Cleaning the Guinea Pig Cage
A surprise metaphor about the pain of procrastination
When I was a kid, we cleaned the guinea pig cage on Sundays. I lived a charmed life where this small chore was something I dreaded. As I write this, my chest still tight after a call with an impatient guy named Jim from the Costco Tire Center, I would trade all my current responsibilities for an afternoon scrubbing the urine and teeny poop pellets out of a massive rodent house.
Ok, I’m not sure “massive” is the right word. The cage definitely FELT massive to my soft little ten year old hands, needing help from my brother or my dad to dump the week’s soiled sawdust into a trash bag before hauling the purple plastic bottom to the laundry room sink. The job should’ve taken five minutes, tops. Scrub scrub, rinse. Dry, put fresh wood stuff in, rescue the 8 lb monster of a guinea pig from the (open) tupperware he hung out in during his weekly home makeover.
But because I didn’t like cleaning the cage, I took forever — ironic, no?
Instead of putting a dollop of soap on my sponge and making a quick job of the scrubbing, I slowly poured the lollipop-orange soap straight onto the dry plastic, making stars or peace signs. Maybe you’re already aware, but pouring thick dish soap onto a plastic that smells like pee is the equivalent of putting a car air freshener up to an air vent and turning the fan on high. The smell was overwhelming. My eyes could smell the excrement. It was a science experiment gone wrong, it was my stupid kid version of suffering for my art.
So then I did a second dumb thing and used a sponge to lather the soap. The pee soap. The soap that smelled like pee. I lathered it. I made it … more.
Which left me with a fairly big plastic bin covered in urine suds.
Watching my baby self from above in this memory, I want to yell, “RINSE IT QUICK, CHRISSY!” But I’m a silent, stressed adult ghost floating on the ceiling, unable to stop my mini me from turning on the sink just a little bit so that a dixie cup’s worth of water slid from corner to corner of the container. I stood there mesmerized, watching the water barely able to pick up any of the now drying, sticky soap from the plastic. Swish, swish … swish.
There were for sure a few times where I did this disgusting — I can’t even call it rinsing — dispersing so slowly that I lost control of the huge cage and SPILLED THE WATER ON THE FLOOR.
This had to add minutes of unnecessary cleaning to the entire process. How did I not see that I was wasting my own time? That I could’ve been on the couch with The Secret Garden in ten minutes if I didn’t move with the cadence of a funeral march?
I’ve realized, with horror, that I still approach some tasks I don’t want to do with the same excruciating lollygaggyness. Take the aforementioned call to the Costco Tire Center. I got that flat tire when I drove up to Seattle in the midst of my covid … over a month ago.
And I’ve avoided the call. I’ve been metaphorically standing at the sink, swirling soap around in a guinea pig cage, daydreaming about a new Dr. Grip pen or a boy I have a crush on or which scissors I’m going to use to cut my own hair later.
The thing I didn’t realize about cleaning the guinea pig cage or calling the fricken Costco Tire people is that the task starts the moment you realize you need to do it. I began cleaning the cage the minute I started avoiding it — I was just failing to finish the job. And I’ve been unsuccessfully calling Costco for almost eight weeks! No wonder I feel like I just ran a mile.
I wish I had advice on how to avoid creating this kind of situation. Maybe keep an ear out for your older self, trying to scream advice to you from the future? Maybe it has something to do with self respect, valuing your time above all else. Not so you can be like, “I love myself too much to clean up the pee water,” but more like, “I love myself too much to waste time avoiding cleaning up the pee water.”
If you have any advice, I’d love to hear it.
Love Always,
Christina
P.S. My guinea pig’s name was Chocolate, Chockie for short, because a bunch of kids under ten named him. He really was gigantic, probably because he lived right in front of the fridge and he was cutest when enjoying a contraband carrot.
