In magazines, the insides of people's houses always look as though an actual human being never walked, sat, ate, played, or slept in them. My house has never looked like that, and do you know why?

Because people LIVE in my house. We walk, sit, and sleep in it. We play in it. We cook in it. We eat all over it. And we leave our marks everywhere. If Good Housekeeping ever sent a crew to my house, they'd pass out cold, because I don't think I've ever seen a house in a magazine that people actually lived in on a daily basis.

Think about it. Magazine shots never show a house with a stack of cereal bowls in the sink, or dirty socks under all the coffee tables, or dirty words written in the dust on all the surfaces not covered by piles of old magazines, or open bottles of 79-cent shampoo lying uncapped and leaking on the floor of the shower. I look at those magazine pictures and think, has anyone ever really been comfortable in that house? Sure, all the colors match, and the cushions are all poofy, and there's no cat hair on anything, and the wall art is uniformly impersonal and represents nobody who actually lives in the house (where are the photographs of the family, for crying out loud?) but where is the personality of the people who sleep under that roof? An antique ten thousand dollar bed might be a thing of beauty, and the envy of the neighborhood, but to me, the thing of beauty would be the filthy little boy lying on top of the bedspread, wearing equally filthy SpongeBob pajamas and curled up next to the shedding cat.

You can always wash a child. You can always wash his pajamas. If absolutely necessary, you can even wash a cat.

And a fragile, antique, wobbly-legged ten-thousand-dollar bed that has to be coddled and never jumped on, or used as a pirate ship, isn't worth a dime to me.

I do remember, though, that if you sleep on TOP of the bedspread, you don't have to make your bed the next morning.

Not that I ever did anything like that as a child. Or even lately.