by Lei Wang
I have often been envious of how characters in stories don’t seem to need to do dishes or laundry or buy groceries, except when it serves their story, like a meet-cute at the farmer’s market or perhaps a juicy conflict between two in-laws over the most efficient way to load the dishwasher. Otherwise, in novels and TV but especially in short stories and movies, the refrigerator fills itself and even eating is an afterthought: food is for pleasure, not necessity.
The boring things of life are given the ax, or no one would watch; imagine a maximalist reality show, each episode 24 hours long, corresponding exactly to a day in the life of someone that you play alongside your own life, minute by minute. Even if it were your favorite celebrity, would you really want to accompany them as they sleep for seven hours? I suppose there are such dedicated viewers out there and also such dedicated livestreams, like Firefox’s red panda web cams. I remember years ago coming across a crowdfunding campaign by a European twenty-something who decided to reduce his carbon footprint by sleeping or otherwise staying in his room all day. He was asking for money in order to do nothing, to contribute as little to the world as possible, and prove it via the most boring livestream. If I remember correctly, he had quite a few patrons—if only for the novelty of the idea.
What are the boring bits of life? Sleep, except for dreams. Chores. The things we have to do, and the things we do again and again and again. Life seems to be a constant battle against entropy, and we are losing. “I don’t identify as transgender… I identify as tired,” said Hannah Gadbsy in the comedy special Nanette. Don’t we all. This was the true punishment of Sisyphus: not the moving of the boulder or even the futility of it, but the day-in, day-outness of it all. We just showered yesterday and our hair is greasy already. The kitchen sink was empty a moment ago, but now there are no forks. The dog needs to be walked, again. Why can’t there be a pet that truly eats one’s garbage?
In The Quotidian Mysteries, a book on the mystical aspects of laundry and other domestic tasks, Kathleen Norris writes of how she found her way back to Catholicism through an Irish-American wedding in which, after the ceremony was over, she watched the priest doing dishes. “In that big, fancy church, after all of the dress-up and the formalities of the wedding mass, homage was being paid to the lowly truth that we human beings must wash the dishes after we eat and drink,” she wrote. “The chalice, which had held the very blood of Christ, was no exception. And I found it enormously comforting to see the priest as a kind of daft housewife, overdressed for the kitchen, in bulky robes, puttering about the altar, washing up after having served so great a meal to so many people.” She couldn’t quite understand the service, but she could understand eating, drinking, and housework.
Sacred is something that is “set apart” from the ordinary; something is sacred because it is not meant to be ordinary. But to treat an ordinary task as extraordinary is also to stand out from the ordinary. Read more »