Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

cleaning

The Mopping Fool

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I am not what you would call an active “cleaner.”

I’m a tidier. I’m an organizer. But, it takes a lot to move me into cleaning mode.

In my head I always look this adorable while I am cleaning. I may or may not also always wear that hat.

I have a certain fear of activating that particular urge, possibly because I come from a line of hard-core OCD scrubbers.  Much as Bruce Banner turns from nerd to Hulk, when my inner-cleaner is invoked I go from laid back dude to my grandmother. I become intent on vacuuming the floor every time someone leaves the room to get a drink – vacuuming it until it is safe to eat mashed potatoes right off that rug.

E has learned to let that particular sleeping OCD monster lie on most occasions, because getting me involved in day-to-day cleaning is the nuclear option. The one time I have been entrusted with cleaning a bathroom the result resembled a demolition project.

The one area where E is willing to deploy the nuclear strike that is my genetic heritage of clean-freak-ness is mopping. I like a floor to be so well-mopped, so gleaming with elbow-greased shine, that you dare not mar the surface with your shadow after the mopping is done. I don’t trust other people to mop for me, because they don’t employ the five key phases of mopping required for a truly gleaming floor.

To say that I was invested in our mop purchase for the new house would be an understatement. “Invested” implies a degree of detached evaluation. No, our mop purchase was a matter of life or death – life with gleaming floors, or the relative half-life of dull ones.

At one point I was reduced to near tears in the middle of an aisle in Home Depot, wracked with indecision and guilt. Couldn’t we buy a sampling of four or five mops to do our own comparative test across multiple surfaces?

The Rubbermaid Wavebrake® Dual-Water Combo with Sideward Pressure Wringer. Wavebreak? For real? It's a fucking mop cart, not a jet ski.

A test should not have been required. What I wanted was a rag mop with a solid wooden handle, and a bucket to wring it with and in. Rubbermaid G780-04 Pva Roller Mop was the ultimate mop because of its heavy metal handle, thick sponge, and heavy-duty wringer. Then I discovered that tiny screws hold said sponge onto the mop, and they get pretty rusty – to the tune of an hour or two to change the head. That was the end of that particular love affair.) –>

Home Depot has a wide, pleasing selection of wooden handled mops. What they had zero of were wringing buckets. They had one massive $100+ dollar custodian cart that came with its own “Caution: Wet Floors” sign in dual languages. I am a serious mopper, so the concept intrigued me, but I didn’t think the cart cornered well enough to get around the island in our kitchen.

Is it just me, or could this easily double as some sort of implement of torture?

Apparently wringing buckets are a rare item, which puzzles me seeing as non-wringing mops are pretty damned common. How do they get dry? Some Amazon shopping yielded the Behrens 412W Galvanized Mop Wringer Pail, but with shipping it totaled almost $40. Seriously? For a mop bucket?

As a result, I committed the cardinal sin of a committed mopper – I bought a plastic handled mop with a built-in wringer. I figured it could last me through three or four moppings – long enough to find a permanent solution.

This is the Quickie Home-Pro Twist Mop with Spot Scrubber. It is the devil.

I was wrong. Super wrong. I popped the wringer out of its plastic threading on my first wring. I began to wring six or seven times to get it dry during phases two and four, which caused the mop head to age six or seven times as fast, which resulted in a busted mop head on its second outing.

$20 dollars for two moppings. I know MY mopping skills are worth $10 a go (hello – I have FIVE PHASES), but I don’t know if the mop quality was equally as worthy.

This all came to a head on Sunday night. I had avoided mopping our kitchen since the mop gave up the ghost, but I caused a bottle of ginger salad dressing to explode across our entire kitchen. Spot-cleaning was not an option – this required mopping.

I dealt with the frustration of my devil mop for all of five minutes. So do you know what I did? Scrubbed the damn floor on my hands and knees. And dried it that way too.

I know I’m my grandmother’s child when I comes to clean floors, but is scrubbing by hand seriously my best recourse with all of the cleaning products in a Home Depot and across the internet at my disposal?

Should I really be having in-store panic attacks and 1000-word blog posts both on the topic of mops?

Am I missing some incredibly simple explanation about how mops get wrung? Do people wring with their bare hands (eewwwww)?

More importantly, what simple home cleaning or repair task drives you similarly up a wall? Please tell me I’m not alone in my insanity.

Preoccupational Hazards

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Tonight was my one night off for the week, except I wanted to spend it on – do some blogging, maybe start my next Trio.

That wasn’t meant to be. I had some more pressing concerns to attend to, such as washing dishes and laundry. And, I’m not just talking about from a normal “chore” perspective. No. This was a no drinking glasses left and completely out of pants situation.

