Step One: Decide to clean your room. This decision must only be made after the piles of clothes (vaguely organized into "clean" and "unclean"), random envelopes that probably contain important financial aid information that you've forgotten, your unmade bed(s) and unchanged sheets, and other random knick-a-brick such as empty shoe boxes, toenail clippers, ripped Target bags, unmatched socks, and mostly-unpacked luggage have all been staring at you resentfully for several weeks, and are now so sick of being in the same place that they attempt to murder you in various ways--mostly involving tripping and/or smothering. Usually said conflict comes to a head--leading to the decision to suck it up and pick up your crap--after you have pulled a muscle in your thigh or lower shoulder whilst flailing to keep your balance.
Step Two: Pick a free day where "Clean My Room" is the only thing on your Inner-Brain Calendar (this entire process is made null and void if you use an actual calendar, such as an e-calendar or planner--THAT IS NOT HOW TO DO LIKE MEAGAN DOES). Set your alarm the night before for a reasonable 8:45 am to give yourself a fresh, healthy start on the day. When the morning of Cleaning Day dawns, and reasonable alarm wakes you with an appropriately obnoxious and peppy ringtone (ideally with a Latino-inspired beat), remind yourself that you have nothing else to do that day and therefor if you sleep in another half-an-hour you'll still have plenty of time to get cleaning done. Sleep until 11:30.
Step Three: Meander downstairs in you pajamas, because breakfast is the most important part of the day. After scouring the cabinets, decide that there's nothing good for breakfast and you weren't hungry anyway. Use your set-aside "breakfast time" to check email and Facebook. (Do not eat breakfast--THAT IS NOT HOW TO DO LIKE MEAGAN DOES)
Step Four: Get bored of both Facebook and waiting for the five-year-old kitchen computer to load pages, and make your way back upstairs to your room. Start Cleaning Day in the official way by choosing to view all clothes as "unclean" (because they've been lying on the floor long enough that if they were clean they're probably contaminated by dust and feet and the unclean clothes by now anyway) and tossing it all into your hamper. Allow for about fifteen minutes of gathering all clothing whilst in your pajamas before you come to the conclusion that though you had originally planned to wear pj's all day, you're starting to feel gross and kinda fat; spend twenty minutes picking out an outfit combining comfortability, cleanness, and not-feeling-fat-no-moreness in equal parts (this process may and probably will be lengthened by the fact that you've just thrown all your clean clothes into your hamper, and so need to dig them out). Brush your hair and teeth so you don't feel half-ready for the day anymore. Go back to cleaning.
Step Five: Organize everything in your room into an obscure filing system of piles that only you can decipher. Do as much as you possibly can to put things away sitting down--i.e., work on the trash pile and pairing socks first. Soon your small trashcan will be full and you'll realize the necessity of procuring a bag to empty it into. Haul yourself to your feet, and trundle downstairs to get one (trundle, as opposed to frolic or stroll: THAT IS NOT HOW TO DO LIKE MEAGAN DOES). Notice while you're downstairs that it's about lunchtime and you're hungry because you didn't get any breakfast. Make lunch [an hour long process altogether, which perhaps someday I will explain in another blog post].
Step Six: Go back upstairs. Remember that you forgot the trash bag. Go back downstairs and get it. After arriving back in your room and emptying the trashcan, gaze about yourself and realize that you have no idea how you organized each of the various-sized piles surrounding you. Spend approximately an hour feverishly pinballing between piles to pick up random objects and put them in their proper place (if at any point you think to yourself that the whole reason you made piles of like objects in the first place was to avoid this exact pinballing, shame on you: THAT IS NOT HOW TO DO LIKE MEAGAN DOES)--all the while accumulating a new pile simply brain-labeled "Where to?" This is where the really gritty, sweaty, pant-inducing bending and reaching happens. If this is your first time Cleaning Like Meagan, you may want to stretch before Step Six.
Step Seven: When you have arrived at the point where most of the work is done, and you have nothing but the "Where to?" pile and making your bed left--about a half hour's worth of work, at most--decide you need a break. Compose a blog post about an inane subject no one was wondering about. Double-check that you have no new emails, and that no one interesting is on chat at the moment.
Step Eight: Spend another frenzied fifteen-to-twenty minutes finding random homes for the "Where to?" accouterments and making your bed. At this point you have conquered Cleaning Day. Get a bottle of water for you parched throat, flop onto your bed, and sip it whilst panting and sweating and moving on to the most important:
Step Nine: Congratulate yourself that while it did take you from 12 noon until around 4 in the afternoon to clean your room, that's still significantly less time than it took your sister too when she lived in the room (THAT IS HOW TO DO LIKE MEAGAN DOES).
