A week off seemed like such a long time a month ago, two weeks ago, last week, and now it’s Thursday, and I feel like I have no time left to do anything. That’s not true, of course—there are three days to go before the last holiday party of the holiday party season, and then there’s New Year’s Eve, and New Year’s Day, and then we are done, but it still feels like it is going so quickly, slip-sliding right between my fingers.

I had big plans for this break: I was going to go through all my bills, and organize my desk and the bookshelves next to the desk, where the overflow goes to languish. My closet...it’s a walk-in that you can’t really walk into, and something needs to be done about that. Nobody needs to keep notebooks from five or ten years ago, with mostly incomprehensible handwriting and arrows and scribbles and doodles. Most of them, I have no idea where they’re from, or what is in them.

If I don’t have any idea what it is, exactly, that I’m keeping, if I have no idea what I’m keeping, in fact, is there any reason to keep it? Besides the fact that what if the reason I’m keeping them suddenly rises up out of the dark, booga booga, exactly ten minutes after I’ve incinerated it all?

In my closet, too, is the detritus of my previous efforts at cleaning it—big old Tupperware boxes with neatly folded extra blankets, wrapping materials, papers, things that are properly systematized and ordered and filed away all neat-like, and then there are the leftover big boxes, in which I dumped everything else and called it a day, shoving it behind the clothes and pretending that stuffed in a box is the new organized. I have to do something about that, which isn’t stuffing it in another box.

And the dresser in there: a drawer is broken, socks have holes, there are pants I have not put on my butt since the Clinton administration, and it is begging to be straightened, cleaned out, burned down and then salted. It needs help, my closet.

There are cabinets in my kitchen that I haven’t opened since I’ve moved here, and I should probably open them and find out what the hell is in there; there’s my Craft Dresser, which is a dresser, as you might have guessed already, full of Craft Supplies, because I am crafty like that. I never meant to be the kind of person who had a Craft Dresser, and it’s a little embarrassing.

But that’s beside the point. If I am going to have one of those things, it ought to be a neat and nicely arranged kind of thing, where I can get in and get out swiftly, no one gets hurt, or catches me hunting for felt or embroidery needles or oil paint. But where there once were drawers grouped around a theme, with plastic boxes in which tools were organized alphabetically, now there is disarray. And that’s not very crafty of me at all. How will I make a proper cunningly snowman-shaped toilet paper cozy, if I cannot locate my size H hook?

Under my bed lives the devil. In my nightstand are nightmares. The bathroom cabinet? Bathroom chaos. Nobody lives like this! I live like this. I live like this because for a good chunk of the year, I look forward to the week I have off, that long and endless stretch of time in which, on the first day, I will fly through the house with a garbage bag and a will of steel and sweep all surfaces clean with one wide scoop of my arm, and everything that remains will be vital and beautiful, and all my furniture will turn spectacularly Danish modern, a single lily in a stainless steel vase will sit in the clean center of my sleek titanium coffee table, the cat will be laminated, the wind will blow my sheer white curtains as I stretch out on the white vinyl couch for the remainder of the week and admire how my apartment looks exactly like a spread in Metropolitan Home, only way sexier and smelling less like lemon polish. They all look like they smell like Pledge.

I live nothing like this, and somehow, I ended up in Utah for a week instead of in rubber gloves and an apron. I go home in a few days, and once there, I predict that I will—well, lie down a lot, and read from this prone position, in my bed which is not Danish modern but which is extremely comfortable. I will finish, possibly still in a prone position, all of the books I got for Christmas; I will briefly consider heading out of doors to go clothes shopping, but veto that idea in favor of Project Runway reruns and eating crackers in bed. I will take at least three baths, but possibly more. All of them will have bubbles. I will make phone calls with a comforter over my head, and send text messages from under a cat. My closet will creak, and creak, and creak, and then explode and kill us all, and it will have been the nicest week off ever.