What's a girl to do?

Despite my well-documented distaste for household chores, I seem to spend a good portion of my day puttering around my apartment doing those dastardly tasks. Most of it is routine upkeep-- stuff that is as much a part of my day as brushing my teeth. But the time I spend this stuff adds up. Soon enough it seems that these daily cleaning rituals seem to edge out those non-standard housekeeping duties-- stuff like polishing my 8 dozen pairs of shoes. Inevitably, those tasks end up on my to do list.

Ah, the to do list. The list which always seems to get longer before it gets shorter. It's a list I refer to on special occasions, usually when I'm procrastinating big time. And I know I'm not alone on this, everyone's list is infinite and unending. Right?

So, don't hate me for this ladies and gentlemen: I have finished my entire to do list.

I'll spare you a detailed account of the joys and wonders involved in painting the numbers back on my stove and oven dials, or repairing a broken lamp. But every errand has been run, every odd job is complete and every action item requiring follow up has been followed.

It took weeks to get through these things. True, none of the items on the list were particularly momentous. While I am glad I finally bothered to weed out the bad seeds in my sock drawer, I hardly believe it's contributed to any of my life goals.

As much as I'd to attribute my recent success of sloughing through ye ol' "To Do" to a cocktail of delicious caffeine and anti-depressants, I think the discerning mixologist would recognize this as boredom. And maybe a little bit of proactive procrastinating. Which is to say, without these things hanging over my head, I have no excuse when it comes to doing those things that will contribute to my goals (and will maybe bless me with health insurance).

Guess there's nothing left for me to do but go out and live life.

Lazy Lasagna

I have an odd relationship with the kitchen. My innate domestic torpor sort of expands from a general laze and malaise about keeping house (particularly as it relates to washing dishes and doing laundry) to a general ho hum here we go again at the stove. When I ask, "What am I going to make myself for dinner?" my ideas are usually nixed by the prospect of too many dishes to wash.

Baking is somewhat exempt. I like making cookies, but I will be the first to tell you that man does not live on cookies alone. Thus, the inconvenience of having to cook for oneself. I think this fallacy has something to do with the fact that I can reward myself with a freshly baked cookie after doing the dishes. I'm sure this incentive-based system will lead to type 2 diabetes, but it works for now.

Cooking also intersects with my decision making problems. I have no qualms with making a choice if it involves losing a limb or a life. But when it comes to decisions about everyday things, I couldn't care less. This means decision making about what I want to eat is very tedious.

I also resist things like structure and planning in the name of being ever spontaneous. This is fine, except when spontaneity gets expensive. Many people have a set of about 5 or 10 recipes they do over and over again. I'm not having any of that pie. I don't even like pie.

As a result of these bad habits, I do a lot of inventing in the kitchen. For example, tonight's dinner (marinating in the fridge) is the product of looking around at what I had and saying "molasses + bourbon + meat tenderizing mallet = delicious?" People who have eaten my cooking and lived to tell the tale say that the food tastes good. I am wary of this. I'm sure they're just being nice. I am of the opinion that food does not taste very good when you've prepared it for yourself. In case these people are not being nice because it is the thing to do in polite company, I am very glad that they've never asked for a recipe-- I typically don't have one.

Even though I don't like my own cooking, I will admit: products of my own invention are usually safer when I pull a "pffft. I know how to make that." I end up with crab cakes or sole amandine with lemon-caper sauce that might not taste like the original based-off recipe, but gets me fed nonetheless.

A couple of nights ago, I decided to cook some lasagna this way. Every time I complain about having to cook, some old gray-haired lady tells me to suck it up and put a lasagna in the freezer. I have never been a huge lasagna fan, even when I was a tiny Crowlet and ate nothing but noodles, cheese and the occasional spoonful of spaghetti sauce. My disdain for lasagna baffled Mama Crow. Back in the days of my picky eating, it seemed self-explanatory. I liked all of these things, but not when they were touching!

