Monday, February 18, 2013

3. Dusting and public indecency


            I used to fool myself into believing I was non-judgmental. I had to face reality when I realized that if I wasn’t judging other people, there was no way I’d be so preoccupied with worrying that other people were judging me. But it’s still one of those things that doesn’t fix itself when you realize you’re the problem. I DID judge housewives & stay at home moms (don’t even get me started on homeschoolers), and now that I was one of them I had to judge myself. I sneaked around my errands feeling like I should be wearing dark glasses, but you can’t take your car to the shop at 11am on a Tuesday and wait around for it to be done, incognito. It’s no secret in the midday grocery checkout line that you have no job. And every person you have to engage with on those and every other errand, is at work. I felt like I was flaunting my good fortune in people’s faces, but I couldn’t stop doing errands. The fact that I was unemployed had to pay off in the time I could now spend with my husband, since I didn’t have to do all my running around after work and on weekends. Yes, I could do the inside chores without being seen, and in fact I needed to, because one of the things we had to cut out of the budget so I could quit was having someone in to do the cleaning twice a month. Which we needed. Because I am a fucking slob. But there’s a problem with that plan too; did you spot it yet? I had to do the cleaning. I am a fucking slob. I’m as shitty a cook as I am a maid, but even I can see that that’s a recipe for failure right there.
            Inside chores are especially hard because they are so fucking stupid. You start with visions of sitting naked on the dryer and reading porn all afternoon while it rumbles and spins, but it doesn’t turn out that way. Housework is endless. There is no inside chore that is complete once you’ve done it, because the reason they exist is that people live inside & make a mess. The first thing that happens when you finally have all the clean dishes put away is that you eat or drink something and make a new dirty dish. Do you know that you can actually work up a sweat, doing laundry? (Not that way – I told you that turned out to be a myth, like eating bon bons & watching soap operas.) Right, so once it’s finished, the next thing is to take a shower, and just before you do that? That’s right, you strip naked and throw your laundry-doing clothes in the hamper. I once heard someone describe the futility of bed making as equivalent to tying your shoes after you take them off. Nothing was ever so pointless and stupid and still necessary as housework. Finally, I found that I could pick a spot – not a room, just an area – and clean that, without wanting to kill myself. If I picked a different area every day, the house stayed livable and I could focus on the outside chores which I had found a way to handle…
            I’m pretty sure it started when I got a gym membership (that’s one of the things housewives do, while their husbands are at work). There’s a steam room at the gym, and those are always sexy to me. I brought it up to my husband, because we have the masturbation photo rule, but you can’t exactly take your camera phone into the steam room. He came up with a new game, whereby he told me exactly what I could and could not do – or rather had to and could not do, in the steam room. Whether or not someone else was in there at the time was the luck of the draw, I had to find a way. This is a game that I still love. It started with absolute terror underscoring all my sexual tension, at the idea that someone else might be in the steam room while I was tasked with some way of bringing myself to orgasm. Then to my great astonishment, I found that I was disappointed instead of relieved, when there wasn’t. I began to schedule my trips into the steam room to increase the probability of having company, and discovered the pride that comes from having succeeded, and the liberating DGAF that overwhelms me when I’m right in the middle of it and really might get caught. It’s the active prioritization of completing the task my husband assigned me, over giving the slightest shit about what some other steam bather thinks of me. I could get banned from the gym or arrested for indecent exposure and in those moments I couldn’t possibly care less. It would be worth it. Do you see where I’m going with this? Semi-public masturbation cancels out my fear of judgment! What’s that beer commercial where they say “Here we go…”?
            So of course part of all the fun of this is relating every minute detail to my husband, who is adequately enough amused to proceed with assigning me more (and more difficult) tasks. In the parking lot at the dry cleaners there is no judgment I fear from some SUV driving manicure-getter, when I’m mentally daring her to notice what I’m doing down here next to her, in my little Mini Cooper. The grocery store checkout is a breeze, when you just got off in a bathroom stall with a “Please excuse our appearance while we remodel” sign on the door. One of my favorites was having to finish my Target shopping after taking a picture of myself with my fingers in my pussy, under the security camera in the mirror of the men’s department. Terrifying. I would have cum so hard after that, if it had been part of my homework. One time I had a series assigned: I had to bring myself to orgasm within six minutes of the hour, three hours in a row, in three different locations. That was a fun day; I got a lot of errands done.
            It translates, too. When the submissive quality of my nature gets on a roll like this, I can think of an inside chore as just another assignment, with my husband’s arrival home as its time limit. My house is never going to look like June Cleaver’s, but I happily make the bed every fucking day.


(A song for running wicked little errands...)

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