cleaned my room

[alexist]

Picked everything up, put away the various books & papers scattered around, dusted the furniture, ironed the clean sheets and put them on.

I know it's totally anal and ridiculous to iron sheets. Every week (ok, sometimes 10 days) when I do it, i think about how stupid it is and how much time I waste on it. It gives me a certain weird satisfaction, though. Cleaning and cooking do that. I don't understand myself. I always thought (or was raised to think) that being intelligent meant you were supposed to do things that stretched your mind, and actually doing things was somehow not good enough. That's one of the reasons I never thought of something like cooking as a career--I was a smart girl, therefore I should go to college and write papers and get a nice white-collar job. I'm not necessarily putting that down, but it can be a very limiting way of thinking.

Comments

[suzylou.livejournal.com]

HOW do you iron sheets? I've tried and just get in such a mess, I either knock over the whole board or just get scrunched sheets with ironed in creases.

It has occured to me lately that I would actually make a damned good secretary/PA. I can type like a demon, I'm polite, I LIKE running things to a timetable and bossing people around, and I'm intelligent enough to do things off my own bat without having to be constantly supervised. But that's not the done job for someone with a science degree, half a masters, and hoping to do a PhD for fun, so I'll probably never do it.

Bloody stupid though, I'd probably be better at that than I am at acoustics ;) At least it gives me an option for when I head back to Cornwall!

[rowan-leigh.livejournal.com]

People have different ideas about what makes suitable work for them, intellectually. I would rather do something manual than something which used up brain on trivial tasks like copytyping and secretarial work, because in the former case I can let my brain do what it wants while my hands are occupied.

Neither is ideal though. I want to be an academic.