Another little posting on the minutiae of my daily life. Today: housekeeping.
Every day is housekeeping day.
My early-morning routines (with more than a dozen parts, taking at least half an hour) include washing out urinals, swabbing the bathroom floor (I have to use my feet), cleaning the toilet, and emptying the subsidiary wastebaskets into the master wastebasket in the kitchen.
[Digression. Yes, I’m a highly organized neatnik. Have been since childhood, which made me a very odd boy. (How like a fag, you say, and I say too. But that seems to be how I came off the shelf, so I ran with it.)
Eventually, when my parents’ lives had reached the point where my mother was in too much spinal pain to do any housework (sad stories here) and my father was casting about trying to find a new life for them, they started using my abilities and inclinations. I took over some of the cooking, and then they flat-out hired me, with a real salary (which I put in a bank account, because I’d need it for college), to do the housecleaning every Saturday. I learned to look at rooms with a housecleaner’s eyes — it’s a talent all its own — and have done so ever since. (This is a neutral fact, deserving neither credit nor ridicule. Just one way of being.)
I was then a teenager, still in high school. Gearing up on a raft of possible careers, though only two of these — teaching and writing, both calling for long apprenticeships — flowered. Yes, I came out of the starting gate with stunning talents, but then you practice and polish, maybe for Herb Simon’s famous thousand hours, more or less, but probably more. (Later, in college, I stumbled onto a career in linguistics that I loved passionately and, incidentally, made me sort of famous)]
Later housekeeping includes doing the laundry, ordering household goods before I run out, ordering prepared meals from restaurants, taking the recycling and the trash to the chutes for disposal, getting my meals together, and washing up afterwards.
And then putting my bedroom in order. Making the bed and arranging its parts to show off, either the soft blanket in my 12/13/17 posting “A decent woolly mammoth and a bit of shirtless cowboy” or (on cooler nights) the queer quilt in my 7/30/17 posting. Raising the blinds on the window next to the bed — let there be light!
Whoa. Why do I bother to do this? It’s a fair amount of effortful work, not easy for me, and there seems to be no point to it: the only visitors I get who might see my work are family and friends acting as caregivers, and they don’t give a hoot.
But it is exercise, using my muscles and calling for coordination and balance — all things I should be practicing to maintain my abilities. If I can do it — there are things I cannot do at all and others that I can do only at the cost of terrible pain — then I should. Not avoid, not get help for, do it myself.
I know, you could do it much faster and more smoothly than I can. But I need to do this work, so please stand aside. (I am actually good at asking people for help; if I’m in a pickle, I’ll tell you.)
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