Is Your House Too Clean? with Sarah Archer

If anything, we should make more things smell like vaginas.

And with that, I will see myself out.

Welcome to Your Wrong About.

I'm Sarah Marshall, and today we have a special spring cleaning episode with our home economics correspondent, Sarah Archer.

About this time last year, Sarah came on on to talk about the Trad wife, and now we're going on a thought cruise through the history of cleanliness and the rise of clean talk.

And we are going to be asking the question: how clean is clean enough?

And how clean is too clean?

I loved this conversation because it felt like part of a bigger conversation that I'm always having with Sarah Archer about our relationships with our houses and cleaning and cooking and gender and the politics of everyday life and it just remains completely fascinating to me.

So I hope you have a good time listening.

And we also, if you are tickled by this episode, have a fun bonus that Sarah Archer was on recently about Peg Bracken and the I Hate to Cook book, one of my personal favorites.

Our most recent bonus episode, by the way, is our March bonus on Marilyn Monroe's dress and the time Kim Kardashian wore it.

That's a wonderful conversation that I got to have with Caroline O'Donoghue and Eve Lindley.

You can find bonus episodes on Apple Plus subscriptions and Patreon, and you can find our newest episode right here, right now.

Here you go.

Thank you for being here.

Welcome to Your Wrong About, the podcast where we ask you, isn't your house clean enough already?

It probably is.

And what's the historical precedent for all of this cleaning?

And when can we stop?

And with me today is our home and garden correspondent, Sarah Archer.

Hello, Sarah Marshall.

Hello, how are you doing?

I am doing okay.

How are you doing in these strange times?

Oh, you know, just toddling into spring.

I do know.

Right.

And that's part of our topic.

That is part of our topic.

Health, human services, things of this nature.

Yes.

Things that we do to distract ourselves when things are weird.

So we're talking today about the project of cleaning the house, which I think is one of the most fascinating topics in culture.

My opening question, building off of our work about this time last year, talking about the trad wife.

And I continue to have a lot of questions about home economics.

And the one I bring to you today is,

do you remember the rise of clean talk during the pandemic?

I do.

I have to say, I'm not on TikTok though, so I was kind of getting it second and third hand.

But it was still seeping out like light through a badly framed door.

Yeah.

Like

like somebody who's who's used too much cleansing fluid.

Well and so tell me like what is clean talk to you?

So my understanding of clean talk is that it was like a the genre next door to the phenomenon of people sort of making fruit loops from scratch.

Like that kind of, that there's a little bit of a sense of, there's a deliberate absurdity to it, and that there's a kind of, you know, I'm posing a question, how best to clean this thing.

And then the solution is always like, well, you dump like an entire canister of barkeeper's friend on it, and then you dump an entire thing of palm olive dish soap on it, and then you do some weird theatrical scrubbing, and it's all and that it was kind of like clean puppet theater or clean interpretive dance or something.

Potemkin countertop.

Exactly.

Like it was kind of, it was not in the genre of, say, your Martha Stewarts or your other home gurus of kind of telling you exactly the right amount of cleanser to use and the exact right brush and the exact right tool not to use too much.

And like the smallest amount that you can reasonably get away with as well, which is a very nice piece of information to have.

Which is smart and thrifty, exactly.

So that this is more, it's almost like the sort of cleaning product

like bizarro worlds version of those those weird cooking videos where people were putting all the ingredients in a single casserole or something.

And it was just some grotesque.

And there's probably a name for that.

Right.

And I feel like that has gone down or else I'm just personally seeing less of it.

But we had a lot of like wasting food theatrics for a while.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Which I just hate.

I hate wasting food.

It's just so, like, just, it's so sad.

Why do you, why do you want to waste food?

You know, the like countertop nachos or, you know, that lady who made like a million of these and one of them was like countertop spaghetti.

And And it's also a lot of transparent rage bait to drive engagement.

I think that's the main impetus.

And this kind of thing was often sort of like people in their 30s sort of acting like kids' TV hosts in a very varied to slightly unsettling way.

