knows what will start to pile up as you ignore the problems right in front of you. If you start to slack, you risk navigating metaphorical minefields.

Or maybe I just need to do a better job of keeping my room clean.