Friday, January 11, 2008

On being yuppie scum

Funny that Rachel posted this, because I've been planning since Tuesday night to write about how we have a housekeeper now.

!!!

Explanation: We live in filth. We have rarely swept or swiffered or whatever the floors since we moved in in July. Since we have a tiny kitchen it looks like a mess no matter what. We have basically never fully cleaned our house, and finally Dan had a friend who had a cleaning lady come in once a month to clean his house and it was like $60 and totally worth it. So we called her, Sandra is her name, and she came and cleaned our whole house on Tuesday. I came home and almost had a heart attack, it was so clean. She not only cleaned the whole common area, but she cleaned our rooms, which included making the bed and stacking up all my piles of stuff in neat piles instead of in messy piles. It was amazing. My first thought was, I want to come home to this every day. My second thought was, Oh my God, I can't believe I just thought that. I went through a series of other thoughts including: "Wow, it's like, if we are only going to get this done once a month I guess I should do it for myself all the other days of the month," and "Well, at least this way we have a check to prevent us from descending into total disorder the rest of the month and "I need to make this my goal." Then somewhere in there I realized, imagine this woman, who barely speaks English and cleans rooms for a living, coming into my room and cleaned it all up and put my PILES OF EXPENSIVE, USELESS CRAP AWAY. Seriously, I am a fucking yuppie. I have more than I need of everything. The number of my magazine subscriptions alone should condemn me to some kind of yuppie hell. I had this sudden moment of self-loathing combined with a (yuppie) instinct to organize everything so as to make my (comparatively) obscene abundance/wealth/excess/yuppieness less visible to the naked eye. I promptly resolved to go through and donate clothing to charity, recycle stacks of magazines (although I am still reluctant to trash my New Yorkers), box up any items I don't regularly use and put them in the closet, and keep my room as clean as it was when I walked in the door on Tuesday. I then researched file organizers at thecontainerstore.com. Kill me now.

(Side note: Rachel? You have someone do your own laundry?)

7 comments:

Rachel said...

in new york city everyone does, ems. no one has time, and the chinese laundry is about $10 for 15 pounds, which is insane. i don't know one person who doesn't use this sort of service.

also, yuppie is my middle name.

rach

Rachel said...

ps why this shit is calling me raincloud is a mystery that requires immediate investigation.

D said...

Rachel. you have now doomed yourself. You are, from this day forward to be known as "Raincloud"
hahaha

Ellen said...

I still do my own laundry. But I am a bum and have a lot of bum time on my hands.

Anonymous said...

Wish you could recycle your NYers my way, but even if you could, "d" would flip out to see them enter this household from which virtually nothing exits. Well, some things (like email) exit "virtually" but virtually nothing exits actually. Also--speaking of virtue--I swiffer once, sometimes twice a week, AND do my own and others' laundry, drive myself to work, do my own shopping, etc. No wonder I rarely accomplish anything of any consequence! Maybe the key to success is delegating menial tasks whenever possible. In Vietnam, someone picked up my laundry and washed it by hand for about 30 cents per piece.

Anonymous said...

"I'm just a little black raincloud/ hovering under a honeytree/ I'm just a little black raincloud/ pay no attention to me..."

Anonymous said...

ok dude good post, what is this recycling you all seem to be talking about? I have a ton of magazines that I no longer need, GQs, Playboys, those goddamn quarterly Stanford magazines, and a bunch of others, too, and I don't know what to do with them. My building doesn't recycle, that I know of, so...? Are there, like, recycling centers? I can take these things to? Who will then do something with them? Or are there hobos that pick up magazines and exchange them for 5 cents each, a la soda cans?
-o