I am a slob. Not the sickening kind of slob who has dirty fingernails and drives a car littered with trash. I am the nicest and best kind of slob. The kind of slob who follows the rules of good grooming and whose life-space has enough order not to be uninhabitable. But I am, nonetheless, a slob. Here is proof.

I rarely put items back where they belong after I finish using them. This bad habit accounts for the frustrating hours I spend looking for something I had in my hand two minutes ago but can’t find right now. In particular, this is true of my phone, my keys, and the TV remote control.

After deciding which shoes I want to wear, I sometimes can find only one of them. Who besides a slob can say that?

I eat popcorn sitting in my recliner and have made peace with the fact that unpopped kernels are hiding beneath the cushion. Papers I know I want to look at later are never where I think I left them. In fact, the more important a paper is, the more likely it is to be lost.

My glove box is full of CD’s and CD cases, but not CD’s inside CD cases.

I am a selective organizer. My return address labels are organized so I can retrieve a seasonally-appropriate one without pause. (I refuse to put a Thanksgiving-themed label on a birthday card I mail in April.) I can put my hands on a Sharpie, a postage stamp, or a needle threader in an instant. Ask me where my vacuum cleaner is, though, and I’ll have to ponder the question.

I leave drawers and doors open, to my husband’s consternation. I fail to finish one task before embarking on another one. This explains my half-made bed and the bottle of Windex sitting on my kitchen window sill because I still need to clean the top half of the window.

I forget to put caps back on toothpaste tubes and lids back on paint cans. When I put away an electrical appliance, I don’t rewind the cord neatly but shove it inside the cabinet and slam the door before the cord can escape.

On the brighter side, my house doesn’t stink and I make it a habit to clean up spills quickly and thoroughly. My toilets are scrubbed regularly and my sheets are changed weekly. No vermin live in my house.

If you drop in for a visit though, expect to see jackets draped over chairs and kids’ jigsaw puzzle pieces on the floor. My kitchen won’t be immaculate. Recipe books may be lying about with utility bills stuck between pages for bookmarks, which means I will spend time looking for those bills later when they are due to be paid.

I prefer slobs over neatniks when it comes to friends. I don’t have to explain anything to my slob friends. They already understand. Neatniks wouldn’t understand if I explained all day.

Extreme orderliness makes me nervous, so I have learned to live with imperfection. My friends, who are also the nicest kind of slobs, have too. They prove it by hanging around with me.