Chore Charts, Stars, and Banana Splits

Having realized that I still am motivated by the very same systems I learned in kindergarten, I recently made myself a weekly chore chart, breaking down all of the cleaning necessities into manageable days of the week so that I do a little something every day. It's fine as none of it involves real cleaning. I am excellent and putting my clothes away and picking up after myself; not so excellent at mopping the floor or cleaning the refrigerator. I gave myself a reprieve for Wednesdays b/c that's garbage day, my most hated day of the week as it involves me going down into the basement and cleaning the litter boxes. I am hoping this dread will dissipate somewhat now that I've added other times on the c.c. where I am supposed to clean the box. Today, I believe I have vacuuming and...something else. That will take no time at all as I have almost exclusively hard wood floors. At work, I have a similar system going where I get a gold star every time I go to the gym. I guess after four weeks of consistently going to the gym 3 times a week, I get a banana split or a pony or something. I haven't totally worked out the logistics. Maybe this can also work for my writing life. Well, I have somewhat figured out a way to bargain with myself; like, just write for five minutes. Five minutes of fiction. And then you can watch as much brain dead TV as you want (isn't that the saddest prize you ever heard of?).

Speaking of TV and pop culture, what is the deal with all of these reality shows featuring the families of the famous? I vaguely knew there were a few out there, but when flipping through the channels last night, I came across Meet the Lohan Blo-hans and The Fruit of Hulk Hogan's Steroidal Loins; the first starring the siblings and long-faced mom of Lindsay Lohan and the second being the daughter of a fake wrestler famous in the 80s. Who gives a crap about these people? Or the Osbournes or the Kardashians or Haylie Duffie as the wooden emcee for a reality contest show.

There's a feature on blogger where you can choose a "search next" option to see recently updated blogs. I was doing that for awhile yesterday and I'd say that the blogs (at least on blogger) break down in the following ways:

45% Blogs written by stay-at-home mom's posting pics of their families doing various boring things. For instance, in doing a google image search for this post, I stumbled on one with a header featuring three country kids who look like all country kids and the blog was called "My Scrappy Life" (not to be confused with the blog by a woman who does collages out of scraps of things). Many of the mom's list the bible on their top ten list of good reads.

35% Blogs from other countries.

10% Blogs with one post put up by a girl in junior high to show her recent photos with her three friends at Sea World.

10% Other.

Not lots of stay-at-home dad blogs or even blogs by husbands; really not that many dude blogs at all. I guess guys don't write about their days. They specialize. They write about a TOPIC. Or maybe I'm unfairly generalizing. But really, good luck finding blogs by guys who just want to journal about what's going on.