This morning, as I stood in front of my closet and pondered what to wear, I felt something fuzzy brush against my legs. Assuming that the cat had wandered over to help me select an outfit, I bent down to pet said cat, only to find myself stroking not my beloved feline but a colossal tumbleweed of lint and cat hair. I stared at the tumbleweed as it bounced along the desert floor of my apartment, accompanied by the familiar strains of Ennio Morricone – “waah waah waaaaah . . . ooo eee ooo eee ooo.” Hmmm. Evidently, I need to vacuum.

Let me make something clear – I don’t live in my own filth or anything, but I loathe housekeeping, primarily because of its basic futility. I clean stuff, but it doesn’t stay clean, and knowing that I’ll just have to clean it again pretty much snuffs any tiny flame of desire I might have to do it in the first place. The odious chore of vacuuming epitomizes this pointlessness. I despise vacuuming with every molecule of my being, and thus I put it off for weeks at a time, usually until a friend comes over and says, “Hey – when did you get this shag installed?” By this time, the accumulated lint and dirt and fur and bits of fluff from enthusiastically mauled cat toys and pieces of kitty litter that went “over the wall” have reached biblical plague proportions, and I have no choice but to untangle the Gordian knot of cord belonging to my arch nemesis, the Dirt Devil Can Vac, and – so to speak – suck it up. Never mind the fact that the configuration of the Can Vac forces me to assume an posture which, by the end of the vacuuming process, has rendered me remarkably similar in appearance to Igor in Young Frankenstein, complete with hump and bulging eye. Never mind the fact that, just when I get into a rhythm, I either yank the Can Vac a little too far and accidentally unplug it or the Can Vac tips over and shuts itself off or the bag gets full and the Can Vac overheats and I have to crack open the Can Vac and very patiently coax out the full bag so that it doesn’t burst out of the chamber and send a flume of powdery dust into my face as it has done so many times before. Never mind these things. Can someone please tell me why I have to run over a piece of lint 26 times with four different attachments to get it off the floor, but if I come within six inches of the front door the Vac will suck up a dime one of my neighbors dropped in front of the elevator? And of course, two days after I finish making those happy little vacuum tracks on the carpet, the apartment needs vacuuming again. Why, I ask you?

I also detest cleaning out the refrigerator. I know that I should just take inventory once a week and have done with it, but the older the food gets, the more reluctant I become to offend it in any way. I want to rinse out the jars; I want to recycle. Really, I do. But when I unscrew the top of a jar of Prego that I’ve had in the door of the fridge since the OJ trial and a little voice says, “Luke – I AM YOUR FATHER,” I just don’t want to deal with it. The way I see it, I can call the police and tell them that I have a hostage situation on the top shelf and that a jar of Hellman’s has demanded $50,000 in unmarked small bills and a getaway loaf, or I can just leave well enough alone. And I can’t cope with defrosting, either. Yes, the frost has shrunk the diameter of my freezer to that of a pencil. So? Should I stand in front of the freezer for half an hour with my hair dryer hooked up to a portable generator? Should I unplug the Frigidaire and return to find that the thaw has revealed a fine specimen of homo habilis and some of his tools? Or should I watch a Real World rerun instead? Not a tough choice.

Fortunately, the rest of the kitchen doesn’t present that much of a problem. I don’t clean my oven because I never use my oven, so if mourning doves want to build a nest in there, they can feel free. I do, however, have to clean my toaster oven occasionally. This entails upending it over the trash can and watching as the 17 pounds of crumbs that have accumulated in there slipstream around the trash can and sift down onto the floor on either side like a gentle snowfall. (The really fun part – finding the crumbs in the far reaches of the apartment because the cat walked through them and tracked them all over the place – comes later.) I clean the stove as seldom as possible. Once, the Biscuit cleaned my stove for me for no reason, without my asking, probably because looking at it made him feel sick, and I felt so grateful that I didn’t cook anything for a week so that I wouldn’t mess it up. When I do tackle the stove top, I put the “William Tell Overture” on the stereo really loudly and attack that bad boy with a Brillo pad in each hand, and if I haven’t finished by the end of the piece, too bad. I don’t mop the kitchen floor that often, either, because putting the food bowls out of harm’s way on the counter occasions a firestorm of indignant meowing that I can only drown out by . . . vacuuming. No, I don’t think so. Besides, everyone enjoys a good game of “kibble hockey” (flicking a piece of dry cat food behind the refrigerator with one’s big toe in order to avoid bending over, picking it up, and throwing it away) once in a while.

Cleaning the bathroom, on the other hand, really gives me a pain. I don’t mind cleaning the sink and the tub and the toilet – I used to work in a stable, so I’ve seen worse – but, as with the kitchen, mopping throws a wrench into the works. I want to get into all the nooks and crannies, but my bathroom is a nook, composed mainly of crannies, which makes doing a thorough job a near impossibility. I also dread changing the kitty litter, not because of the contents, but because after I have dumped out the old litter and scrubbed the box, I have to pour a fresh panful of litter, which creates a cloud of clay dust so thick that I expect the bulls of Pamplona to burst through my front door. By the time the dust settles, the time has come to change the litter again. Do you see a theme emerging here – aside, of course, from my monumental laziness?

See, I don’t hate the housework itself. Housework doesn’t really qualify as hard work, and if I did a little each day and prevented it from piling up, I could save myself a lot of aggravation. I hate the fact that the housework will never end. I wash the windows, and they get dirty again. I do the laundry, and then I do it again a week later, and then a week later I do it again. I wash the dishes, and I take the dishes out of the drying rack and use them, and I wash them again. The fact that any housekeeping task has “infinite drudgery” written all over it just makes me feel defeated. Of course, I always end up performing these tasks eventually, but I always wish that I could find a way to make the effects last longer. Think about it – how much of your life have you wasted inhaling Windex fumes when you could have read a book or gone on a picnic instead?

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