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Yours portly is knee-deep in preparations for the annual Spooktacular, which kicks off tonight at 6 PM.  The Spooktacular has become a hotly anticipated event, and while I’ve failed at a number of enterprises lately, the Spooktacular is a marquee event that my students and their families enjoy.

As a longtime dilettante and fulltime slob, I’m not the best housekeeper.  My energies are expended on other endeavors, like this blog, my teaching, and my private lessons.  The last thing I want to do after a long day of mind-molding is clean the toilet or vacuum the carpet.

My parents’ and grandparents’ generations were neat freaks.  They’d scrub the baseboards with toothbrushes and risk their lives to second-story windows.  I scrub so poorly, my dentist regularly warns me about gingivitis.

But even I succumb to the overwhelming sense of shame that comes from having company over in an unkempt house, and as I want these people to keep giving me money to touch their kids—and as I hope to avoid my father’s dismayed disapproval at my dirty baseboards—the Spooktacular forces me to deep clean.

I’ve been doing a lot of it lately.

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