Cleanup time

My supervisor, possibly realizing that my school day malaise is largely the result of having absolutely nothing to do, has given me the task of aiding with the daily classroom cleaning of him form class. Every day, from 3pm to 3.30pm, I am summoned to assist class 1A to cleanse their home room on the third floor. This is a school-wide ritual, something I assume was established to slice janitors from the school budget (although there are two little old men in overalls who are part of the staff and whom I often see fixing broken chairs and carting rubbish to the incinerator).

Upon arrival at the said room, the class (42 students in a tightly squeezed desk grid, girls on the left side of the room, boys on the right) bows politely and begins to divvy up the tasks at hand. In the corner of the classroom (and in every classroom in the school) is a cleaning cupboard, stuffed with mops, buckets and squirty things galore. On the classroom wall is a task sheet, made by some administrator with no life in which the class divided up into different ‘task groups’ on a daily basis; window washing one week, mopping the next.

The chart is so confusing that usually Mr. X gives up and lets his students decide on what tasks they want by way of ‘Jung Ken;’ the Japanese version of ‘Rock, paper, scissors.’ The difference is that ‘Jung Ken’ is played in massive groups of ten-twenty people, in which everyone stand in a circle and yells “Jung ken....ho!” and displays their paper/scissors/rock hand manifestation. Of course, this doesn’t work so well with more than two players, and the general rule is that there can be no result unless there is one rock and nineteen pieces of paper. As you can imagine, this can take hours, and I have to stand in the corner and grit my teeth as the students yell out “Jung Ken...ho!” over and over again, completely unperturbed by the fact that they could be trapped in their ridiculous circle for the rest of their afternoon.

Once the tasks are allocated, the cleaning can being in earnest. And I mean that. The cleaning is carried out with the precision of a nuclear bomb scare; the desks are suddenly stacked at the front of the room and a team of moppers begin to sweep across the floor with eyebrows furrowed. A group of girls grab the squirty stuff and begin to deal with the windows; carefully scrutinizing every corner for the fingerprints of some foolish third grader during lunchtime. Another team is put on dust monitoring. They work their way around the room in a chain, checking every sliver of surface for particles and also attacking everything with the squirty stuff. There is a two page print on how to dust off the blackboard. I attempted this seemingly simply task on the first day and had the handout shoved at me by six horrified girls. Apparently the key is to start with vertical strokes and move on to horizontal after that. Good to know.

Because this mission is carried out on a daily basis, the whole cleaning thing becomes redundant. The girls squirt cleaner onto windows which are already spotless. The boys with the mops are unable to find anything to mop up. The dusters haven’t given the dust enough time to settle from their particle scouring 24 hours prior. The inside/outside shoes distinction already takes care of most of it. To be fair, I have never seen a cleaner school in my life, especially compared to my debris-infused high school in the Hutt Valley.

Talking of trash, last night I was fool enough to watch John Waters’ Pink Flamingos. It was a film that made me miss my group of Gummo-adoring friends, as scene after scene of celluloid offensiveness went reeling by me. Especially of note were the heinous Marbles couple (the wife looks like a hideous B-Grade Tilda Swinton) who keep pregnant girls chained up in their basement and sell the babies to lesbian couples. They also give each other orgasms by sucking ravenously on each other’s toes. Across town, the obese drag queen Divine lives in a trailer and puts a steak between her thighs to warm it up for dinner. Her similarly obese, brain damaged mother sits in a play pen and is obsessed with eggs and her son, Crackers, likes to have sex with the chickens. It is a fucking offensive movie and I loved every minute of it. If only cleaning could be this Divine.