Reading: lots.

Moving: Nope

Viewing: Less than yesterday

20 February 2000: Slothful

This weekend RDC cleaned up his office and once, entering the study, I found him on the floor assembling folders of information and wanting to grouse about the office support person who'd not been very good office support, since she'd (yes, it's female) sent him the separate components instead of collating them for him, as if to do that should be his job, not hers. I chided him, asking if the task were so below him, and he paused (his wife being a staff assistant, he'd better) before replying that if it wasn't, the company should outlay her, not his, hourly rate for such manual labor. This is true.

I observed him at work for a moment and chided him again: whatever hourly rate Dot Com might pay someone to do the task, no one should take as much of the company's time to complete it as he was taking. He opened a folder, put a thick pamphlet in the right side, and gathered another four items to put in the left side. I joined him on the floor and reached for half of each of the piles but, as I expected he would, he took that as permission to leave the job to me entirely, which was fine. I could do the same job faster, and the same job faster means better.

Rapidly I collated all the four items into stacks, then flipped all the folders open, and then with both hands at once inserted the left- and right-hand stuff into their respective pockets. And I realized another reason I hate Ayn Rand (who isn't worth even a staff assistant's time).

In The Fountainhead, Dominique Francon writes for Gail Wynand's Banner a column investigating the conditions of homes in the slums and to gather human material. "She scrubbed the floor of her room, she peeled potatoes, she bathed in a tin pan of cold water. She had never done these things before; she did them expertly." (New American Library edition, p. 140. I knew just where to find the passage and nearly had it by heart. I haven't memorized Rand as I have Austen--I'm not completely beyond hope--but certain of her phrases do stick in my mind.) Besides that Rand here shows that everyone in the slums is there because of deliberate laziness and stupidity, she also declares that any one of her heroes, any real person, who can think, can do any manual task perfectly, since it requires no thought (think of the philosopher Hugh Akston being a short-order cook in Atlas Shrugged, a job he could perform perfectly but without adding to the intellectual achievement of capitalism). So Dominique hauled water expertly, calculating how many trips she would have to make against how much she could fill her pail without spilling it, and hauling water at all when she later couldn't crack a marble slab in her fireplace but after much effort merely scratch it.

A simple physical task can be done only one best way, as Frank Gilbreth sought to prove, one best and fastest way. Mental labor, on the other hand, can always be innovated. But it's obvious Rand never did a lick of manual labor in her life that she didn't consider herself far above; she would always write as if intellectual capacity were the only necessary factor in any job and neither strength nor experience could contribute to efficient, competent completion of a task.

She sneered at farmers, of course. That's evident in Atlas Shrugged. She never farmed. Killing off all your intellectuals will cripple a country--are you paying attention, China?--but I do like, at first blush, the Gang of Four's idea of compulsory agricultural work. Not compulsory military service, because I don't believe in military solutions, but compulsory public service--I wonder if AmeriCorps has any agricultural programs?

Erg.

My favorite kind of Sunday morning does not entail getting up at 6:00 to drive 75 miles to go skiing. My favorite kind of Sunday morning is when I wake up gradually, eventually realize I'm awake, get up and pee and come back to bed, open my book until RDC realizes he's awake, at which point the head-petting and footie evolves into something else more ardurous.

Except today. Today RDC propped his weight on his left arm to use the right one to pull me toward him, at which point his left arm decided it wanted to go somewhere else. I, with my ear against his chest, heard it happen: cranch! and RDC, of course, felt it. Beth hinted at gimp sex, and a bad knee is one thing but a bad shoulder means neither of our usual less athletic positions works, even after the initial pain recedes. He hasn't been doing the exercises his physical therapist suggested, to keep the muscles strong since his connective tissue is a wash. His punishment: no nookie. What about me, though?

Again today I read all day, and napped, until Must See TV Sunday night. I merely listened to the "Cops" style X-Files. People said hand-held cameras were one reason they couldn't stand "Blair Witch." That aspect didn't bother me for that movie, but oof, it made this a particularly unwatchable episode of X-Files. I like the idea of your fear killing you in whichever way you most dread, though.

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Last modified 15 February 2000

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