Maintenance work, part 2
Late last year I wrote about my frustrations with cooking and other “maintenance work,” in the parlance of Jenny Odell:
I started reading How To Do Nothing by Jenny Odell, on the recommendation of some friends and readers of this newsletter (hi Jane!) as well as the entire educated-millennial internet. I’m only a little way in, but I really like her model of “maintenance work.” This is work (and sometimes, in the case of the book, art) that doesn’t really create or change anything. It just keeps what already exists going. It’s the kind of stuff you’ll always have to do again, to my endless, ridiculous frustration: cook lunch, wash the dishes, take out the trash, walk the dog. It’s extremely easy under capitalism to undervalue this work or render it invisible—hello feminized labor! It’s also the most important work anyone can do, in terms of keeping yourself and your fellow humans alive and comfortable and helping a society hum along relatively smoothly.
Somewhat to my surprise, my relationship with this kind of work—chores, essentially—has transformed during quarantine. Admittedly, I was already somewhat on a new path before this whole thing began; I cooked a ton over a very cozy winter vacation and that really did seem to click something into place in my attitude and in my schedule. (I also got an Instant Pot around the same time, which didn’t actually make anything faster but did help me plan ahead in a way I hadn’t really managed before.) Still, my lingering resistance to maintenance work has more or less dissolved during quarantine. Instead of feeling like something that’s taking me away from my real work, it feels, for the first time, like it is my real work. My paying job—and I have a ton of that work too—is the thing that’s taking me away from cooking and cleaning and dog walking and all that. The grass is always greener, I know, but I honestly wish I had even more time to devote to maintenance work right now.
Part of this is that obviously our housekeeper is on paid leave, so if we let anything slide and get out of control there is no one to save us from our mess. But a bigger part of it is that cleaning and cooking have moved in my mind from the category of chores to the more neutral category of activities, now that there are so few other ones to fill that time and mental space. Cooking is something different to do, not something I have to squeeze in. I have even baked some very easy recipes (favorites include this one and this one) My whole life I thought I hated baking, and here I am, liking it. I previously dreaded grocery shopping, and now I miss it terribly. I now mark the end of my paying work day by…sweeping my office. Quarantine is full of small surprises.