And in this case, it was like a grown-up woman pretending to be mixing cocktails inside of her toilet bowl,

which brings us over nicely to the world of clean talk where you first fill your toilet with with ice and then you put all your product on it so that like theoretically the ice melts and it can coat the inside of the bowl but isn't that what foam was invented for that's the story i think it's just because it's a really striking visual to fill a toilet with ice

like do you ever really need to fill your toilet with ice i'm not an expert but no you don't ever i don't think so you don't no

i am a grown-up woman who has sort of learned in adulthood truly how to clean And I've learned a lot of it from social media where, you know, I am watching for enjoyment, but where I learn in an incidental kind of way how to do the occasional thing while I'm searching for dopamine, like a truffle pig in the forest.

You're sniffing it out, just kind of snarling around.

And occasionally, accidentally, you'll learn something.

And I think we're living in a time of greater than usual obsession with like cleaning and organizing and decorating in our houses and what they say about us and who we are because of them and what we consume and how we consume it and social media is playing a big role in all of this one of the things that i have have come to believe basically which is unfortunate because i didn't want it to be true is that the secret to cleaning and housework broadly is that you have to just constantly be doing a little bit of it and if you're constantly doing a little bit of it then it doesn't pile up that much

and if each person living in a household is constantly doing a little bit of it, then theoretically it stays a a little bit for everyone rather than turning to a lot of bit for one person who is the mom who is Santa.

Exactly.

And which is also a good business model if you're the kind of person who sells cleaning products.

Yeah.

To have everybody at it constantly at like a like a low to medium simmer.

And I guess what I'm trying to figure out and what I believe is maybe like the secret to some kind of happiness is like, how much little bit do you always have to be doing?

Because I think in theory, it's like not that much, right?

You have to wash dishes and those do pile up if you do anything ambitious.

Like you have to clean surfaces, you have to sweep.

But we're also, I think, in this sort of clean talk social media world being shown a model of existing where, you know, also the people doing the most outrageous things rise to the top

because they drive engagement.

And I think a lot of people are worried.

possibly, well, kind of not believing it, but also maybe kind of believing it that everyone is deep cleaning every day.

Yes.

And so the question that I brought to you, or one of them, because I have mixed feelings about this whole phenomenon, right?

Because, like, I like to watch it.

I'm one of the millions of people who clearly enjoys watching it.

And I think there's a lot of great people on it.

There's Vanessa Amaro, who taught me how to roll a towel.

That's improved my life dramatically, and it doesn't cost anything.

Okay.

Yeah.

You roll it like it's like the way they do in spas, and then you look at your towels and you're like,

look at those towels.

And then it's like a little spa day in your bathroom.

Exactly.

And that's the light side of clean talk of the force, right?

Because it's like, it doesn't cost anything.

It's a skill.

And that's in, you know, as we always come back to, who will win the Martha crown in the Game of Thrones?

The one who teaches skills.

And Martha, in fact, is the person who taught, not me personally, but taught the community of which I am a member how to fold a fitted sheet.

And that is one of the things that I'm actually extraordinarily good at.

I got to get on that.

I do not know how to fold a fitted sheet yet.

And I guess like looking at clean talk, right?

Cause there's like, there's, you know, it's a false-sided die and a big side of the die is a terrible metaphor, but one of the sides of the die is very corporation driven.

And part of my feeling is like this is clearly driven to some extent by sort of the corporatization of everything and how, you know, if you are an influencer and you sell people Amazon gadgets and products, then you are obviously incentivized to teach them how to use the products faster so they can buy more of them and they can buy more different ones.

And we can have this sort of cleaning arms race where no one's house is giant or clean enough.

But also you look at it and you're like, corporations can, they're very insidious and they can certainly drive culture to an extent.

But if something isn't going to take off, it isn't going to take off.

And like, it's interesting that so many people, myself included, just want to watch people clean.

Isn't it fascinating?

It's a little bit too much cleaning.

And I have to think that maybe it's connected to the fact that we might be a little freaked out.

But to learn about that, maybe we'd have to go back in time.

We probably would.

I have taken to enjoying power washing videos.

Do you watch power washing videos on?

I know.

