frankie

The worst thing about housework is that it’s never finished. No
matter how much hair you pull out of the shower drain, the demonic
forces of entropy will always conspire to replace cleanliness with
filth. Certain tasks are more soul-destroying than others, though, so
here is my ranking, from least to most horrible, of the inescapable
hell that is household chores.

COOKINGI know some people who would rather chip bunions off
the feet of an angry rhino than make dinner. They are baffling to
me. Cooking is the perfect chore: it’s only as hard as you make it,
and at the end you get to eat some food. The reason I include it
here is because you have to clean up after you cook. No one wants
to scrape dried-up carrot peels off the kitchen bench when they
could be lying on the couch digesting.

LAUNDRYWith a trusty front-loader, a podcast, and a healthy
aversion to ironing, laundry can be very relaxing. It’s a great
time to be rigid and controlling without pissing people off – if my
undies aren’t hanging symmetrically, I’ll adjust them until my
internal bureaucrat is fully satisfied. However, laundry rewards
consistency. One load is fine, but if I’m staring at a dirty washing

pile the size of a hatchback, I become tempted to feed it into

a woodchipper and live the rest of my life in the nude.

VACUUMINGMan, fuck vacuuming. What even is dust? Some

people say it’s mostly made up of human skin, but I think that’s a

convenient fairy story to cover up the true origin of dust: evil. Evil

forces reaching into our dimension from other worlds cause dust,

and I won’t hear a word to the contrary. On top of this, you have to

suck up the dust with an incredibly loud, cumbersome machine?

And then you have to empty the dust into the bin, which always

results in a mushroom cloud of particulate filth up your nose?

No, thank you. Vacuuming is cancelled.

TAKING THE BINS OUTThe only way to make taking out the rubbish

tolerable is to force someone else to do it. In an ideal world, rubbish

would disappear as soon as it was created. Onthis crap Earth, we

stuff it into a bin so it can sit there for a few days fermenting and

excreting all kinds of horrific liquids. Then you have to pick it up

and take it out – a task that carries a 100 per cent risk of getting

bin juice on your bare hands. Garbage men should be paid a

million dollars a year.

WASHING UPThe day I moved into an apartment with a dishwasher

was the best day of my life. I’d rather pull all my pubes out individually

with a pair of tweezers than do the washing up. I’d rather eat a

handful of livewasps. If I never have to chip hard scrambledeggs

off a greasy plate again, I will die happy. If washing up suddenly

disappeared, every sharehouse on Earth would become 40 per cent

more pleasant. We should just eat off the floor and be done with it.

CLEANING THE CAT LITTERIs there anything worse than scooping

up the turds of an animal with a brain the size of a walnut? Well, yes,

there is: scraping that animal’s turds off the wall because they can’t

aim their butthole at a toilet twice the size of their body. If human

toilets had the same relative dimensions as litter trays, they’d be the

size of paddling pools. Yet somehow, at least once a week, my cat

hangs her stupid cat bum off the side of the tray and drops a log on

the goddamn floor. She’s lucky she’s so cute, is all I have to say.

the daily drudgery

ELEANOR ROBERTSON RANKS

HOUSEHOLD CHORES FROM

SUCKY TO SUCKIEST.

Photo

Lukasz Wierzbowski

rant