The third state of clothing does not exist. It only serves to increase your stress, and causes tension at home.

What’s the “third state”? I’m glad you asked. We all know clothes can have these two states:

1. Clean – in the closet or waiting to get there
2. Dirty – in the laundry hamper, waiting to get there, or in some stage of laundry.

But there is also a third, evil state. That is the “Semi-Clean” article of clothing. It has been worn once, but isn’t really dirty or smelly. Yet, for some (I claim – COMPLETELY ILLOGICAL) reason, we feel it’s not good enough to live in the closet with the fully clean clothes. Somehow, it will affect them badly. Maybe it will offer some delinquent behavior and will be a bad influence on the pure and perfect clothes. I really don’t know what people imagine.

But I’d like to ask this: If the semi-clean clothes are clean enough to touch your *body*, your own *skin*, what do you expect will happen when they touch your other clothes?

Will the pure and perfect clothes gain a slight scent of deodorant? That will happen anyway one second after you put them on.

Therefore, I call bullshit. There is not such thing as a semi-clean article of clothing. Either it is clean enough to go back in the closet, or in goes in the laundry hamper.

NO MORE PILES.

Try this and let me know how it went. You can also send small gifts… 😉

What does help, by the way, is hanging your clothes in the sun, but you’re not doing that, right? You’re hanging them on the floor, or at most on your treadmill…

Just get rid of these stupid piles.

I know you might feel like mind is warping, because this goes against some ingrained sense of what is “clean”. It has to do with our perceptions of “clean” as “healthy”, which was very true before the invention of anti-biotics, and less so today. To free yourself from this, think hard. Be logical. What’s really unclean about those airing piles? Your laundered clothes are not sterile in any way, certainly if you use a cold or medium wash cycle. Clean and semi-clean are the same.

FREEDOM!

I will give you this, though. Sometimes clothes are actually stinky, but you don’t have time to wash them… For that, I located this brilliant list of tips. Some of these are used by Broadway performers who sweat in their outfits but don’t have time to get them cleaned. Now that’s some serious credibility….