Those are very satisfying.

Those are great.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like, here are a couple of matrices of things that are happening on, right?

Where there's like a big contingent of people who are like, oh my God, there are too many microplastics.

I've got a sandwich bag full of microplastics in my brain, probably.

I have to avoid all plastics and also sleep with my retainer in somehow.

The darned invisible eye.

I don't have a retainer.

I have teeth like David Mitchell, but everyone else does.

And then there's like, in a way that feels sort of like, again, like some sort of weird balance to it, people who are evidently like microplastics maxing, you know, because again, if you're going to like clean and organize to a certain extent, then like everything is going in an acrylic container.

You have to be able to see your milk.

You have to put it in an acrylic thing and write milk on it or not.

You just trust yourself to remember it's milk.

I'm not against freakscaping, but you just got to stay on top of expiration dates or else you're going to be confused.

And,

you know, there's that.

And then there's also this obsession with cleanliness and cleaning and disinfecting everything and putting bleach on everything and exposing yourself to a lot of caustic chemicals that probably it would be nice to like limit your exposure to because you know

paired with you know know us also living in a time you know of kind of realizing how many people don't believe in basic germ theory like it was way more than i thought it would be but something i also wonder about is sort of whether around this time of the dawning of germ theory of sort of this being something we were just beginning to figure out um or to understand the scientific basis behind and also seeing people accepting or rejecting whether that is similar to what we're going through today, where we know that there are dangerous things coming into the house and like, you know, the kitchen where we prepare food and the bed where we sleep and all these other places and the toilet where we put ice

famously.

But we don't know exactly how they're getting in or where they're coming from.

And that makes us feel like we have to just

go over the top with absolutely everything, maybe.

Right.

Which kind of gets to the natural, what is it, the naturalist fallacy?

I think that this idea that anything that's chemical in air quotes is is dangerous and bad and anything that's natural in air quotes is good for you but kind of not understanding that it's sort of you're applying kind of a human binary to the natural world that doesn't make any sense and that the way in which our bodies interact with chemicals of all kinds is impossible to police.

It's impossible to trace every interaction.

And it's impossible to say, for instance, when you read an article about the fact that there's, let's say, certain kind of cancers are on the rise among younger people.

And then you're, you know, kind of consuming, you know, TikTok content about people using 10 times the amount of cleanser that they're supposed to for a given, you know, a toilet ice bath and think, like, who knows?

Who knows why these things are happening?

Maybe it's the oil industry.

Maybe it's microplastics.

Maybe it's any of the above.

Right.

And the idea of sort of fixating on what we feel like we can control

when things are out of control feels like part of this too.

Yeah.

And that's that's why the fixation on the home.

Yeah.

Well, why don't we unwind by cracking open an 1884 vintage of housekeeping manual?

Well, that sounds like a little slice of heaven.

Doesn't that sound like a little good, clean, fun?

It does.

Okay.

So this is a housekeeping manual written aimed as I think historically most housekeeping manuals are at like the young housewife starting off young ladies and kind and, you know, implicitly aimed at the middle to upper middle class white woman basically or the upwardly mobile working class white woman um but there's a lot of fascinating class language in this and um also very racist against the irish so let's let's get into that not surprising

so this is chapter eight to clean and keep clean And what is this book?

What is the title of the book?

Oh, this is called Anna Maria's Housekeeping.

And it's the character of Anna Maria telling you how to keep your house clean.

It was written by some other lady.

Wow.

I don't think I've ever seen this before.

That's amazing.

This is by an author named Susan Dunning Power who's writing in character as Anna Maria.

Wow.

Okay, chapter eight, to clean and keep clean.

The neighbors who remember her speak of my grandmother as a pattern housekeeper of the old style.

With 11 children, a large circle of acquaintances to entertain, and a fastidious husband, she managed to do and direct everything for house and family in the nicest manner without losing her serenity.

Better not lose that.

Or being other than delicately neat in her dress.

In the Yankee phrase, dirt wouldn't stick to her.

Therefore, I have always had great respect for one of her favorite maxims handed down that one keep clean was worth a great many make cleans.

