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My day started with my father insisting that it was Very Important we got the house tidied up. See, the cleaning lady quit a couple months ago. At least, we assume she quit. She had been coming in every other week, but then she started coming in irregularly, and then one day we realized that she hadn't come in for two months. My parents called, of course, but never got an answer. Eventually we gave up and admitted that she had apparently left the business and we'd have to do the tidying up, vacuuming, and reassuring the cats that the vacuum isn't going to get them, all on our own.
Mostly we forget, but now and then my father gets into a spasm of We Have To Clean Up All This Clutter. I think he gets it from a sense that my mother wants the house cleaned. Unfortunately what we mostly have is a lot of clutter: cleaning the house isn't a relatively simple thing like mopping up pools of things, it's a task of taking a huge pile of books, magazines, papers, uninteresting mail, and clipped coupons that we will never use off the living room table, sorting them into different components, and then putting them back on the living room table where they can be dispersed back into their natural piles.
I view this as a pretty silly thing to spend much effort on, and while I'll vacuum and try to put the junk into piles with as small a footprint as consistent with there being three cats in the house, my father insists on having everything picked up and put in a different place. The result is a lot of low-level argument, which inevitably results in about ninety minutes with our shouting at each other, in which he says fine, I should waste time on my computer and stop trying to help around the house (he is incapable of ever believing that anything I do on the computer might be work, or even useful to me), and I argue that I am trying to help but every single thing I do he finds fault with, down to -- I swear -- complaining that by not drying my hands off at the sink adequately I was getting drops of water all over the floor he had just mopped and that was drying. It made for a sullen evening.
Trivia: The Lunar Module Eagle's descent orbit insertion maneuver put the craft into an orbit of 58.5 nautical miles by 5.8 nautical miles height. Source: Apollo By The Numbers: A Statistical Reference, Richard W Orloff, NASA SP-4029.
Currently Reading: The Lawn: A History Of An American Obsession, Virginia Scott Jenkins. I'm pretty sure I heard of this from someone on my Friends list, as I know I had to seek out the library branch in which it was and find it even then. (The book's a decade old; I forgot that things like this used to be published in paperback.)
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(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-20 09:40 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-21 09:06 pm (UTC)I hadn't really thought about my parents' cleaning lady, mostly because I was in grad school or Singapore for most of her employment here, and when I was ensconced in the guest room I would usually sleep through her visits. But it was really very nice having the house tidied up without having to specifically work at it, particularly since most of it is just reducing the footprint of the piles of things.
I never had a maid or cleaning service while in Singapore, although they're relatively cheap and easy to hire; I just never felt like I needed one enough. In hindsight, it might have helped to have an independent person asking if I really needed quite all this clutter, or if I could reduce it to, you know, books/DVDs/desk trinkets/notes I'll use again. </p.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-20 09:41 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-21 09:07 pm (UTC)Oh, neat. Did you take the time to read it or just to notice the title?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-22 06:33 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-27 04:44 am (UTC)The titles and the opening-closing chapters seem like good summaries for the book. It really strongly suggests a thesis origin.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-20 04:44 pm (UTC)My mother used to like that kind too, when I still lived at home. I do think there is useful cleaning to be done in the world, but that kind isn't it, because the end result doesn't really help anything - unless you personally reorganized it for yourself. It's a one person job unless there are going to be meetings about "how best to organize something to all of us know where it is". (The other way that seems to go is "you should already know where that goes because you've lived here", and that did lead to arguments at home.)
I'll say that cleaning has its uses and I do it from time to time. The two kinds I'm more up for doing are real cleaning (things like mopping, vacuuming, or wiping things down), and long term moves, (like taking all those empty boxes in a closet and finally dumping them in the recycling bin where I'll never see them again - or taking a box of clothes to charity because I won't wear them anymore).
That second sort is the kind that helped with my room last month, when I nearly broke my neck trying to walk from one end of the room to the other because of all the junk in it. By the time I was done with the moves and fixes in there, I have actual carpet space again, a place for my air conditioner, and a relatively cleaned off desk I can use.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-21 09:09 pm (UTC)Cleaning has a great number of uses, mostly in clearing out space. The weekend before I'd cleaned out my room and even though all I threw out was one small bag of mostly plastic bags, I ended up with much more space in my room. And I had the chance to vacuum parts of the carpet which had gone embarrassingly untended for months.
Really what I should do is more regular little tidying of smaller sections, but that takes a daily commitment and I have so many daily compulsions already it's hard to make room for more.
Coupon clipping mania
Date: 2008-07-22 02:34 am (UTC)Now, among these tasks, coupons should be easy. They have at least one logical and highly applicable collation, that of the sequence with which you traverse your preferred grocery store; and they have unambiguous "no longer useful" dates printed right on them. And they're small enough that you can create a large number of piles on an ordinary-sized table.
The tricky bit comes when you discover the grocery store has more departments than the little plastic accordion-file wallet has pockets. (And the Pigeonhole Principle strikes again.)
Re: Coupon clipping mania
Date: 2008-07-27 04:46 am (UTC)You seem to be trying to analyze the problem of what to do with large piles of coupons logically, when in fact the point is to clip coupons and feel that we ought to use them even though we never do use them.
"That dust is an integral part of my filing system!"
Date: 2008-07-22 02:40 am (UTC)You're not up to your usual standards of hyperbole here. You need to make some allusions to entropy, and possibly that your particular piles are sufficiently large that statistical mechanics applies. Something like:
"Sorting and separation through archeological sieves, then stacking them in new piles to be ignored until processes of entropy, geological succession and cellulosic affinity can restore the natural sedimentary layers."
(Quote from some 1940s-ish "Sherlock Holmes" movie.)
Re: "That dust is an integral part of my filing system!"
Date: 2008-07-27 04:49 am (UTC)No, that's true; I wasn't even starting to think of this as a subject for hyperbole. It seemed like enough of a triumph to explain how things did play out.
I believe that I've seen that movie, although I'm not sure I can pin down which it was.