Your Humble Blogger was considering writing about Nathan Newman’s latest on Freethinkers, but that didn’t so much happen. Instead, I washed the car.
Now, those Gentle Readers who know me are aware that saying I am not a car person is litotes on the scale of saying Donald Rumsfeld is no peacenik. In addition, some of y’all may know that cleanliness is next to godliness in my eyes due mostly to being unreachable, ineffable, and of an entirely different ontological status than my own experience. I derive no pleasure from a clean car. On the other hand, in heading down in the morning to grudgingly take my seat, my pique is only heightened by a disgustingly filthy car. In addition, I’ve paid my registration for another year, and in order to take advantage of that, I need to affix certain stickers in certain places, which stickers will not adhere well to the caked-on crud.
Have I mentioned that there’s a gravel-and-dirt road involved in my weekday automotive perambulations? And that when not in use it is always parked outside with no cover? No, the issue with this car was not cleanliness, but dirtiness, which is a subject Your Humble Blogger is familiar with and does care about. So, out with the bucket and the rags, and down to clean the car.
Now, from an economist’s point of view, it seems to me that a person in my position should properly be aiming at a half-assed job of car-cleaning. That is, I should be looking to expend enough time and energy to make the car not-dirty, but not so much as would make it clean. Unlike, for instance, cutting my fingernails shorter than I really prefer them, it doesn’t give me any longer until the chore has to be done again. I won’t notice the car until it’s filthy again, and a true-clean car gets filthy as fast as a half-clean one.
The problem is that it’s really quite hard to leave off cleaning the car at half-clean. I wash down the passenger side, quickly and lightly, and then go over to the driver’s side, and do that, quickly and lightly, and then the front and the back, and then I notice an area I missed on the driver’s side, and then I notice that the passenger side is drying with streaks and I go back and get those. Remember, if I left the streaks, they would utterly fail to bother me over the next weeks, but at the moment of my cleaning, with a rag in my hand and a bucket of sudsy water, it’s hard as hell not to go back over them.
I think I wound up doing a perfectly good economist’s job, by declining to go back upstairs and get another bucket of water for rinsing off. Still, I spent too much time on it, and then, of course, too much time on writing about it.
Thank you,
-Vardibidian.