Lasagna sans recipe turned out to taste okay. It could stand to be saucier, but this can be solved with a jar of marinara. I took a gamble with how long it takes to bake this stuff, and it seems to have paid off. Everything tastes about how it should taste. Still, I think I'm not overly fond of lasagna. I had but a small piece yesterday evening. Ever since then, I can tell you where this brick has wedged itself in my digestive tract. This is even more foreboding because of the bigger brick of pasta in the freezer.

How to get things done: Get Sick.

I'm not going to try to pull the wool over your eyes here. I started writing this post two days ago when I felt semi-tolerably awful. I said to myself at the time, "Hmm. This illness is both bothersome and painful, but I can hack it. Cough cough cough. Repeat and fade." Since that time I have felt just plain miserable, so some of what I had written here is pure bunk.

Yesterday I woke up and the sickness had moved into my nose. My capacity for thinking dwindles exponentially at the mere threat of sinus pressure. The actual event can render me absolutely useless. To make matters worse, all the fluid that had been happily gurgling around in my bronchioles was flowing out of my nose at a rate that made it impossible to replace my fluids. I tried to nap, but it was too uncomfortable. I tried to watch a DVD, but I couldn't concentrate. I tried to take a steamy bath, but I got too pruney and then I got a bad case of the chills.

At one point, my Dad called me up to ask me a question about taxes.

"Hulloh?" I croaked. Just barely.

"Yuck!" Said Dad, "You're sick. I don't want to talk to you now."

Now, luckily, I am fluent in Mike. It took many years, but I realize that this response is his way of saying "You are sick. Please, do not let me keep you from the recuperation process. Take care of yourself." Unfortunately the part of my brain that filters social interaction with non-familiars was also at work. I also thought, "Oh my God. He thinks I'm so contagious that he'll be able to catch this crap over the phone." Actually, he might have been thinking that, too. I had to get the phone-will-suck-my-brain-out-of-my-ear phobia from somewhere, and my sister's been swearing up and down that this isn't her fault.

So, yesterday I was too sick to make most of the following apply. To make matters worse, I ran through my entire arsenal of over the counter cold remedies by about dinner time. This meant that I drank hot toddies until sleep finally seemed like an option.

This morning I felt good enough to go to the Safeway to get some medicine and sundry groceries. As I was driving over there, I realized that my ears were plugged up and maneuvering a vehicle probably wasn't the best idea. As I walked around the store, I realized that by gosh, my ears are so clogged I can't even hear the easy listening. I go about my business and I end up in the cheese aisle. I look at the block of cheese, thinking about the ratio of the price of cheese to dollars in my wallet, whether or not I might qualify for government cheese, and cheese as a catalyst for phelgm. At this moment, the nice old lady that comes into Safeway at 8am to get her single stick of string cheese and a hundred bucks in twenties comes up behind me and started to talk to me about the recession. Let me tell you, I could not hear her approach at all, and it seriously made me question my capacity for bladder control.

Even though I couldn't hear anything, I made it home. And eventually I made it back to this blog entry. Without further ado...

I am sick. I'm not too surprised by this illness. Due to my innate domestic torpor, I accumulated a pile of dishes in the sink. Underneath the pile was a hospitable environment for some primordial ooze. I don't believe I am exaggerating too much when I claim that the goo had a pulse and, quite possibly, its own zip code.

Some people (Hi, Dad!) have a name for my ability to ignore the dishes: laziness. I call it a chronic disease frequently exacerbated by bouts of depression. Be that as it may, I can see how this current illness might have festered in the sink. I'm pretty sure germs like to hang out with primordial ooze and talk about important events in the microbial world. Perhaps the germs bore the ooze to death by gloating about their pathogenic qualities.

O, sickness. This means I swapped sitting around all day feeling miserable with sitting around all day feeling miserable. The difference is, now that I'm sick I can get things done. The dishes? All finished. The ooze? Ghostbustered. The pile of papers? Mostly conquered. The floor? Swept, mopped and vacuumed. The fridge? Cleaned out. The laundry? Halfway there.

These are things that I've been putting off for ages. My main excuse had been that I didn't feel good enough to get things done. Now, when I physically feel like a pile of hot, rotting garbage I've become a model housekeeper. I wash dishes after every meal, for chrissake! Who is this person.