Again, I think that's true, and it's also the most annoying advice that anyone could possibly give you.

You know what it reminds me of?

It's very like how to write your dissertation in 10 minutes a day.

Like, it's that you should it's like don't do it all the night before do it you know in little pieces every single day like a discipline which is so irritating and you're like you know if i hadn't waited until the night before i wouldn't be reading this book would i

here we go Still, one must make clean before she can keep clean, and Irish Katie has not left the kitchen in the glorious neatness we were talking about last time.

I don't envy you the house cleaning, but if bringing purity, order, and safety into the dark corners of the world is a heavenly mission, yours is one.

And where should such purity and safety begin if not in one's own home?

You have read of Miss Octavia Hill, the English lady who rented tenement houses in the worst part of London and had them cleaned, taking part, I believe, in the scrubbing and whitewashing with her own hands to give the wretched poor a glimpse of that cleanliness which is next to godliness.

It was one of the finest missions of the sanctuary, and I have thought some homes where education and taste had place needed a similar visitation.

She's saying rich people have gross houses too.

One would think the pictures would leave the walls, the books come down from the shelves, the tidies and knickknacks get up and shake off the dust, and homes kept with the negligent half order, which is all people seem to attempt now, their time being too much taken up with Kensington work, tennis and clubs, and socials, to see that their houses are pleasantly or wholesomely kept.

They let the poisonous dust gather under the beds and in corners, allow contagion to breed in vile, damp places left by slops, and food becomes tainted in their close closets.

Their very garments gather musty odors while they are taken up with finer things, as they suppose, as if one read poetry with a face unwashed.

There is more sincere refinement in the clean bare floors, spotless pantries, and sweet airy bedrooms of plain homes where pictures and books are luxuries than in fine houses where everything is attended to save the cardinal virtues of health and neatness.

Wow.

Holy mackerel.

So this is fascinating because it's actually, when was it published, did you say?

1884.

1884.

Okay.

Would you like to guess, just for fun, the year that physician and scientist Robert Koch discovered the tubercle bacillus?

Ooh, 1884

to

1882.

Ah,

1882.

Oh my God.

Anna Maria is on top of it.

Totally on top of it.

And this is kind of like gets into this super interesting connection to European modernism because a lot of it grew out of the reaction to tuberculosis.

That there was this kind of big push to all of what you were talking about, sort of, you know, sunlight, space, big windows,

you know, kind of no dark corners.

There were a lot of sanatoriums built and architects like Le Corbusier Corbusier and Peter Behrens and

Bruno Todd, one of the big, really, really influential early modernists, Alvar Alto, designed sanatoriums in Europe.

The chicness of flat surfaces, this was another big thing.

In the Victorian era, you wanted to show your abundance and kind of cultivation by having lots of stuff and upholstery and fringe and lots of carved wood.

It feels like a real knickknack era, yeah.

And like hair art made by young lesbians.

Totally.

Look into it.

Look into it.

I certainly will.

A lot of time and energy and persons to keep all that stuff clean, to dust every little nook and cranny.

So one stylish solution to that is to have a lot of flat surfaces and to have lots of planes, geometric.

So one of the reasons why.

I feel like I effed up in a classic Victorian way, actually, because I'm looking around my house and it's like a lot of velvets and sort of like high nap.

You had a lot of fresh cracks.

yeah a lot of a lot of knickknacks well you're very 19th century and that's what happens that's you know yes but everything is covered in cat hair that's the thing i mean

if i had like a gross beige house i could wipe everything clean but i just love surfaces that attract cat hair so what am i to do

people and i think people still sort of find it chilly like you know it's not cozy it's not homey it's not you know this sort of sanatorium it's a little museum-y it's a little museum-y it's clinical and it was meant to be because this was really kind of like in an era when people were,

you know, between that and the flu pandemic, I mean, it was a very, it was a terrifying like bacterial era, right?

If you were, you know, the 1880s to around World War I.

And that was really what modernism grew out of, at least in a technical sense.

So, of course, the fact that it was also utopian,

you know, designed to be sort of accessible to the common person.

