Women who hate cleaning, a new breed

I tricked myself into going shopping with YY today, as usual at the expense of my sanity. Normally I just flat out refuse...

YY: I need new shoes
Mark: like you need a punch in the face
YY: you need a new jacket
Mark: I just renewed the lease on the old one
YY: you're ugly. Let's cover you up with some clothes
Mark (pokes YY in the eyes): there ya go, all better now!

...but this time I decided to strike a bargain. Maybe it's cause I abandoned all my students in China. That in combination with the well documented fact that teaching instincts tend to flare up every once in a while like a bad case of herpes. Or is it the other way around? Either way, in the spirit of the completely unbalanced deals my parents made with me when I was young, we made a pact: I would go shopping with her for an hour if she read Prelude to Foundation (in Chinese). That'll teach her! I can't wait to see her suffer as she reads that awesome book...


Does bejesus ("you scared the bejesus out of me when you changed your underwear without me asking") have anything to do with Jesus? Cause saying "you scared the Jesus out of me!" just doesn't sound right at all. Scaring the Jesus out of someone...now that's something I need to experience. On both sides of the scared Jesus.


I think my female flatmate might be even lazier than Yuan Yuan, who in turn is even lazier than me when it comes to cleaning, something I would have thought impossible a few years back. But the universe just keeps expanding. There's a double sink in our kitchen, essentially two sinks side by side sharing a wall. My flatmate has had a pot with caked porridge soaking in water there for the last month. The other day I remarked to myself that due to evaporation and drinking (I was thirsty!), soon the water level in the pot would get low enough for the porridge to start rotting again (it already started once, before my flatmate mustered up the energy to pour some water in it). But then I looked again today and it was full almost to the top again! What a beautiful combination of action and procrastination on her part.

The Mercurial Cleaning Lady

The good thing about living with Yuan Yuan is if I ask her to put something somewhere, I don't need to worry about forgetting where I told her to put it; I can always find it later on the floor. Having first struggled against but then embraced this reality, I amuse myself with variations on the subject, at her expense if I can manage it:

"Can you put this in the trash can? Sorry, I mean next to the trash can."
"Where do you want this on the floor?"
"Take your shoes off when you walk around on our dinner table!"
"Oh my God! Is that a piece of empty floor I see peeking out? Quick! Cover it with this used tissue!"
"Where's my cellphone? I can't find it on the floor and I know I told you to put it on my desk."
"In case you're wondering later what your bra smells like, it's my left foot."

And then this morning I woke up without the feeling of dread someone with a healthy instinct of self-preservation would have produced as surely as a teenager produces erections. My instinct of self-preservation had taken private lessons with Bob Dole without me knowing and continued to sleep, limp and carefree, as I somnombulated through the waking hours. And then I tried to find the half empty bag of milk I put on the table yesterday to make some coffee and to my astonishment it wasn't on the floor. And neither was anything else. Yuan Yuan had cleaned the room without so much as asking me more than 600 times whether I'd like to help her. All I ask is a little consistency...

The Unquenchable Thirst For Idiocy

I was vacuuming downstairs today, a rare treat bestowed upon me by my loving mother, and I was cleaning out stuff from under the couch to avoid having to perform mouth to mouth on the vacuum cleaner. Couches are magical creatures, kind of like Asian people. There's some as of yet undiscovered law of physics along the lines of: "looking at a blanket strewn across a couch, it's impossible to tell whether or not there's an Asian person sleeping under it." I learned this one by experience - sitting down on innocent-looking couches only to receive a dragon kick to the head.

Anyway, couches also have a magical quality - the amount of space underneath a couch is greater than it appears, usually by a factor of 12. You can probably fit an entire apartment's worth of stuff under most couches. This is why when people want to clear up some space in their apartment, they go out and buy a couch or three.

So I was cleaning out the stuff from under the couch, and it was all Michelle's things that she hasn't used since she was in Mom's uterus. Being a natural born leader, I ordered Michelle to take it all down to the basement. Being a smart little Jewish girl, she negotiated me down to half of the items.

As I set up my vacuuming gear, I watched Michelle follow my orders. Trying to save time and effort in the very humanly unintuitive way, she was building a veritable tower of "STUFF" in her arms, balancing it like she was at a Cirque du Soleil audition. There was absolutely no way she could carry it all down in one trip, but this didn't phase her in the least.

Now, I'm an expert at this method of "saving time and effort." I've written books or at least this one blog entry about it. I sacrificed my first MP3 player to this technique back in 2002. And I'm proud/ashamed to say that I have learned absolutely nothing in terms of not repeating my mistakes. I am incurably optimistic. In her place, I would have been doing the exact same thing except perhaps with less grace. So naturally (I never miss an opportunity to be a hypocrite) I tried my best to make her feel like a complete idiot and unleashed torrents of derision as her leaning tower became a falling tower at every third step. With my encouragement and her innate talent for mulishness, the one-minute task stretched easily to ten.

I was thinking about why we're both such imbeciles in this respect, and I think the main problem here is the "but now I'll never know" factor, as in "but now I'll never know if I could have done it in one trip without smashing anything/everything into a million pieces." When you try and fail and it takes you ten minutes, you know for sure that you would have done it faster had you taken several trips. But when you do it in several trips, when you're done you're still in the dark. You don't know what would have been the best way. So really, it's the thirst for knowledge that's driving this idiocy, not laziness.

Phew, one more charge of laziness skirted.