Smells like teen spirit…

Ok, so they’re close to 10 years past “the teens”, but with some men you would never know it. I can not begin to count the amount of times I’ve gone down into our basement and said “it smells like boy down here” while the BF and his buddies sit around playing video games and drinking beer. How do they do this? How can some men turn a perfectly clean, odorless room, into a messy stinking teenage boy seeming room, in the span of a couple hours? Especially while they’re sitting still, not really working up any kind of sweat.

Anyone who has a teenage boy or has grown up with a teenage boy, knows this smell. I had the good fortune of growing up with two, and although they showered regularly, and were relatively tidy (with the help of their Mommy) their rooms always had a “boy smell”. It’s not an unbearable, awful smell by any means, it’s just distinctly male. And what’s funny about the “boy smell” is that the boy’s themselves never smell that way, its just the room that they’re inhabiting.

I constantly tease the BF that he’s “five years old”. But realistically he’s more like 17. He still has the incredible knack of boyishly smellin’ up a room while just sitting around with a bunch of his buddy’s, and has established a very different definition of “clean” from myself, which I’m sure, is the same as it has been since he was a teenager.

My definition of “cleaning up” would include:

Putting all of the dishes in the dishwasher
Throwing out all of the garbage
Putting all of the cans/bottles into the recycling bin
Finding a place for all of the papers that have inevitably pilled up
Clearing off the computer desk
And generally tidying up
*Note: Dusting and Vacuuming aren’t part of “cleaning up” because they happen on the weekends.

The BF’s definition of “cleaning up” would include:

Piling all of the dishes in one area on the coffee table
Stacking the papers together in one pile
And putting all of the recycling in one area (but not dumping out the contents)

Now this isn’t to discredit the help he gives me when I’m cleaning, because he definitely pitches in and helps me out. This is just what he thinks is appropriately clean if I’m not there and have asked him to clean up. Generally I’ve asked him to do it while I’m not there because people are coming over, and when I inevitably say “this isn’t clean, people are coming over” he responds with “whatever, they don’t care.” – Again, 17.

Gotta Love him though, even if we define clean in two TOTALLY different ways, because he’s got that adorable devilish grin that gets him away with everything (and he knows it!).