Thursday, July 15, 2004

A Procrastination Post



Who is going to be remembered eternally, the sculptor who creates the idea for a statue or the stonecutter who actually cuts it out? We remember the famour writers but not those poor sods who washed their underwear and served them breakfast. Sure, there is general, vague and insincere praise for all the masses who do the maintenance and support tasks that allow a few happy people to do their own stuff, but they are not remembered or truly thought of as Important People. I always think of this when I read diatribes against Tolstoy's wife who finally rebelled against her role. Supposedly if you're married to a saint-like writer anything he inflicts on you should be suffered in silence.

The reason for these thoughts is that the Snakepit Inc. desperately needs vacuuming, and I don't want to do it, as I am a goddess and an important blogger, too. But the appeals to fairness and democracy drown my voice out, so it's my turn to vacuum. The dogs did it last week and the snakes swept the floors. Vacuuming is one of those truly thankless tasks; nobody ever notices that you have just vacuumed, they only notice if you have not, and the minute you finish vacuuming the accumulation of dust and scales and doghair continues as if nothing happened. Really, it would make a lot more sense not to vacuum.

Instead, we could build a new floor over the old one every ten years or so. If the rooms were built tall to begin with one could still live in the same house for quite a long time without needing to crawl.
Why has nobody invented a house that doesn't need vacuum cleaning? I suspect that the answer is in what I said above: someone else does the inventors' vacuuming and that's why they don't know how to invent anything really useful for us masses.

This is one of those posts that shouldn't have been written. I was going to do something heart-breaking and important on international politics and warfare, but there are plenty of other bloggers doing that work. They probably have someone else doing the vacuuming. Or that's my excuse, anyway.