You might laugh at my situation. Ha!, you might think, he seems to be so together with his podcasts and his Groom Team, but it’s an illusion! You might continue to gloat, Aside from his yuppy job he’s living the slovenly, disorganized life of a lazy bachelor.

Yet, that’s just not the case – and not just because I’m living merrily in sin with Elise. I’m certainly spending time being clean, orderly, and tenacious outside of my yuppy occupation – it’s just that the time is invested in all of my yuppy pre-occupations.

At this point I have so many non-occupational jobs that it’s not unusual for a week to go by without me even finding the time to do a single load of laundry. Take this week, for example.

I spent half the weekend recording and mixing the four songs in the last two posts, and the other half working on an arrangement for Drexel’s all-female acappella group. Monday I spent a few hours cleaning up the back-end CK, and then I went to a concert of someone who is playing at my wedding. Tomorrow night I’ll be co-hosting an open mic with the other half of Arcati Crisis, and on Thursday I’m the artist liaison at our Lyndzapalooza Fall Mixer.

Did you catch all of that? Recording engineer, transcriptionist, network administrator, event planner, rock star, and A&R rep. That’s six hobbies that I’ve turned into part-time jobs. Hobs? Jobbies?

At least with the latter half of wedding, AC, and LP I knew from the start that I was getting into something that was both time-consuming and rewarding. However, the former three – CK, arranging, and DIY recording – all started out as innocent distractions from the rest of my life. I never meant for them to become staying up until 3am, working until I nod off in my chair sorts of engagements. It just turned out that way.

Is this insane or just slightly abnormal? Do you have jobs aside from what you do for a living and taking care of your home and family? If you do, did you choose to make them a priority, or did they sneakily transform into one over time?

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Yesterday was the day without motivation — having used it all up on Friday. I was recharging… incapable of doing anything with any amount of zeal. So, to follow it up, today was a day consisting of all of my energies focused into one thing that i absolutely know how to do right: clean. Yes, i just cleaned for seven straight hours. And, do you know what? It feels good.

It feels good because i spent the sum total of my emotional and mental energy on something entirely unlike cleaning on Friday, and was horrible at it. Or, alternately, i was terrific at it and it wasn’t well-received. Either way, i’m not entirely happy about the whole affair. By contrast, with cleaning you absolutely cannot fail. If you mop long enough, scrub hard enough, and fold precisely enough, everything will turn out absolutely perfect and no one can possibly argue with you. There is no arguing with something that is spotless; you can’t decide to like it a little while not being really thrilled by it. The sight and smell of something that is like Brand-New cannot be deflected or denied.

I did seven loads of laundry in industrial strength machines with spin cycles that lasted me through whole chapters of Infinite Jest. I mopped every piece of tile in our apartment, going back over the tough spots with All-Purpose cleaner and then clean water so that the floors wouldn’t be sticky. I refolded every piece of clothing that vaguely rotates into my daily wardrobe and reorganized my closet and bureau. I got down on my hands and knees with an industrial strength sponge and a can of Ajax and scrubbed the floor of my shower until all i could smell was the activated bleach and all my eyes were tearing up and i couldn’t even see if i had gotten the floor white yet through the haze of scrubbing bubbles.

It wound up pearly white. I had no idea.

Seven hours later my back hurts, my hands are dry and aching, my eyes are red-rimmed and sore, and i owe Lindsay a new sponge. And i did it all absolutely right, and no one can argue.

Meanwhile, i am inexplicably one of the only six hits for the term “boywhore.” When it comes to search placements one thing i’ve learned is to never ask questions…

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/12/7975856/

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Today was a day wholly without purpose until 11:57, which is not the time that i would suggest that you set when it comes to acquiring a purpose — not just in the sense that technically the day ends a scant three minutes later, but also because it clearly means you wasted a whole gaggle of useful hours doing absolutely nothing. Which, and i’m not going to split hairs about it, i did. All day. In fact, i almost decided not to wake up; at the time it seemed like a conscious decision that i could make and stick with. Just… don’t open my eyes. Turn over a couple more times. Wake up on Monday, check my email, and go to class.

Please excuse any incoherencies that emerge as this rambles on. It is an experiment.


The two things that occurred to me at 11:57 were really one thing with another bigger, fatter thing sitting on top of it. The primary thing was that i almost surely had a paper due within the next two days, and that i should figure out which of the four papers i have due this week it was. The hulking thing that was standing in the way of this was my room. Or, more specifically, the mess therein.


My room is/was a mess; i do not attempt to deny it. I am the only person that has to live here, and ostensibly the mess makes it impossible for me to bring anyone home with me from a party because i might lose her on the way to the bed. I don’t necessarily mind all the stuff i have scattered around, but at the same time i somewhat enjoy order (and an unobstructed view of freshly vacuumed green carpeting). Thus, cleaning commenced shortly before midnight.


