These are my Brakes.
Cars are all about maintenance. You change your oil, you rotate your tires. You check your fluids and replace your filters. Well, after my brakes had gotten so bad that the entire truck would rumble every time I hit the brake pedal, I decided it was about time to get down 'n' dirty with some long awaited and much needed maintenance. As I sat there using my spare tire as a makeshift bench, busting my knuckles trying to break the bolts that held my brake caliper to it's bracket, I began to think about how just about everything in life requires some degree of maintenance at some level.
Life Maintenance
I recently read an article on a somewhat well known blog about how difficult it is to make the transition from teenage internet-monger to responsible adult. Y'know, the whole mix of catching up on e-mails, watching your finances, housekeeping, etc. But I realized this weekend that all of those things can be summed up under the title "life maintenance." You're just taking care of all the things that keep your life moving forward, much like what changing the brakes or flushing your transmission fluid does for your car. House cleaning, doing dishes, taking out the trash, grocery shopping, laundry...these would all be considered home maintenance. Then returning phone calls and e-mails and setting appointments and things would be social maintenance. Eating, working out and hygienic practice would be personal maintenance. Then if you developed a system to organize and plan out all your maintenances, that would be maintenance maintenance.Work vs. Home
I think I'm much better at keeping up with my stuff at work than at home. My work space is immaculately organized, everything on my desk pad calendar is color coded with highlighters, and my inbox is perpetually empty because I immediately respond to all of my e-mails, then file them in the appropriate folders. But then at home, I've got a speeding ticket that I've been dragging my feet on until about a week ago, our financial filing cabinet is overflowing with unfiled bills and pay stubs, and I have no idea where I stand with my fall school schedule at UTA. I need to figure out a way to get more on top of my home stuff. I would join FlyLady, but there's just one problem with that: it's called FlyLady. They should make a men's version called Shark-Raptor Man. Their tagline can be "Take care of your crap or the Shark-Raptor will kill your face."Go-Kart Relationships
Back to the auto-maintenance thing. If you don't keep up with your car, it will eventually fall apart and all you can do is hope you're lucky enough to not be inside it when that happens. Same goes for relationships. Granted, some relationships take a little more work than others, but they all need upkeep from time to time. We normally call this "hanging out." One of my mechanic friends once told me that "everyone wants a go-kart." What this means is that you buy a go-kart, you drive the go-kart, then you forget about it until you want to drive it again. There is little to no maintenance to be done. It made me start thinking about how many relationships I've had in the past that I've expected to be go-kart relationships. That was clever when I thought of it, but now it's just cheesy. But I have a rule against backspacing when I blog, so it is what it is. It's kind of like how I sketch using pen instead of pencil so that I can't erase the stuff I don't like. I feel it's more honest that way. And more sloppier.All in all, there is a myriad of applications for this whole life-is-maintenance idea. I guess the message behind it is that maintenance must be done if we want things to run smoothly and efficiently. Every time you find yourself doing some kind of menial task that you hate doing (in my case, folding and putting away laundry), think of it as life maintenance, and understand that it will inevitably need to be done again sometime in the future. It simply must be done in order for your life to run smoothly. You might get a few busted knuckles and a shirt stained with motor oil in the process, but there's nothing like the sound of an engine that just got fixed up, roaring extra loud as if it knows it's in good hands, and it's happy to be there.
This is all for now.
-R.
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