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| Aroostook Republican photo/Natalie De La Garza Richard and Richie James keep their dorm room at the Loring Job Corps Center so spotless, it earned the distinction “Room of the Month.” |
By Natalie De La Garza
Staff Writer
The best way to make a room look its best?
Make sure you can see the floor.
This simple idea can cause difficulties for some — particular parents raising children with conflicting aesthetic perceptions and differing theories about the methodology of floor organization.
At the Loring Job Corps Center in Limestone, students are required to maintain a certain level of cleanliness; two rooms among the cleanest on center, however, are occupied by students who admit to having notoriously messy rooms growing up.
Like the 21-year-old twins Richard and Richie James currently from N.Y., but lived in Jamaica for most of their lives. They share a share a room on center that’s perfectly neat and tidy — but their room wasn’t always this spotless.
Richard explained that their mother always cleaned and now, when he sees a pile of papers or something that’s dirty, he cleans it up.
“But,” his brother interjected with half a smirk, “when we lived in Jamaica, our room was dirty.”
As kids who didn’t enjoy cleaning their room, their family implemented a reward-based method as incentive for keeping their room clean.
“In Jamaica, we never used to play games until we got an Xbox, and our Auntie used to tell us that if we cleaned our room and if our room stayed clean for one week, then we could play our Xbox,” Richie described.
Now at the Loring center, the students don’t need a video game incentive to stay organized and neat or even pass the daily room inspections.
“Our mother taught us that if you’re not in your own place, always keep the place clean — and that’s what we do,” Richard said … but the twins’ mother was still surprised to learn that her sons earned Room of the Month for their cleanliness and organization.
As expected in a dormitory situation, the rooms at the center are not expansive and keeping a messy room is a quick way to make a small dorm space look smaller; though messy rooms are an option, the option isn’t a viable one in the opinion of Dylan Angiolillo, an 18-year-old student from Calais.
Angiolillo expressed that in a small room, a mess takes up even more space.
His roommate, 19-year-old Matthew Faulkner from Orient, is on the same page when it comes to keeping their room neat and tidy — but Faulkner was forthcoming that “my bedroom at home is trashed.”
Faulkner has two very different styles of organization, but expressed that both are effective.
“I know where everything is, whether it’s at the dorms or back at my house where everything’s a mess,” he said.
Both Faulkner and Richie James prefer having a room that’s messy — but not dirty.
“As long as there isn’t trash everywhere, I’d prefer a messy room,” Faulkner said. “I usually find things better somewhere that’s messy.”
Angiolillo has always tended to be on the neater side of the organizational spectrum, and explained that it’s probably from the way his parent talked with him.
“They would walk into my room and ask ‘don’t you have friends coming over today?’ and I’d say ‘yeah,’ and they’d say ‘do you want them to see this nasty room?’ and then I’d clean it up,” he said.
Regardless of how they’ll choose to style their abodes once they graduate from Job Corps, their rooms currently reflect excellent organization and cleanliness — and Faulkner jokingly offered advice to avoid clutter.
“Get really good at stacking stuff in hidden places.”
