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June 11, 2013 · 18:55

If I Only Had A…Maid

♪ I would wile away the hours
Nibbling bonbons and buying flowers
(A significant upgrade)
I’d be chill, I’d be happy
I’d be dressin’ really snappy
If I only had a maid… ♫

I am so fakking sick of housework these days. I love the warm weather, but I’ll say this for the dead of winter: it’s a lot cleaner.

In Spring, nature decides to come indoors to play. Kids walk through the house in pool-wet and lawn-dirty feet and leave smeary footprints from the back door to the front. There are damp towels…everywhere. Dust and other schmeg blows in to settle in corners, and it becomes impossible to have the glass-topped coffee table look remotely clear. Flies get trapped between the sliding doors and die there, their corpses needing extrication (but not before driving me half-mad with their desperate and hopeless pre-mortem buzzing).

The dogs begin to shed more (which is really saying somethin’), leaving blond, brown and black hair all over the leather chairs and couches, where it sticks until I wipe it off because static electricity.

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck

With additional hours of light comes extended hours I am forced to look at my house As It Is, as opposed to October through April, when it looks ‘romantic’ by 4:30 p.m. because I turn the lights down low and can no longer see the dust.

There is definitely more laundry this time of year. Aforementioned towels, plus bathing suits, shorts and jeans, t-shirts galore because no kid of mine is ever going to get through an entire Jumbo Freezie without slopping the melted bit all down their fronts. Before I had kids, I would look down my nose at parent friends of mine who left overflowing baskets of clean laundry in the living room. “How lazy!” I would think to myself, “How hard can it be to put away?” and “When I am a parent, my family will always have a wellspring of pristine clothes to choose from!” Well, a note to those as yet-childless, judgemental bitches: it is ridiculously hard to keep it up when you’re doing it all the fucking time for a houseful of people who (yes, I’m about to say something über-motherish) HAVE NEVER UNDERSTOOD HOW THE CLEAN CLOTHES GET INTO THEIR ROOMS.

This is not a GIF. This is footage. From my house.

Phew. That was nice. It felt good to get it out. Really, really good.

A natural consequence to perpetual circuit cleaning is that while the other three are well put-out, I myself never get out of the clothes I clean in. I have a closetful of lovely cotton sundresses that have yet to see the light of day this season. But you see, even IF I had somewhere to wear them, even IF I took a shower, even IF I shaved my legs, I’d still have to iron them (the clothes, not the legs) beforehand, I mean, they’ve spent the past almost-year being shoved aside for cooler-weather clothes and are as wrinkly as Donatella Versace’s tuchus (and I wouldn’t be caught wearing that out in public). And that’s just more work. So.

If I had a maid, I would have her (yes, I assume it’s going to be a her, ditch Women’s Studies comments for now) do all sorts of things outside the norm. Windows? Don’t care, leave ’em. Countertops? Nah, I do those myself several times a day. Water the plants? You’re not taking away something I actually like doing. Run the dishwasher? Uh, nope, not paying you to press buttons. Some of the jobs that have occurred to me in the last 24 hours:

Hangers: Go through my entire closet and make sure none of them are overlapping. Ain’t nobody got time for that.
Paperwork: Once a month, gather random papers from wherever you may find them in the house and shred them. This includes bills. I will never notice.
Bath products: Once a month, go under the sinks of all washrooms and toss half of what you find there (exception: TP). I will never notice.
Fridge: Once a month, pull out the crispers and clean whatever nastiness you find behind/under there. Most of it you’ll have to use your fingernail to scrape off. I never want to deal with that shite again.
Rooms: For God’s sake, capture and kill the dust rhinos under the bed. My vacuum won’t do it, by the way, technically speaking, the sucker-part angles too much when you get the wand-part that low to the ground. So you’ll likely have to lie on your stomach on the floor and get some Swiffer-y something-or-other to manage. Or spray yourself with Pledge and git under there, yourself, and roll about, I don’t care.
Stickers: This is a kind of I Spy exercise. My children randomly place stickers around the house (including but not limited to: Superheroes, My Little Pony, dollar-store miscellany, Christmas, Easter, Hallowe’en and Valentine’s Day) with no visible pattern. Grab yourself a bottle of Goo Gone and make ’em disappear. I’ll deal with the tears afterward.

That’s all I got for now, though I’ll be adding as I come up with other stuff.

What would YOU have your maid do? (Those able to answer “Well, I usually have her…” need not apply.)

