Sh*t I Don't Understand: Adult Chores

When you think of spring, you think of agreeable weather, baseball, TV season finales, and the onslaught of Wedding Season. Maybe you reminisce about your college pilgrimage(s) to Cancun, Acapulco, Cabo, or any other Mecca of Alcohol Abuse. Spring is great....except when it's followed by the word "cleaning." I hated that phrase as a kid and especially couldn't stand when people would try to put some optimistic, sing-songy tone to it. "Spring Cleaning!" No, thanks. It's one of the few things more annoying than Rick Reilly these days. (Hey Rick, here's your leather jacket, hair mousse, and water skis while you're at it.)

The matter of spring cleaning itself is little more than a topical lede for this post. What I come to you this evening to discuss are Adult Chores in general. As kids we all did chores to gain some sort of grip on the concept of responsibility and/or the value of a dollar. That's totally fine. But when you're grown up and you work for a living, the days of tedious, laborious, mundane tasks consuming your free time should be over. It's one thing if you enjoy certain types of household work, i.e. gardening, as a hobby. It's a whole other thing if you missed seeing the #1 college football team get upset on an autumn Saturday because you were obligated to rake leaves for 3 hours.

Married guys joke about the "honey-do" list a lot. It makes me cringe. "Hey Phil, what did you do this past weekend?" "Oh, the wife put me to work, heh-heh. Spent 6 hours cleaning gutters, trimming hedges, and then she had me change her oil." It certainly sounds like our buddy Phil had a fantastic weekend, didn't he? If that becomes my life at some point, please take mercy on me, and, by "take mercy on me" I mean re-enact the last scene in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, with you being the Chief and me being R.P. McMurphy.

I'm not saying the do-it-yourself approach is bad. Hell, some things, like shoveling snow, you sometimes just have to grin and bear and take care of on your own. Other things can even be borderline-enjoyable if you've got nothing else to do and a good playlist going on the iPod (washing your car on a 75-degree day comes to mind). I'm just saying that some people end up enslaved to their chores in a blinded effort to save money. John and I have discussed this many a time, usually while enjoying an afternoon on the golf course. He came up with the great line that "what these people may save in money, they sacrifice in existence." Couldn't have said it better myself. Once again, I'm not telling you to waste money having every single little thing done for you. But, too often, people forget that money spent for the purpose of purifying one's "me time" is some of the best money one will ever spend.

Here's my whole thing. Paying what you determine to be a fair and/or nominal price to have a task done professionally for you is what America is all about. Movement of money is good for the economy, and since I value my time as much as I value my money, it's a good investment to me. I gladly fork over money to have dress clothes dry-cleaned, because I've tried ironing - and I suuuccck at it. Time not spent hunched over an ironing board muttering obscenities to myself is time spent reading, working out, watching sports, writing on this here blog, or any other desirable activity you can think of.

There are about 6 or 7 things in this world that I'm truly very good at. So if the task calls for something outside of lifting a weight, hitting a 3-iron, reciting sports trivia, or seamlessly incorporating movie and TV quotes into conversation, the chances are pretty good that I may not be the most qualified person for the job. You can call me lazy. You can call me un-handy, if that's even a word. You can pontificate on how I'm a microcosm of the outsourcing problem in America. But I make enjoyable use of my free time, and you can't take that away from me.

Oh Hi, March

Take a look at the blog archives on the lower right side of the page and you'll notice a pretty dramatic decline in the frequency of posting between this point last year and now. A year ago we were producing more than an item a day, many of them of considerable length and even more considerable depth. As Kevin pointed out last month, much has changed in the past 6-8 months for the blog's three operators. We've all moved and now live at least an hour apart from each other (as opposed to the 20-minute diameter that had enclosed us a year ago), we've all taken on new jobs or new, unprecedented levels of responsibility at our current jobs, and we're also in the midst of seeing some of the most important people in our lives start to get engaged and married (not actually any one of us yet, though, rest assured). As an unfortunate result, the blog has taken a bit of a backseat. But I guess you can just call that another element of getting older.

On the other hand, I am enjoying some of the things that seem to never change from year to year. As someone whose Winter Dldrums got an early start when Tony Romo broke his collarbone two months before Christmas, there are few nicer phrases right now than "February is over." The Big East Tournament is underway, and for the first time since October, I am feeling interest in a sporting event for reasons other than gambling or spite. Selection Sunday is 4 days away. The Tournament is 8 days away (depending if you count the round of 68 or not), and soon enough will be providing us the 2011 versions of overnight household names Bryce Drew and Ali Farokhmanesh, or maybe another unfathomable run like George Mason in '06, Davidson in '08, or Butler just last year. And once we've seemingly had our fill of the NCAA on CBS theme music, camps will break in Arizona and Florida, and our baseball teams will head north to play games that count once again. Shortly thereafter, the Feel Good Event of the Year will be upon us to erase any doubt that the shitty winter of 2010-2011 is gone.

The only thing that will keep you sane in life is having things to look forward to on a regular basis. It doesn't have to be huge, it just has to be on the horizon. Kevin's piece below about life after college ties right in to this thinking. Simply put, it sucks sometimes. It really does. And we all know that. But we also have to be able to find those openings, those breaks in the monotony that remind us, "hey, it's not all so terrible." For me and probably for John and Kevin as well, one of those ripples of light comes every mid-March. Followers of the blog who have an embarrassing amount of time on their hands may remember that I put that very same Andy Dufresne picture you see above on a post from last year that said some very similar things. But hey, any day that the Shawshank picture goes up on the blog can't be too bad of a day.

The End is Here

In 12 hours, we can say goodbye to the Winter Doldrums for another year. Yes, NCAA Tournament time has come again, and it is here to hold our hands right up through the remainder of March into the beginning of April, Opening Day, and The Masters. And if we've been at all good this year we will get a few weeks later a watchable set of playoffs in basketball and hockey to go with the NFL Draft and the onslaught of consistently decent weather. By lunchtime on Thursday, we will be reminded of all that once was good, and could be again.