Suzy Says

My sloth and indolence really know no bounds. I never clean my own house. We have a cleaning lady come in every other week, an indulgence which is viewed with horror by my egalitarian siblings, who think it feudal of me to employ someone to do something I could do perfectly well myself. It’s true that I could do it myself, but I don’t want to, and anyway, Ana does a way better job. I pay her in cash, so she doesn’t have to pay taxes on it. She can come whenever suits her on the appointed day, and she can bring her kids if she likes, which she does. She has been cleaning our place for several years now, so I think it’s good for both of us. She has a job, we respect and appreciate her work, and we have the weekends to do things which are more fun than scrubbing toilets and mopping floors. I really don’t think it’s all that horrible of me.

However, my laziness seems to be advancing with the years. This week, I took all of John’s (still getting used to not calling him Rufus) shirts to the cleaner’s instead of washing and ironing them myself. He does iron his own shirts, but it takes him so long that it drives me crazy with impatience and frustration just watching him, and I’d rather do it myself, since I can do three or four in the time it takes him to do one. I happen to be very good at ironing shirts (isn’t that surprising?). I was taught by the best, my Victorian era English grandmother, and when I was at college, my Dad used to save up his shirts for me to iron when I came home, because I did them just like his mother used to. And my father, like his father, had the ability to make doing favors for him an absolute pleasure. I felt honored to iron his shirts. But now, I can’t be bothered, and the cleaner’s is so much cheaper and faster that I’ll probably never iron another shirt.

The only chore I can’t find a way to outsource is shopping, the boring food kind, not the fun kind. I love the fun kind of shopping, though both my friend Alice and my stepmother Margaret have shopped until I dropped, while they carried on valiantly doing their best to boost the economy.

We used to have Peapod, where you could order all your dreary groceries on line and choose when they would be delivered, right to your door (and actually, right into the kitchen). This was especially useful for heavy things like champagne, kitty litter, and gallons of spring water, all weekly necessities. But with the dot com bust, farewell to Peapod and WebVan and hello again to Safeway.

It’s especially difficult since I am car-less for the foreseeable future, which means not only having to fight my way through the mobs at the grocery store, waiting in interminable lines while fellow shoppers use food stamps to buy steak and charge or write checks for $5 worth of food, I also have to lug it home. None of this is enjoyable, and I try to avoid the unenjoyable wherever possible (one of main reasons that I haven’t had a Pap test in years). But I can’t see any way around this one. Maybe carrying all those heavy bags will tone up those mushy upper arms!