Lost Journal

Humor Column
by Tim Mollen
September 13, 2009

The Labor Day Housework Marathon

Journal Entry:  September 7, 2009 (age 40)

This afternoon, I wore a huge, frozen smile as I walked over to my wife, Amanda, and showed her the bottom of the wastebasket I had just washed out.  “Yes, Tim,” she nodded, “that’s very good!”  Like many men, I need this kind of validation after completing the simplest of household tasks.  Amanda will clean an entire room without mentioning it, but I feel the need to show her each handful of dust bunnies that I pull from behind the refrigerator.  “Look at this one, honey!  Good thing I got it out of there, huh?”

The two of us spent the entire Labor Day weekend cleaning every inch of our house.  Because I’m a neat freak, but not a clean freak, this is not a common activity.  A neat freak obsesses over any piece of clutter on a counter, desk, or table, while ignoring the half inch of dust on the bookshelves and the Rorschach stains on the kitchen floor.  But when I do clean, I clean like a maniac.  I clean the tops of the blades on ceiling fans, and the grills of radiator covers.  I dust the top of every picture and door frame.  I scrub the flat surfaces of the sashes between windows and storm windows.  I power-wash the downspouts.  I gleam the cube (Rubik’s).

Amanda is a cleaning generalist.  She likes to do housework in small, frequent bursts of activity.  This ensures that our bathroom and kitchen are usually in decent shape.  I believe in a more “hose out the living room on leap year” approach.  This ensures that small ecosystems in our closets face unnatural disaster only once in a dingy blue moon.  (“Run, my microbial fellows, the pale giant has a Swiffer!)

Having a cat makes housework more difficult.  Having three cats, as we do, makes it somewhat futile.  It will only take a week or so before our clothes begin to pick up pet hair every time we sit in, lie down on, or glance at a piece of furniture.  To get even with our little dander-throwers, we vacuum a bit longer and more violently than is necessary.  Cats have an inordinate fear of vacuum cleaners, as though they share a collective memory of the first upholstery crevice attachment being gifted to the ancient Egyptians by the dog-headed Anubis, god of death and crumb removal.

Speaking of things that drunken archeologists think about, a thorough housecleaning can unearth long-forgotten totems from the distant past.  An earring.  Grandpa’s recipe for tripe margaritas.  A ticket stub from a Color Me Badd concert.  These are hypothetical, of course.  I’ve never worn an earring, and I’m not sure which would be worse – a Color Me Badd concert or a tripe margarita.  Ah, college.

Now that we’re finished cleaning, I look forward to wallowing in my own filth.  But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to be proactive.  I’m going to put open boxes of baking soda in every room.  I figure that’ll buy us a year or two.  And I’ve written to the research and development people at Glade to suggest a few new scents:  “Foyer That’s Been Dusted Within the Last Four Months,” “Basement That’s Damp, but Draped with Bounce Sheets,” “Couch that Cats are Allergic to,” and my favorite, “Cage-free Humans.”

© 2009 Tim Mollen

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