Priorities

One man's trash is another man's treasure.

It's interesting; if you enter "one man's trash is another man's treasure, but" into a search engine, you come up with all sorts of bizarre phrases. (My favorite was "...but this man's trash is his dinner"... huh?) I thought of that adage while pondering priorities. Many priorities are universal, like breathing, eating, sleeping, but after the essentials people can place their priorities across a wide spectrum.

I went to the hairdresser today. (Actually, I'm not sure if I should call her the hairdresser, the barber, the hair stylist, just the stylist, just the dresser...?) Either way, I went to get my hair cut, and in the midst of the small talk that inevitably accompanies such a endeavor, she asked me what my plans were for tonight. I lamented that my plans were pretty boring; I hoped to clean up my apartment some, as it's gotten pretty messy since my maid quit. Well, the stylist skipped right over being sympathetic towards my plight, and expressed shock that I--a single, childless male living alone--even had a housecleaner. Our priorities were definitely different.

There are very few tasks that I detest as much as cleaning. I find the effort inefficient, as once cleanliness has been achieved it seldom stays long. I was very spoiled growing up, in that I had a mother who stayed at home and made it a priority to keep a clean house, regardless of our willingness to help. I did my share of vacuuming and dish-washing, but I stayed away from everything else, especially bathrooms. If the dictionary ever chooses to include a picture next to the phrase "an exercise in futility," they should choose an image of a person bent over a bathtub, scrubbing away against intractable grime.

In college, I managed to further delay my exposure to this loathsome task, as I lived in the dorms all four years and our communal bathrooms were the janitor's domain. When I started off law school by getting my own apartment, however, I could not avoid it any longer. But I tried. I had a half bath that I kept clean for guests, but I refused to do anything but superficially clean my own bathroom. Except for the end of the semester; at the end of finals, with studying no longer an excuse, I'd get down on my hands and knees and scrub and scrape and scour until every inch of porcelain, tile, and stainless steel shone like ivory, polished granite, and silver.

But it was a gross way to live; I acknowledged that. And the work was much harder (or so I've heard) than if I had cleaned weekly. So when I moved to Minneapolis, I resolved to have a clean bathroom every week. I followed through on my resolution... I hired a cleaning lady. Nicci was an amazing cleaner (she still is, just not for me). Every Friday, I would come home to an ivory tower. As far as my priorities went, having someone else clean my house was pretty close to the top of the list - the task is so odious and takes so long, to have somebody else do it was essential, at any price.

But then Nicci found a real job, and left me all alone, staring at my bathtub.

A month later, I found that my cleaning abilities hadn't improved much since law school. In fact, since I have guests over more often (and never am finished with "finals") they were worse in some ways. Today, talking to the stylist and seeing her shock, I realized that a change needed to be made. I couldn't just sit around fondly remembering the good old days with Nicci. The conversation with my stylist made me realize what was at the root of my priorities: I like having a clean, tidy apartment. And since Nicci's not around any more, if I want that clean apartment, I need to just buckle down and take action. No matter how uncomfortable it may be, I need to start taking responsibility for the state of my dwelling.

My first step: calling my stylist's friend, who's looking to find a job as a cleaning lady.

Hunting

My parents didn't have many rules in our family that were spelled out as such. One of the few, however, was, "If you kill it, you eat it." It started when Grandpa Manny first took us fishing: I loved catching sunfish after sunfish, until the basket was completely full. I soon found out, however, that catching fish was supposed to have a purpose: food. If you caught fish, you ate fish. For some reason, I soon after lost all interest in the sport.

I then forgot about the rule until I got my first BB gun. The thrill of shooting at tin cans quickly wore off, leaving me to set my sights on more challenging targets. One day, a squirrel up in a tree seemed to be eyeing our house with hostile intent, and I was forced to shoot it out of self-defense. I wasn't the greatest shot, so it took quite a few attempts (don't worry, I kept my eyes peeled for a white flag, but he never backed down); frankly, I was surprised that I actually killed it. Then I remembered the rule. Or more accurately, Dad got home and responded to my tale of bravery by reminding me of the rule. Thankfully, I had already dropped the squirrel in a sack and hurled it who-knows-where into the woods. After having my memory jogged, I expressed to Dad both my desire to willingly obey him by eating squirrel stew, and my deep lament at being unable to do so, since I relocated the squirrel without first obtaining a forwarding address.

I originally wrote this post because, when I was home last weekend, I found out about my parents' new nighttime ritual. Due to the prolific rain Iowa has received this year, there's plenty of standing water and thousands of mosquitoes. These bloodthirsty hoardes have been infiltrating our house, and consequently Mom and Dad now embark on a nightly mosquito hunt in order to avoid looking like plague victims each morning. (In fact, now they are sleeping under mosquito netting - I half expect them to speak Hutu upon my return.)

This post was going to be a witty application of "if you kill it, you eat it" to my parents' present misfortune. However, I did face the problem that 10 mosquitoes a night were going to be pretty hard to make into any sort of edible arrangement. Then I read this article. A woman in Taiwan caught over three pounds of mosquitoes! That's definitely enough for mosquito meatballs, skeeter steaks, or any one of a number of pest-related delicacies. Just wait until she shows her parents...