My birthday is in one month and one day, which puts it on a Tuesday, so my birthday itself, eh — but the lead-up to my birthday, in which I haunt my Amazon wish list’s “purchased” section like a vengeful ghost? It’s the mooooooost wonderful tiiiiiime of the yeeeeeeear! Especially if some kind soul gets me the Roomba. Or a set of Roombas. Or a whole fleet of Roombas. A phalanx! A gaggle! A murder of Roombas! Roombae Roombarium!

Roomba me, people! I hate sweeping! HATE IT! And I have to do it forty-eight times A DAY, because 2 cats x 1 piece of kitty-litter clay between each cat toe x 3 visits to the litter per cat per day = a veritable drift of litter bits! And then the cats shed! And then the cats pick up pieces of kibble, carry them out into the living room, drop them, and forget about them and walk off and do it again! Crumbs! Lint! It! Never! Stops! I have two brooms, a vacuum, and Swiffers wet and dry, but do you think I’ll win this battle? Because I won’t! Even replacing the words of the Hallelujah Chorus with “I-I-I-I-I-I hate sweeping” and “stuu-uu-uupid kibble” doesn’t help! HATE! ROOMBA! NOW!

I don’t consider myself a particularly frail or easily disgusted person, but sweeping is hardly the only household chore that just sits on my to-do list day after day, undone, dreaded and avoided — what I really need is a Bathroomba, because, again, not all that squeamish, but certain aspects of cleaning the bathroom give me the gags just thinking about them. The back of the toilet: ack. Also: AAAAAACK. The toilet itself is fine. I mean, it’s a toilet, fill in the fecal-aerosol blanks. But the back of the toilet, the part with the hinges? I don’t know why, but something about the lint that gets back there, and always that one hair that won’t come off the sponge eeeee-yeeeech hate! Hate hate hate! Hate it! Hate cleaning back there! And how does it get…because I sit on the…because…haaaaate! Only thing I hate worse? Grout! Pulling hair out of the drain is not my favorite, and scrubbing the tile itself is not my favorite, but that beige-y mystery gunge in between the tiles, aaaaaaack ack ack ack ACK AND HATE AND THEN! MORE HATE! It’s…it’s…what is that stuff, anyway? Why is it so gross and brown? AND GROSS? Why does it come out of the grouted parts and cling to the tiles and refuse to rinse off? Why do scrubbing bubbles not actually get into every cranny for me instead of forcing me to clamber into the shower wearing only a pair of rubber gloves and do the icked-out It Is Gross And Brown Dance? False advertising! And hate! Profound, barfy hate!

And excuse me, soap dish, but why is it so hard to clean you when you hold a cleaning agent, namely the soap? If I could find one of those goddamn plastic doodads with the little prongs to hold you up in the first place, I wouldn’t have this problem, but I can’t find one anywhere, and nobody seems to know what I mean when I try to explain the doodad — you know, the doodad? With the prongs? That goes…in…the soap…dish? Hate? So I have to put the soap on the surface of the actual dish, which then gets all gunged up with soap, which, okay, it’s soap, but my hand soap is green so if I don’t de-gunge the soap dish it looks like Swamp Thing’s bathroom, so: de-gunging. Except it’s soap, so I try to wash it, and it just keeps sudsing and sudsing and sudsing and I rinse and rinse and rinse, sudsing, rinsing, sudsing, rinsing, the dish looks like Afro Ken, I dump more water on it, the sink is drenched, my shirt is drenched, and the sudsing, it will not stop! Hate! “Why don’t you just scrape the dry soap off with a” SHUT UP I TRIED THAT! HATE! PLASTIC DOODAD! BIRTHDAY! SOAPBA-AAA-AA-AAAAAAIIIEEEEEE!

