electric boogaloo

Last night I made a promise to myself: Tomorrow, we clean.

When I woke up, I decided that the best way to get our horrifically messy apartment in shape would be to spend the day pretending to be my mother in law. It would be so easy! And I’d get Kevin and the kids to do the same thing and all of us will be a houseful of her, and we’ll stay focused and in character all day long.

So first I called my father in law and griped at him for whatever he happened to be doing because he was doing it wrong and should have checked with me first. Then we bought a bunch of noisy plastic toys, noted loudly that our kids have too many toys, made each other uncomfortable by discussing the human body’s overabundance of yeast, and discussed the many uses for apple cider vinegar and vitamins for about two hours. But! Right after that, we cleaned.

Kevin started in the kitchen. He rocks the kitchen. I sort of don’t get why we even have to have a stupid kitchen when there are nice people like seriously a five minute walk from our apartment who LOVE to cook food for us. It seems to make them genuinely happy when we show up, and I feel that in a way, whenever we choose to cook at home we are in fact robbing small business owners of not only much-needed monetary support, but the very joy that is the core of their existence. It’s pretty wrong to cook at home.

So while the boys pretended to be granny by (1) riding a noisy retro rocketship through the mess and (2) playing with Lovie the lovable lovebird, Kevin worked on the kitchen and I started at the front hallway and worked my way inward.

The problem is that there really is no line between kitchen and living room. He assumed I’d clean the living area, and I assumed — well, alright I’m not stupid and I knew that the part with the couch was probably safe to consider Not Kitchen, but by the time I got that far I was just sick of cleaning. How does she DO it? The more my mother in law cleans something, the more intense and determined she becomes to finish. I’ve seen her skip meals, set aside her own physical ailments, shove aside her beloved grandchildren, and push old people in front of buses in order to get a cleaning job 100% complete. But I can’t stay focused. I have a timer in my head; no matter how great cleaning is going and no matter how satisfying it is to see the floor again, every 15 minutes the timer goes off and my brain says Ding! Fuck this.

Then I grab the computer and click everything in my bookmarks toolbar for ten minutes, and find myself disappointed that nothing on the internet changed while I was cleaning.

The entire day went on like this, until 6:00 when the boys started melting down from the stress of riding their toy rocket around so much and being able to walk in their bedroom without tripping over spikey plastic dinosaurs. I started feeling frazzled and frustrated that they were making it so difficult to clean, what with their incessant need to be fed and nurtured. I was just about to stuff them both in the dryer and turn it on low heat, tumble dry when Kevin’s mental timer went off.

Ding! Let’s go to the dollar theater.

Kevin has the best ideas. It must be fun to be so smart all the time. So that’s what we did, we went to see Wall-E, and I found it totally and utterly charming, mostly because I sat next to Graham who asks the best questions during a film. What is that animal? How is Wall-e doing that? How is he doing THAT? What is that? How does Eva talk? Why is her head OFF? And so on. Oh and the part where Wall-E uses a fire extinguisher to scoot around in space, he whispered in awe: “When I grow up tomorrow and I am in space, I am going to use one of those. But I’ll use a toy one. Not a real one like that.”

(I’m translating from Dutch/Graham speak. What he actually said was winIgrowuhtomhhh anImihspeh I ah goeuhuhwahaohs. IwahyuhaTOY ONE. Nahareewahliyyat.)

So we came home, made a late dinner, read stories and put everyone to bed. The house isn’t clean, but it’s cleaner. It’s now to the point where most people would look around and go, Man. Tomorrow we should really clean this place up.