With me, cleaning is a circular exercise… it’s never just one thing or one place i have to tidy up. Instead, one thing leads to the next and the next until picking up a penny turns into my unearthing my desktop from the mess of cds and bills that it was submerged in. So, it’s not as though i could just find the paper that would tell me the relevant facts about my papers so much as that i had to circle (like a starved vulture over a decaying hunk of carrion) my room until it turned up. And circle i did… and circled and circled.

(This is where i skip over the part about my learning that the Latin American Lit paper was due tomorrow, the Theory one on Tuesday, and the incredibly daunting one on International CopyRight and the Internet due on Thursday. I’m sure you can imagine how fun it was.)


Dr. Ibieta asked for a 750-1000 word paper, and i intended to deliver one. However, around 845 i found myself getting a wee bit weary … both of staring at my monitor and of being awake. Contrary to what you might expect, such weariness motivates me not to quickly reach a summation in my academic wanderings, but to instead blather in a more circuituous route until i finally run out of steam altogether and wind up ending in an unceremonious heap wherever i fall. That’s what happened. To further prolong my weary misery, i decided that i wasn’t just interesting in writing the paper, but also in the paper making some small amount of sense, so i endeavored to read it back to myself. Upon attempting such a feat i discovered that even with my reading glasses weighing in heavily on the bridge of my nose i was basically seeing the screen in triplicate, and that my only hope in untangling the web i had woven with words was in reading it aloud to see if it made a single lick of sense.

My next discovery was that my mouth had stopped working at some point during my typing-spree. I read and re-read my hulking paragraphs, but all that came out was a weary drone that increasingly lacking ennunc- and pronounc- iation. I tried to force my lips to comply with the onscreen syllables, and i was rewarded with a feeling akin to the hinges of my jaw weeping. The proceeded to weep through three consecutive readings of my paper, during which i combined several paragraphs and excised 200 spare words that i had accumulated along the way. The result is a paper of perfect size and shape with a somewhat tenuous grasp on its own narrative (which isn’t a very good thing, since its supposed to be a paper about narrative)…

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/11/7405813/

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Matt’s amp is buzzing. To get any kind of volume out of it you have to turn up the Gain knob, which distorts the signal a little and leaves you with this constant amplifier hum. It feels expectant, as thought some rock band’s big sound is going to come crashing out of the amp any second in a tidal wash of big guitars and growling bass, but really it’s just me sitting on the floor trying desperately to read sheet music from the Bass Cleff of a Tori Amos book.

The apartment is otherwise empty. I did a lot of wash yesterday, so the bedroom looks somewhat organized. In here is another story … everything scattered – papers, cds, jackets, shoes. It’s really the fault of this weekend; i didn’t spend much quality time with the apartment this weekend. Saturday night Drexel had their homecoming dance and i have this single glowing picture of me with a tie tied around my head as though i was some kind of savage, sweating like a horse and smiling madly. I love to dance, that’s all there is to it.

It took me fifteen years to learn how to do the mashed potato correctly. I’m not sure that the learning curve is so steep … i think instead i had to spend time learning all sorts of other little rhythmic pieces of the puzzle before i could put it all together. A decade and a half is a long time to have spent doing anything. I’ve been in school for fifteen years now… i’ve been out of my first house for fifteen years… i’ve had my Thundercats for fifteen years. it’s funny, i only have a decade on my closest cousin and he won’t ever know the same things i knew as a child. Thundercats, GI Joes, Madonna, George Michael, Casey Kasem’s countdown, Johnny Carson, Ronald Regan, the Gulf War … all of those things are vivid emotional and psychological building blocks of my life.

I’m the only one of my cousins that will remember my Grandmother. My nine-year-old cousin Dale wouldn’t have any memories of her active and laughing since he was five or younger, and all of my other cousins are only four. I’m the youngest person in the family to know her; we spent hours sitting at her kitchen table playing solitaire, lying on her living room floor watching Golden Girls every week, eating Golden Grahams before i got picked up by my carpool on the way to middle school. Last night i was on the phone to my mother and she reminded me how long my father’s mother had been in a managed care facility … time had shrunk it down to only a year, but she was out of her own home months before we left my home of sixteen years in SouthWest Philly (which she owned).

That was almost three years ago. It’s been a long time since i’ve sat and played solitaire with her, but to me it doesn’t really seem so expansive. She’d always get up and dance when she won… singing “Let the Good Times Roll” and dancing around the kitchen. I eventually learned to jitterbug so i could join her, but by then it was too late.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/01/2182260/