allow me to be the last to announce my entrance into the bourgeoisie

we have hired a cleaning service. in characteristic defensiveness-despite-nobody-batting-an-eyelash, i would like to explain this decision. my sainted grandmother - no, really, except for making me feel fat for eating more than one cookie the woman really ought to be canonized - worked as a housecleaner for, oh, pretty much her entire life. and by that i mean until she retired at eighty because she believed no one of that age should drive a car and thus could not commute because buses in seattle rarely go to fancy neighborhoods. now, there are two categories of professional housecleaners: those whose own homes are actually kind of a wreck, and those who could showcase their living rooms for better homes & gardens given five minutes notice.

my sainted grandmother was of the latter category. i always found it extremely soothing. when i lived by myself i made every effort - and occasionally failed miserably - at keeping house in this fashion. of course, when i lived by myself i could also subsist only on hummus and fuji apples, watch seven hours of law&order a day, and generally do whatever, whenever. it should come as a surprise to no one that married legal-partnership-via-a-legislative-loophole life is different. i mean, holy shit, there's another person here in the apartment! who was not raised on fascist standards of cleanliness! who has her own possessions, some of which are so foreign to me (witness: bike accessories, cooking gizmos, a thousand library books) that i would not know where to begin with organization!

oh, man, and then there's entropy. that shit's the devil. if an object is left alone, not only will it remain in the same spot while a person does things (like work full-time and take two classes at sucka-free city college or teach undergraduates while studying for an immense oral exam) it will begin to gather accessorial grime! horrifying.

i have said for years - and people who have known me that long can attest - that i would never have someone else clean my house. but recently, with the lunatic wisdom of the actually quite young, i have realized that there is very little i would not do to maintain my grip on sanity.

enter sarah pfingsten of in its place, a woman who claims to fall into the former category of housecleaner illustrated above, a fact which already makes me feel less like an utter domestic failure. plus i have never met her - my SFL handles the normal-working-hours business of household maintenance - and am unlikely ever to actually be at home while someone is cleaning my house for me, a situation i believe i would find intolerable. so maybe now i can be at home when not at work or class and do something other than flagellate myself for resting when there are dust bunnies to exterminate. gosh, that'd be great. self-punishment, despite appearances, is not really my jam.