zombie maintenance

of all the things i confront on my to-do list on a daily basis, the ones which cause the most heartburn are the recurring maintenance items, those things which never permanently fall off the list but rather revive themselves over and over again like zombies, week after week, month after month.

i find myself staring with crimped shoulders and a furrowed brow at my calendar settings, struggling to decide on the ideal cadence with which to schedule certain undying tasks. does the floor need to be mopped once every two or rather three weeks? what about the windows, how long before all the smudges from George and Pippa’s pressed noses against the glass become too difficult to look past? then there are the activities which i don’t bother to schedule because i am reminded of them due to sheer proximity: the dishwasher has to be loaded and emptied daily if not every other day, and then there’s laundry. if it were possible to shave 6 months off my life in exchange for never having to fold laundry again, i think i might make the trade. ah and it’s not just house chores but corporal ones too; gynecologist check-ups and teeth cleanings loom over my conscience like a storm cloud when the yearly reminder appears on my phone.

i realize, of course, that these recurring tasks do not uniquely affect me - they are facts of life which virtually any adult around the world must learn to accept (which some do more gracefully than others, apparently). but i also recall that one of the early signs that something was not quite right about my father’s recovery from an aortic dissection was that he gave up on brushing his dentures after meals - something which he had painstakingly attended to during the first days after his open-heart surgery, at a moment when he was still surprised and thrilled to be alive. my mom says that he lost his will to live the moment he stopped caring about the state of his teeth.

and so i carry on with my zombie chores with half a sense of duty (i shouldn’t complain when everyone else in the world endures the same nuisances without so much as blogging about it!) and half terrified that the moment i give up on recurring maintenance, some god or spirit or benevolent dictator will interpret my laziness as a lack of will to live, and whisk me from this life as suddenly as my father disappeared from it.

Photo by Luis Villasmil on Unsplash