Also loathed: cleaning the refrigerator. Defrosting the refrigerator is a right pain in the ass for reasons I probably don’t need to get into, but it’s also really disturbing, because…what is with that smell? Does it always smell like that, but it’s cold, so I don’t notice? Because it smells like a basement. A basement in Pickleville, in the state of New Onionshire, in the People’s Republic of Wilted Romaine Lettuce…onia. And seriously, every time: crumbs in the egg-holder part of the door. Why? How? I don’t understand it. It’s not like I perch over the refrigerator door to eat very crunchy burnt toast and talk with my mouth open, spraying random crumblets all over the place. I sit on the couch to do that. [rim shot] So what’s with the random carb detritus? And why does the olive jar always leak? I screw the top on straight; it doesn’t fall over on its side; do the olives, like, sneak out at night or something? And nothing says “futility” quite like seeing a cat taking a nap in a crisper drawer it took you fifteen minutes to wash because it doesn’t fit in the sink. (The drawer, not the cat. Although the cat doesn’t really fit in the sink either. See: fat.) “Thanks,” cat. In conclusion: hate. Any day with that Fridgeba, U.S. Patent Office. Aaaaaaaany day now.

Any day with that Coffeemakerba, too, because I really hate cleaning the coffeemaker a lot, because for days afterwards, no matter how many times I run plain hot water through afterwards, I taste phantom vinegar. Yes, I am lazy, yes, I am neurotic, yes, I am aware that polter-tastes are not a formal paranormal classification — none of this changes the fact that, as a society, we should have long ago perfected pneumatic-tube technology for consumer use generally, and specifically for the distance between the nearest Starbucks and my desk. Come on, capitalism! I demand; youuuuuu supply! Aaaaaaand…go! …Starba? No?

(…hate)

Okay, cleaning the coffeemaker isn’t actually that bad, comparatively. It’s a little disconcerting when the coffee tastes like sauerkraut, but compared to the unspeeeeeeeeeeakable eeeeevil (tm Aku) I like to call “disposal of Styrofoam,” it’s minor. Even filing, which I detest due to the cuticle-shredding that inevitably proceeds from stuffing yet more bills and receipts into overstuffed folders which the IRS prohibits me from weeding for seven full years, pales in comparison to the Styrofoam. Please, someone, anyone: Styrofoamba. I am begging you. Styrofoam is wicked to its core. I cannot abide the squeaking. I once left a new computer in the box for two days because I dreaded that unholy squeal, and in peanut form, it is even more godless and malevolent, floating hither and yon, resisting attempts to corral it into a dustpan, always. With. The. Squeaking. And you know who loves a Styrofoam peanut more than a cat? Nobody. Not even Mr. Styre O’Foam himself loves a Styrofoam peanut more than a cat, because to a cat, a Styrofoam peanut is not a nub of malice but a toy for pouncing on with claws (squeeeeeak) and gnawing on with teeth (squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeak) and rolling around on with great, fat abandon (SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAKETY SQUEAK SQUEAK).

HAAAAAAAAAAAATE!

It’s not just laziness, although I have a lazy streak a mile wi– well, it’s more like laziness has a streak of me, so never mind. The point: it’s not the laziness. It’s the hate. I have chores that I don’t mind doing — the dishes, the kitty litter, the laundry, organizing the closet. Maybe what I need isn’t a Roomba but to start an Amish-barn-raising-style chore club with a bunch of people who hate doing those things but don’t mind cleaning the bathroom, or who could deal with the Beelzefoam while I’m at the laundromat doing their towels.

Or maybe I should just get drunk first and then do the chores. “A bottle of red / a bottle of white / Swiffer eeeeeeeverythiiiiiiiing in siiiiiiiiiight…”

Okay, Swiffering under the influence it is, but only until someone gets me a Roomba. Someone awesome. SOMEONE LIKE YOU.

[Update 2/23/05: Just for kicks, I went over to my wish list just now, and someone, I know not who, has bought me the Roomba. Awww! Whoever you are, you are awesomeba. Thank youmba.]

February 21, 2005

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