RSSFriday B.S.: A Little Lite Housekeeping
Jun 22
Humor Cleaning, Humor Comments Off
I poured half a jar of spaghetti sauce into the pan and then took the lid and attempted to screw it back on. Instead, the lid, which had a residual pool of sauce cupped inside, flew out of my hands in a trajectory straight for the floor. It landed with a abrupt snap, showering the tile and the under part of the cabinet in marinara. So I wet a paper towel, wiped up the sauce on the floor, put the lid back on carefully, stirred the spaghetti noodles, covered the sauce pan, put the jar in the fridge and that moment, I don’t know what possessed me to make my bed.
So picture it. The blankets are pushed aside, I’m pulling the sheet down over the mattress corners. Now, my bed is huge. It’s huge in awkward ways, long in the frame and the mattress is double height so that the surface is actually above my waist. It’s pushed into the corner of the room, with just enough space from the wall to ease a slender body through for the sole purpose of making the bed at the far end. But I’ve piled a lot of crap in that area because it’s out of sight so getting to that corner is a challenge. Unless you crawl over the bed, which I did, dropping off the bed into the corner, to tighten the sheet and then crawl back over again.
And that’s when I noticed that I had trailed a line of wet, sickly red spaghetti sauce across the sheets. For when the lid had spiraled out of my hand like a buzzsaw, I failed to notice that it had splashed on my feet, and then, in a spontaneous frenzy of housekeeping, I decided to make the bed and when I was crawling across the sheets in order to tighten the corners, I wiped my feet off.
One time, I had been watching my favorite episode of The Simpsons with Sherri Bobbins and she gets sucked into the engine of an airplane, that cracks me up every time. But just before the last song with Homer singing, “Around the house, I never lift a finger, as a father and husband, I’m subpar” I get it into my head to check all the lightbulbs in my apartment and replace the ones that are burned out. Now mind you, there are three bulbs burned out, one in each room, and one of them has been burned out since the time that I. Moved. Into. The. Apartment! There was absolutely no urgency whatsoever, and the fact is that changing the lightbulb in my experience is about as traumatizing as killing a spider. You know you should just do it, but there is something so bothersome and horrifying about even having to do it in the first place, that it takes a disproportionate mental effort to accomplish the task.
So picture it. I popped the casing off of the light fixture, unscrewed the light bulb, had gotten back on the chair with the new lightbulb in my hand, and now I’m dancing back and forth on the chair like a child that has to pee because I can hear the song from the television in the background. So just as Sherry Bobbins is singing, “Don’t think it’s sour grapes, but you’re all a bunch of apes!” I rush back into the living room to watch the last few seconds of the episode, and just manage to catch her floating by her umbrella into the jetstream of an plane engine and being reduced to dust. But not only does this moment fail for the first time ever to make me laugh, but I still have not changed a single lightbulb in my apartment.
These compulsions are how all my housekeeping chores get done. I’m clipping my nails in the bathroom and the next thing I know, I’m cleaning off my office desk. I’ll stop in the middle of washing dishes, wipe my hands, hear the weather report on TV and before I have even made it into the living room to see how much rain we are going to get, I’m spraying the toilet seat with cleaner and wiping it down. In the middle of writing this essay, I rushed to take out the trash that I had ignored for three days, continuing to push soiled paper towel, egg shells and discarded apple cores -- I can’t eat them even though there are starving children in Africa -- into the bag long after it was too full to hold anything else.
I’ve always known that a little light mania with me goes a long way to a clean and organized home.
