Sense belongs in the bin

Chinese New Year is coming and, as with every year, my mother has decreed that a spring-cleaning is in order. I, frankly, would rather be digging my ear and eating what I find than engaging in mopping, scrubbing, sweeping and wiping every single object/surface in the house. Heck, I would even rather be writing copy. Or listening to the Backstreet Boys.

But it seems there is no escape. The steely glint of determination in her eyes is already blinding me. Whenever this mood takes her, she gets her way sooner or later. And, this Saturday, she will.

But really, it’s not so much the cleaning that bothers me. It’s the endless quality checks. To me, a house is clean as long as there are no dustballs flitting around. To her, you must be able to eat off the floor and, even then, it’d require just another three rounds of mopping.

Even worse, she has been proclaiming that she is going to “throw a lot of stuff away this year” about once every 15 seconds since two weeks ago. This is deeply frightening. It means that my entire CD collection is in peril. And my MASK^TM toys. Then there’s my collection of dusty books and my Dragonball comics from 1-42.

Of course, I could counter this by suggesting that she throw away that ridiculously huge steamer that she uses once every decade. Or the dog (“we don’t need that dirty wet rug”), or all the furniture in my room which is the wrong side of 50 years old and creaks if I so much as breathe on it.

But no, those things will survive. Instead, we will be hurling stuff like the Barenaked Ladies or that Dragonball episode where Goku squares off with Vegeta down the chute. It makes no sense. But then, neither does tradition.

Football caused me to smell a cat's ass

I played football on Monday. That means four days have since passed and still I feel like I’ve been run over by a truck. Literally every single part of my anatomy is hurting. Muscles I never knew I had have decided that it’s time they got in touch with good old Mr Brain up there. And so my grey matter has been inundated with messages including one from that muscle situated in the outpost on the underside of my fourth toe which simply read “Ow”.

It is utterly impossible to walk around without looking like a prick. As I stumbled to the toilet the other day, someone asked me in a hushed, sinister voice, “Are you on DRUGS?” I replied in the negative as best I could and then careened through the toilet door like a quarterback, no doubt confirming her suspicions.

My initial plan for the week was to jog on Wednesday. However, considering that most of my muscle mass now consisted of mango pudding, I decided to just think about it vigorously, which is more tiring than most of you might imagine. Last night, however, in a moment of complete lunacy, I attempted to do pushups. As I got down on all fours, my body did its best to remind me of my fragile state. My joints creaked like rusty swings and the mango pudding wobbled all over the place. Still, I persevered and with vein-popping effort, lowered myself to the ground whereupon everything gave way and, for a moment, I found my body supported solely by my face.

“No biggie,” I thought after detaching my cheek from the wood panelling, “Just a matter of trying again.” Which I did… to much the same effect. The only benefit that came out of all this were the assertions that (a) my floor needed cleaning, (b) that I could achieve this simply by rolling around and that (c) I had not the strength to do so.

And so I lay there in a heap of dust looking as spent as a horny donkey during which time the cat came to check if I was dead and, upon discovering that I wasn’t, decided that I would like to smell his ass. And then after that, things just got too ugly to describe.