Little Things--Why Bother?
I've been doing the laundry and cleaning this morning, stuff I didn't get to yesterday. (Remember, I can get a lot done early, being up at 4AM!).
One of those things has been hauling some old stuff up from the basement and elsewhere, for a Goodwill or Value Village donation. Included in that was my old Eureka Boss vacuum, which hasn't worked for a couple of years, or thereabouts. On impulse, I decided to open it up and check it, just to make sure it wasn't the belt that had given way. No, the belt was fine. However, the roller was completely choked up with carpet fiber--all the stringy stuff that forms the edging. No wonder the roller couldn't rotate. So I cleaned that up and tried the vacuum--presto! It works just fine. In fact, it's better on bare floors than my other little Eureka Maxima vacuum, it's quieter, and it has a longer cord for better reach. What I can't understand is why I never bothered to do a simple check in the first place, why I assumed the vacuum was broken and so spent money on a second one.
Is this just me or is this a general human tendency? Is it more prevalent among people who have lived alone for a long time? Is it a function of mental health issues? Personality?
And since I was on a roll, I actually took a pair of pliers and removed the stripped screw in my bathroom door knob. The screw that's been partially stuck out for what? Seven years? Eight? Let's see, this is my tenth summer in this house, so it could be longer.
Why?
Perhaps because they are just little things, things that don't really matter in the grand scheme of things and most of us have greater concerns. I'm not super-anal about stuff like this--heck, the doors have been off my kitchen cupboards for oh, I think it's eight years now. Everything is torn apart, nothing is put back together or finished properly. What is done is strung together with bailing twine, so to speak. In other words, done in a half-assed way. My living area laminate, generously laid by the father of someone I once knew, has too much float, so a number of the planks float apart and have to be kicked back into place. We also laid it in the wrong direction. The baseboard trim, which Dad did most of, is so-so because neither of us knew what we were doing, not really. I've never bothered to do the trim in the upper hallway. I've got carpet torn up, painting that needs to be done and re-done, a bathroom that needs to be gutted (ditto for the kitchen), electrical work that should be done (by the way, I still have a brand new living room fan in the box, purchased June 2008, half price)...a host of little (and some big) things I just don't get to, for one reason or another--lack of money and lack of motivation.
I undertand that I've been in this "nothing matters and what if it did?" mode for a very long time now. Because, really, nothing does matter. We live, we die, we're forgotten--quickly if we have no family, in a generation or two if we do. There's nothing special about the human species; we're another animal on the planet, dominant for now. All of us, individually and collectively, will pass away.
So no, in the very grand scheme of things, nothing matters. Certainly not fixing things around a house.
But on the flip side, we still have to live while we're here.
Somewhere, there has to be a balance. A mid-point between placing too much emphasis on our silly little lives and giving up entirely because there's no meaning to anything we do anyway, in the Universal sense.
I"m just not certain where that balance lies.
And since I can't figure it out, maybe I'd just better go take care of a few other small, outstanding things around the house, things that have been waiting for attention for years.
One of those things has been hauling some old stuff up from the basement and elsewhere, for a Goodwill or Value Village donation. Included in that was my old Eureka Boss vacuum, which hasn't worked for a couple of years, or thereabouts. On impulse, I decided to open it up and check it, just to make sure it wasn't the belt that had given way. No, the belt was fine. However, the roller was completely choked up with carpet fiber--all the stringy stuff that forms the edging. No wonder the roller couldn't rotate. So I cleaned that up and tried the vacuum--presto! It works just fine. In fact, it's better on bare floors than my other little Eureka Maxima vacuum, it's quieter, and it has a longer cord for better reach. What I can't understand is why I never bothered to do a simple check in the first place, why I assumed the vacuum was broken and so spent money on a second one.
Is this just me or is this a general human tendency? Is it more prevalent among people who have lived alone for a long time? Is it a function of mental health issues? Personality?
And since I was on a roll, I actually took a pair of pliers and removed the stripped screw in my bathroom door knob. The screw that's been partially stuck out for what? Seven years? Eight? Let's see, this is my tenth summer in this house, so it could be longer.
Why?
Perhaps because they are just little things, things that don't really matter in the grand scheme of things and most of us have greater concerns. I'm not super-anal about stuff like this--heck, the doors have been off my kitchen cupboards for oh, I think it's eight years now. Everything is torn apart, nothing is put back together or finished properly. What is done is strung together with bailing twine, so to speak. In other words, done in a half-assed way. My living area laminate, generously laid by the father of someone I once knew, has too much float, so a number of the planks float apart and have to be kicked back into place. We also laid it in the wrong direction. The baseboard trim, which Dad did most of, is so-so because neither of us knew what we were doing, not really. I've never bothered to do the trim in the upper hallway. I've got carpet torn up, painting that needs to be done and re-done, a bathroom that needs to be gutted (ditto for the kitchen), electrical work that should be done (by the way, I still have a brand new living room fan in the box, purchased June 2008, half price)...a host of little (and some big) things I just don't get to, for one reason or another--lack of money and lack of motivation.
I undertand that I've been in this "nothing matters and what if it did?" mode for a very long time now. Because, really, nothing does matter. We live, we die, we're forgotten--quickly if we have no family, in a generation or two if we do. There's nothing special about the human species; we're another animal on the planet, dominant for now. All of us, individually and collectively, will pass away.
So no, in the very grand scheme of things, nothing matters. Certainly not fixing things around a house.
But on the flip side, we still have to live while we're here.
Somewhere, there has to be a balance. A mid-point between placing too much emphasis on our silly little lives and giving up entirely because there's no meaning to anything we do anyway, in the Universal sense.
I"m just not certain where that balance lies.
And since I can't figure it out, maybe I'd just better go take care of a few other small, outstanding things around the house, things that have been waiting for attention for years.
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