Apparently, even if I am only gone for a matter of days, my roommates wreak organizational havoc, remarkably efficiently, in my absence. Dishes pile in the sink, garbage cans fill to overflowing, important incoming mail becomes buried under several-month old issues of The Onion, The New York Times and The New Yorker.

Certainly, even the second law of thermodynamics predicts such change – over time, the universe inevitably progresses towards chaos. And yet, sitting this close to the seemingly inexhaustible energy supply of the sun, our little planet is mathematically destined to head in the opposite direction, towards an increasingly ordered state (see Morowitz, 1968). Perhaps, then, it is my recent time in sunny LA that inspired me to clean our apartment this evening in my roommates’ absence. For a few brief moments, at least, there is a semblance of civilization, everything is in its right place.