I have a handful of theories as to why this might be:

1. The sickness has flipped on some sort of auto-pilot. In order to survive the disease, I must go through the motions of normal domestic upkeep.

2. You can only feel bad about one thing at a time: either the pithy state of your life or the burden of the sludge accumulating in your bronchioles.

3. Cleaning house is a lot more fun when you make cool rattling sounds with your lungs and your voice sounds like you're three cigarettes away from the tracheotomy.

4. One must make their outsides look better to make the insides feel better.

In other news, I'm making excellent use of my tea cozy.

"A Place for Everything and Everything in its Place"

I'm taking a brief (hopefully) break from sorting through The Pile of papers. It doesn't matter where I live, or how "on top of things" I may appear, this pile follows me everywhere. I accepted this long ago, and I usually choose to live with The Pile, stashing it away underneath my hula hoop in the old Murphy bed closet.

The problem is my relationship with The Pile has become cyclic and predictable. I can eyeball that stack and immediately be overwhelmed by the knowledge of how I will begrudgingly spend a Sunday afternoon in the somewhat distant future. I close the closet door with a sigh. I already know how this one will end: To Be Continued...

I think my problem stems from the fact that I am a neatnik resigned to the fact that I have an innate sense of domestic torpor. The mere idea of cooking, cleaning, laundering, et cetera leaves me mentally fatigued. It's intolerable. I'll live with the mess rather than the exhaustion.

At about the same time as The Pile becomes large enough to seem precarious, clutter seems to creep into my living space. One day I get bored enough to put on the kitchen timer for a 15 minute cleaning, just about the limit of my cleaning contribution. I might as well have taken a four-hour standardized test or have read Ulysses (unabridged) in one fell swoop. After my quarter hour of sacrifice, I have to reward myself with a $3 cup of coffee.

The next day I inevitably walk into my apartment after my morning constitutional or some sort of errand. Some internal switch is flipped at the recognition that my previous contribution has changed the shape of my mess. I look around, tense and frenzied, "How can I live in this squalor?!?" I put on my least practical pair of shoes for the task and I tackle the entire apartment. No couch cushion is left unturned. No slip of paper in The Pile goes unnoticed. There was an episode of The Jetsons in which Rosie the Robot short circuits. She goes berserk and maniacally cleans the Jetson family sky condo chanting, "A place for everything and everything in its place!" In this moment, I know exactly how she feels.

Afterwards, I am left with a shiny, clutter-free apartment, a massive headache, and the beginnings of a new version of The Pile. There's always about an inch of paperwork that can't be thrown away, stored, or attended to. I put it in the closet underneath the hula hoop. Sigh. To Be Continued...

At present, I'm about halfway finished sorting through the current incarnation of The Pile. Even though The Pile is full of relics deemed unimportant enough to deal with at a later date, it can be quite labor intensive. I frequently find myself re-reading something just so I can justify putting it in the recycle bin.

I get a lot of envelopes from my parents with nothing but newspaper clippings inside. No notes of salutation or any sort of explanation included. The contents vary, but often include Wall Street Journal Broadway reviews or tips for how I could save money or get a better job. I feel that these are pretty self-explanatory: they say, "We know how you love the theatre, so we are sending a review of The Putnam County Spelling Bee for the umpteenth time." or "Get a real job. You know, one with actual benefits and a salary that allows you to contribute to your IRA." Needless to say, a lot of these articles end up in my pile.

Articles that cannot be safely included in the self-explanatory category are decidedly more disconcerting. Sometimes I'll spend hours trying to decipher the implications of three column inches of text. Once in a while, the particularly disturbing blurbs merit a call to Mom and Dad. I've usually left the it in The Pile so long that they have no recollection of sending me the article in the first place.

I just found one such article from my dad in the middle of a collection of unopened envelopes filled with notices reading YOU HAVE BEEN PRE-SELECTED and 0.00% APR in a most atrocious typesets. I could tell it was special because it was folded in half in an envelope with Kimberly written across the front. Similarly, my name was written across the top margin as well.

