Paper, meet shredder. Shredder, meet paper.

After my layoff, I promised myself I would do more around the apartment. I didn’t tell wifey this, though I suppose I am now (doh!). By many measures, this husband already does his part. I go to the grocery store, though after years of this, all the green leafy stuff still kind of looks the same. I help with cooking, when told what to do and how to do it. I do dishes and laundry. Hell, I even clean (sometimes) and handle the finances. (And this witty commentary, though not technically housework, doesn’t write itself.)

But physical labor isn’t my thing. Truth be known, it kind of intimidates me a little. I’m always scared I’m going to do irreparable damage to something or someone. But I was game, what with my new-found hours, days, weeks, months of free time. A good friend of mine redid his yard and put in a beautiful deck during his unemployment. Surely I could tackle some relatively basic tasks. Here’s the list of projects I vowed to undertake…

• Build a storage compartment in the hallway
• Put up shelves or find some other storage solution for our gazillion CDs
• Repair the ceiling plaster in the bedroom
• Fix the bathroom sink
• Replace the broken bathroom tiles

Here’s the list of projects I’ve actually undertaken since October…

• …
• …
• …
• …
• …

Let’s call the last four months a ramp-up period. I like to prepare for projects, by doing lots of research, more than many doctoral candidates. Then I promptly forget everything and take forever to get back to it. Eventually I may return to a project, given enough procrastinating and prodding; my intentions are good after all. I’m just slow… g l a c i a l l y slow. Wifey would agree.

Yesterday I renewed my vow to get stuff done around the apartment, and then spent the better part of the day cleaning – a good first step. I started with my files, which had overwhelmed their storage cases and become piles of paper on my desk and the floor. There were paid bills and banking statements dating back 13 years. There were tax forms from the early 1990s – when I was in college and still, apparently, earned more than I do now. Some of paperwork, nay most of it, was disposable.

I reorganized the files and created a shredding pile a foot tall to destroy, two sheets at a time. Let’s create a mental image, shall we? Imagine a thirty-something-year-old unemployed guy sitting on his bedroom floor in boxers and a t-shirt shoving paper into a shredder. [Take a moment if you must, I have the time.] … [Sufficiently scarred? Okay, then let's move on] Two hours later, my back was sore and a crick had crept into my neck. Six small plastic bags of shreddings awaited disposal. The pile was down to nine inches tall. Let’s where I left it.

Vacuuming – more of a mission than a chore for me – was next on the agenda. I have to get every speck of dirt, every carpet fuzzy and every stray strand of cat fur. I’m meticulous, anal even, for some reason. I crawled under desks and the bed. I reached into closets and behind furniture. Two hours later all 900 square feet of the apartment was clean, and there was enough collected fur to create a third cat. (This could be another project.) And all the bending over had wrecked my hamstrings.

It was late in the day at this point, and I had to do something else – like maybe eat or shower. The projects from four months ago are now front and center in my brain again. I’ve even made a bit of progress on a couple of them since yesterday. But they’ll have to wait again, because now it’s tax time. Will the fun ever end? Don’t answer that.

“There’s no place like home,” Dorothy once said, before becoming a drug-addicted gay icon. Maybe it’s because “home is where the heart is.” So does that mean if I try to go somewhere else, without my heart, I’ll die? It’s also true that “you can never go home,” unless you’re Bon Jovi. This presents an interesting and potentially fatal quandary. I have to be but can’t be at home. Finding a job doesn’t seem all that daunting when faced with a rift in the universe. While I’ve managed to sidestep these dueling cliches so far, my luck ran out today. 

Home is the place to be most weekdays, regardless of my employment status. Everything I need – stereo, computer and food – is right here. And so are a few things I don’t need. Don’t try to hide from me, dirty dishes. I know you’re there; I can smell you. And every evening, wifey returns. What could be better than that?

Home wasn’t so great today. A pipe burst in my building’s basement, forcing the super to cut off the heat to fix it. February is not the warmest of months in NYC; it was a balmy and breezy 35 degrees outside. With the help of my less-than-airtight windows, the temperature inside my apartment dipped into the high 40s. Even the onesie can’t withstand that, as much as it tries. After all it only comes with feet, not hands (hmm, now there’s a thought…). 

Today was also a special election for a vacated state senate position serving my neighborhood. Campaigning in most neighborhoods involves volunteers handing out flyers. Campaigning in Jackson Heights involves volunteers yelling things in Spanish through very loud speakers mounted on moving trucks. Interestingly enough, this is the same tactic used to sell pay-as-you-go cell phones. Every 20 minutes a very excited someone implored me to vote for a political someone… I think. I don’t understand much Spanish. When traffic backed up and the truck was marooned below my window, the message was repeated over and over. While they didn’t actually get me to vote (or buy a new cell phone), they did manage to piss me off and make me crave Mexican food. 

Mix in some random drilling in the stairwell outside my door and the cats’ incessant meowing, and voila… a perfect day… to be somewhere else.