Zatera Ul

Heh–Lileks comments on feminist complaints about patriarchalism in who does the cleaning:

I was a half-slob once and a mostly-slob before that. Now I do all the housework and child care and do not feel as though I am making some Brave Stand Against Predominant Sexual Paradigms. It’s not like I get boobs when I mop.

I spend about as much time cleaning and working as MFH does commuting and working. It’s very satisfying to beat back the entropy (disorder) a bit. The hands-on work balances my job’s highly abstract and theoretical work. I suspect that this cleaning stuff is much like everything else: each sex has its own Bell curve, but the Bell curves overlap. Women clean more overall, but some men clean more than some women. Around here, I’m in charge of Practicality, while MFH is in charge of Foofiness. So I do the cleaning.

I’ve been following FlyLady, a cleaning guru, since last fall; not everything, just what I find helpful for me and my household. She has inspired me to make up a weekly cleaning schedule, and to do some deep cleaning on a different room every week. One of the first ones was the bathroom–it made an amazing difference, and for once I actually looked forward to taking a bath, mostly because the floor was very clean. I’m more sensitive than I thought to how clean the floors are, so Wednesday (my vacuuming, sweeping, and mopping day) is now one of my favorite days of the week. I also have found her focus on decluttering helpful. I like checking to see what the day’s Mission (little cleaning job on a neglected area) is.