![]() The lunchbag folded with care and brought back home Thursday morning: the garbage truck whining at 7 Wednesday evening: he takes the cans out front Joyce Carol Oates describes these painstakingly simple routines that comprise our lives in her (admittedly gender-typed) poem, “Women Whose Lives are Food, Men Whose Lives are Money” : Or on a weekday afternoon when I’m out of coffee cups and have to run the dishwasher–didn’t I just run it? Or find that the fridge is all at once empty yet again. ![]() For example, I can still find myself baffled on a Sunday morning when all the clothes I wore that week are there, dirty, waiting for me. Yet, if you are wired anything like me, each repeating cycle of basic daily tasks comes as something of a revelation, and at times it’s even a shock. Even if the specifics–how we acquire food and prepare it, or how we clothe our bodies and care for those garments, or the quarters in which we sleep–have changed, the general shapes of our daily activities persist. These routines, the big shapes of life, have stayed mostly the same for thousands and thousands of years. ![]() Do dishes.Īt the end of each day we lie our imperfect lumpy bodies down and we sleep. We wear clothes, they get dirty, we wash them, put them away, wear them again. ![]() The funny thing about being alive is that we spend the majority of our time doing the same five or ten things over and over. ![]()
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