Cleaning inside the garbage disposal

There is a small quiet competition in my household, between my wife and me, on who cleans what. I've brought up ot her a couple of times that I'm the only one who cleans inside the garbage disposal...and she talks about being the one who moves the things on the counter so the whole counter gets clean. The context goes back to the early feminist struggles of the 1970's, when I learned to change my consciousness around the definition of work. Recognizing and appreciating the repetitive, daily tasks of cleaning, cooking, caring for children (changing and washing diapers in particular) as "real" work, when they had always been at best ignored, more often reviled, as tasks to be expected from the women in my life--this was a huge change in consciousness, and one that's stayed with me these forty years.

So even though I do almost half the cooking and what I consider a more than fair share of the cleaning in our household, I still feel the presumption coming from Sefla that my maleness somehow makes me unable to see and appreciate when things need cleaning.


We've also identified a difference in tolerance for dissonance--she's visual, and is very disturbed by mess and clutter in the arrangement of objects in the house. I'm auditory, and have to fix a staticky radio signal or a beeping smoke alarm battery immediately, or it drives me crazy. Similarly, I must have the remote control with its mute button always ready for action on those rare occasions when we watch something on commercial TV, so that the "advertiser voice" won't contaminate our environment.

And speaking of environmental contamination, I think it's more this need of mine for an auditorily clean atmosphere, even more than political repulsion, that makes me turn off the radio immediately whenever George the Lesser's voice is threatening to be broadcast.