I hate clean freaks who are always bragging that you could eat off of their floors. Big deal! You can eat off of mine, too: cookie crumbs, a stray Nacho, perhaps a spaghetti noodle that didn’t make it from the strainer to the plate. Personally, I think there is something wrong with people who even entertain the notion that anyone would want to forage for food on their cotton pickin’ floor!

I’m tired, too, of cleaning being associated almost exclusively with we women. It seems it’s always “the cleaning lady” and not “the cleaning man” who is coming to do some-one’s house or apartment. A female is called a scrub woman; a man gets the more dignified title of custodian. Even when a man is associated with house-hold chores, he’s pictured as a hunk like Mr. Clean, not some pitiful waif down on her hands and knees with a rag in her hands. According to the Good Book, it is MAN, not woman, who is supposed to live by the sweat of his brow, yet advertisers seem to picture only women clutching Swiffers, hugging the Pinesol , and swishing the toilet bowl brush as if they enjoy such tasks. No, no, no! It may be a fantasy world, but I prefer to identify with ads featuring beautiful women selling lip-stick, eye-lashes, and luxury cars (“It’s the Decembah to remembah at your Lexus dealer”). THOSE ads are more biblically correct as far as I am concerned. I know a lot of people who were born with the “Clean! Clean! Clean!” gene. My sister was. As a kid, she loved being inside the house– scrubbing floors, washing windows, cleaning off counters. She loved the smell of Lemon Pledge. I swear I was adopted. I was nothing like her! I couldn’t stand indoor chores and always escaped the house to go play baseball or make mud pies –any activity that would put me in contact with dirt. Charles Schultz’ “Pig-Pen” comic character had nothing on me.

As far as I am concerned, cleaning drains energy that, unfortunately, is not renewable. At least, not in my case. I just can’t see expending my life-force on a task that will have to be repeated and repeated and repeated, and is never done. I like to think that I stand with some brilliant inventors in my philosophy. We have self-cleaning irons, self-cleaning ovens, and self-cleaning refrigerators thanks to people who feel the way I do. Sometimes, when I am dead-tired and am leaning against the shower wall, I wish that God had made a self-cleaning body for the human race. That would have been nice. Really nice.

I don’t do spotless. No room in my apartment is a showroom. I agree with God that life is simply “dust to dust”, so why sweat it? Besides, I am strengthening my immune system while, at the same time, conserving energy by not over-sanitizing. If you want floors so clean, you could eat off of them, have at it. As for me, I prefer walking on them.

Jean Mlincek is a freelance writer who resides in St. Petersburg, Fla.