What a Chore

I should be cleaning my house. 

I was talking to a friend the other day and she and her husband are looking to buy a house with enough property for a big garden or an orchard, so their kids can learn how to "work." She mentioned how her husband was raised having to care for a big orchard and his dad was raised working on a farm and they are hard workers. It is very important to this friend that her kids learn how to work hard like that. 

And I was agreeing with her and making derisive comments about today's youth and how the only body part that gets worked out on them is their fingers--you know, from all the text messaging, video games, Internet surfing and channel flipping that the do. 

Yeah, today's youth. They are sooooooo lazy. 

I lived on a farm until I was almost twelve years old. I fed chickens, I took care of rabbits, I hauled scraps to the pigs, I weeded ditches (Yes, ditches. You know, those things that carry water to the farm? With their fertile, soft soil they sprout weeds like a five o'clock shadow. So, yes, they need to be weeded EVERY DAY.) and I even burned trash. 'Cause that's what you do when you live in the country. 

Now, hold your horses, before one of my brothers gets on here and starts moaning about everything I didn't do: like wake up pre-dawn to feed calves or lambs, or milk a cow, or help irrigate, or build a fence, or even hoe beets. Yes, that's right I didn't do those things. At least not much. Or not like your long-suffering, hearty and hale young selves did. But I did other things that never even crossed your chore list: like baked eight loaves of bread weekly when I was nine years old, or folded every scrap of clean laundry that nine people can produce, or ironed Sunday clothes for seven kids, or took care of the baby EVERY time Mom and Dad left the house so you could play knock-'em-dead-couch-pillow football. (You may be older, but I have a wicked, wicked memory.)

So, yeah, I wasn't raised like today's kids who sit on their duffs all day long and don't know how to put together a hard day's work. Not at all. 

In my current life, I work at a job where I sit in a chair on my well-endowed posterior for NINE hours a day. Then I come home and heat up some Lean Cuisine (all of 3 minutes and 45 seconds, thank you very much) and then I read a book, visit with friends, fulfill my social obligations, and surf the 'net until I drop off to sleep and start the same day all over again tomorrow. 

Like I said I know how to "work hard." 

Which is why I should be cleaning my house. But I'm not. My fingers have sure had a workout though. 

Yeah, that's right, you little 2008 punks. You ain't got nothing on me. 

"Lazy" is a science. And I'm getting my very own PhD.