And for those wondering what I really think, this is the kind of maid I’d want, and I’d never have her do any of the grody things listed above, because I would love her far too much:

Sniff! I love you, Aibileen!

Vociferation

vo·cif·er·ate tr. & intr.v.vo·cif·er·at·ed, vo·cif·er·at·ing, vo·cif·er·ates

To utter (something) or cry out loudly and vehemently, especially in protest.

~Here there be swearing~

Consider y’self warned. Arr.

It’s rant day, apparently. Not a full moon, for those lunar-minded people, I checked already. But it’s goin’ around today. Good for me, though, ‘coz I got my next subject handed to me on a platter.

I was going to start right off affirming that I know everyone enjoys a good rant…but then I realized that I happen to really enjoy ranting, and ranting often; perhaps not all of y’all do. For me, it might have something to do with constantly being told to be quiet as a child (I was passionate and precocious, so sue me), maybe it’s my unique way of railing against injustices of all kinds, but when all is said and done, I think I love it because it’s cathartic. Having a good ol,’ down home, bile-extracting enema makes me feel better.

Now, there are many righteous things out there to get one’s dander up, but I’m not addressing socially conscious reasons here. I’m talking about the Things That Piss You Off Royally. The manias that, no matter how you try, you can’t let go until you tell someone, preferably uncensored and loudly. It doesn’t have to be the perpetrator of said Thing (though that does add a perverse and wonderful pleasure to it). I have plenty of friends who’ve lent their ears to my soap boxing, and I’m thankful for ’em.

I’ll get us started, shall I? Okay. I’m at Enter Retail Establishment Name here. I’m at the far end of a rack of clothing. Some chick will inevitably start looking on the same rack, two feet ahead of me, moving toward me in the opposite direction. What the fuck? Can your stegosaurus-sized intellect not see that in about ten seconds we’re going to meet in the middle? Gad! I’m a veritable magnet for these women.

Then there’s run-of-the-mill manners. You know, I drink and cuss and a whole bunch of stuff that mortifies my mother, but I know my social manners and mind my p’s and q’s. So just try to imagine my ire when I’m in line at the grocery store and someone pushes past without uttering a simple ‘pardon me.’ I like to steel my body sometimes (if it’s not a senior), so that when they attempt the shove-by, they hit a brick wall. Even better is when they stand in my peripheral vision, snorting and pawing the ground with impatience, thinking that I should somehow psychically pick up that they’re waiting to pass by. Well, screw it. You can’t utter two little words, then my periphery does not register you. And if they get irritable enough, and try the shove-by mentioned above, I will, in a clear and carrying voice to all within earshot, say, “If you’d said EXCUSE ME, I would have moved!” I have no issues with embarrassing the fatuous.

Feet shufflers. Gonna kill the feet shufflers. A buddy of mind specified flip-flop wearers, but then I’ve always been more of a generalist. A lot of the time it’s teenagers, oozing ennui as they are wont to do, but many times it’s just lazy-ass grown-ups who don’t care if they suck the life out of you and everyone else with their laggardly s-l-i-d-e CLOP, s-l-i-d-e CLOP. Pick up your fucking feet, epsilon!

Clerks that can’t make change without a calculator. Y’know, it’s basic math. Learn it. If the bill is $4.57, and I give you $10.07, you shouldn’t need three minutes and a piece of paper. Kill me.

I could also easily do away with at least fifty percent of the parents who deliver their offspring to my kids’ (Catholic) school each morning. These people live their lives as though there’s a secret and special page dedicated to them in the Biblical urtext that states “I-Shall-Park-Where-I-Please-Because-My-Issue-Has-Been-Chosen.” Which roughly translates to mean that, while I’m jockeying for a spot, these half-wits put it in park wherever they damn well please, making a total clusterfuck of the parking lot. Additionally, you have to practically sideswipe the other minivans in order to get out at the end of the day. I was gonna make a sign that stated, “Thou Shalt Let Other Drivers In,” but I’ve already caused some waves at the school and it’d just be taken down by the custodian, anyway. Gotta pick yer battles.

So. There’s a few of mine, and lo and behold, I feel lighter just having written it all out. Thanks for reading. Send me some of yours, too, eh? Just don’t ask me to give a lesson on their/there/they’re or it’s/its and so on. I’ll insult too many of my friends.

(Psst – there’s a link to The Oatmeal article “10 Words You Need To Stop Misspelling” here – send it to the offenders!)