My dad writes like a robot. Each pen stroke is mechanical, precise and exacting. In fact, all of my family has excellent penmanship, with the exception of myself (the sole left hander). The marginally evil Grandma Crow was originally left handed, but it was beaten out of her. Now her unnaturally right-handed penmanship is the apex of the family's graphology elite. Seeing such lovely script would ordinarily command attention. However, add a touch of the tad too familiar and a bunch of newspaper articles later, I can see how the envelope ended up in the pile.

This article is a 4"x5" snippet, and I'm going to guess that the source is the Wall Street Journal. The Journal's got a pretty recognizable editorial style once you've read a few editions, to it's credit, might I add. This clipping has a small photograph of two men drinking shots. Were they themselves cocktails, I'd say that they're made of one part Williamsburg hipster, two parts trust funded frat boy. In my opinion, it's a particularly potent blend of douchebaggery. I notice that one of them has a beer chaser, and I decide that this makes him less bad ass than he is attempting to appear. At least he didn't go for the ironic cowboy hat worn by his compadre.

The most disconcerting and attention nabbing thing about the article is the fact that Mike has meticulously underlined selections in red ink. This makes me imbue the scrap with particular importance. After all, teachers would always leave those ominous words SEE ME in red ink at the top of the page. Red ink says "Wrong!" or "You're in trouble" or "You're broke." All of these statements put me on alert.

In spite of the weighty importance of the red ink, I have no idea why this article was singled out for me. I've come up with this list of what this article might possibly imply:

1. Grow up already.
2. This is why you can't get a date.
3. Look at how you liberal types are ruining society.
4. Nice guys don't exist anymore.
5. No one will ever be good enough for you.
6. Your generation is full of lazy underachievers.
   
7. Same goes for the 20-something bachelorette.
8. Get a real job. You know, one with actual benefits and a salary that allows you to contribute to your IRA.
9. Be culturally important and singlehandedly save the male species.
10. Your generation gives me a headache. Even more so than your sister's generation.
11. Are you sure you're not a lesbian? Might be a more promising option.
    
12. Quit hanging out with fledgling alcoholics.
13. Get a real job. You like nice things and you can't depend on being a dual income household.
14. Feminism totally backfired, didn't it?
15. Don't trap men into marriage. They don't like it very much.
16. If I catch you with one of these assholes, you're going to hear about it.

I bet you're interested in the article, so I've included the text below. Instead of red underlines, I will put the highlighted text in in all caps. I realize this infers that I am shouting. But, so does red ink, right?

Society
'Young Single Male' Is Urged to Grow Up
City Journal- Winter

People shouldn't dignify the videogame-playing and hard partying of some 20-something males as a phase of self discovery, Kay S. Hymowitz says in the conservative City Journal. SHE SUGGESTS THE SO-CALLED YOUNG SINGLE MALE GROW UP BEFORE HE WRECKS SOCIETY.

Men are increasingly delaying marriage to their late 20s and beyond. As seen in such movies such as the "40-Year Old Virgin" or "Knocked Up," they fill their prolonged bachelorhood by watching gross-out videos on the Internet, playing video games and flitting from one half-serious girlfriend to another.

Unlike bachelors past, these Young Single males no longer bother posing as sophisticates. Instead, they indulge in scatological jokes and chugging contests. Partly this is a backlash against feminism, Ms. Hymowitz says. More fundamentally, pop culture has given the seal of approval to the long-running discomfort men have felt for the responsibilities of family life. Articles in PLAYBOY were describing MARRIAGE AS AN ENCUMBRANCE LONG BEFORE MODERN FEMINISM ARRIVED.

The downside to this attitude shows up in novels such as Nick Hornby's "About a Boy" and Benjamin Kunkel's "Indecision." In these stories, the protagonists' serial indulgence of easy pleasures leaves them isolated from others, with FEW ASPIRATIONS. For Ms. Hymowitz, who has written extensively and sometimes critically about HOW THE FAMILY HAS CHANGED OVER THE PAST 30 YEARS, YOUNG MEN ESPECIALLY "NEED A CULTURE THAT CAN HELP THEM DEFINE WORTHY ASPIRATIONS," Ms. Hymowitz says. "ADULTS DON'T EMERGE. THEY ARE MADE."

I'm confused.

Where's the recycle bin?