That's what brutalism was all about.

You know, everybody could afford concrete.

It was also really, you know, kind of people were spooked by germs.

And so

one of the things that I find really interesting about like MAGA aesthetics, which is not an interesting topic.

I hate the fact that I have to be interested, but it's like...

It's forced itself to become interesting, I think, over time.

Yeah.

It has forced itself on us.

It's not minimalist.

It's really maximalist.

There's a lot going on.

It's kind of like chaka block, and there's something kind of Victorian about it.

Or perhaps even Rococo.

Perhaps even Rococo.

Let's go crazy.

Let's say it might even be Rococo.

I mean, when you look at Mar-a-Lago, it's certainly an attempt at Rococo.

Absolutely.

It's Rococo revival, and it's also kind of Spanish.

And then there's the parts where they like ran out of money and they, yeah, there's gaps.

And it's kind of that like South Florida, like sort of like Fantasia of like Spanish architecture

that was happening with the red tile and all that stuff.

But I mean, you look at Mar-a-Lago, and it's got to be a germ factory, right?

Because it's like all of these upholstered surfaces, you know, there's a lot of antiques.

To name my favorite subreddit impossible to clean, or is it horrible to clean?

Yes.

And so all of which is to say, as a long-winded way of saying, that aesthetics and cleanliness have a long history together.

They go, they have gone, they have

been in tension and gone together for many, many, many years.

It also strikes me that the early days of our most recent pandemic were interesting because there was a period when we all believed, and I think that, you know, the data was kind of supporting this, but we also were just, I think, maybe trying to control what we could, that it was spreading through surfaces right and we all were like cleaning the mail and stuff yes cleaning mail and cleaning i remember doing this i remember going to get a bunch of canned goods and like lysoling with like wipes yeah like all the cans it very earnestly i thought this was a great idea yeah i mean and that it and the thing is like it's it's nice to kind of look back and laugh about it now but like that is what you do when you don't know as much as you would really like to you know and think about what we're seeing now with a sort of Make America Healthy Again movement, which is not something that I think is good, but I think given the vagaries of what you were mentioning before, microplastics, et cetera, all of these kind of mysterious things that are

seeping into our world unbidden, we don't know what the effects are.

There's been a lot of seeping the last 10 years or so.

We're exposed to a lot of stuff.

And also kind of roughly this time period, right, the late 70s, we had all the news around Love Canal, where basically like

toxic waste was seeping into the groundwater underneath an elementary school and a residential neighborhood, and only area moms dared to fight back.

And, you know, that's the kind of the birth of the Superfund site is around that time.

So it's, yeah, in the 80s, we had kind of done

70s and 80s, we were seeing the effects of having done all the damage that we did with these like marvelous inventions that we came up with, you know, during and after World War II.

Dow chemical.

Right, exactly.

Yeah.

And I mean, and that's, and that to me is part of the picture too, right?

Because we have like one of the clean talk people who I

who I delight in following, who is very over the top, like has these

huge racks of like cleaning supplies just like in her bedroom.

Wow.

Just, you know, I think just because she likes them or because it's, you know, it's free advertising for your TikTok shop if you do that, if you also sell cleaning supplies, which a lot of people people do but like i've you know i've seen people comment like i i don't know if you should be sleeping with all those cleaning supplies in your room and like i think it's probably fine if they're in their containers but like but also there's you know you don't want to be like inhaling that stuff yeah but there's a level of daily cleaning especially in an enclosed space where if we're following the guidelines of sort of what marketing wants us to believe versus what the sort of minimum that we need to actually get something done then it feels like we're at risk of inevitably like some amount of overkill.

It does.

It does.

I think, and sort of lack of ventilation and, you know, kind of using more product than necessary and kind of, you know, it's also, you know, your home doesn't need to be, let's say, as

sterile as like an operating room.

Right.

It doesn't, you know what I mean?

Luckily, I mean, until we have to start doing surgery at our houses.

Well, but only part of the house, only like, you know, a big bathroom or something.

So it's like, if you're going to kind of like do a counter wipe down, it doesn't have, you don't have to sort of take out the big guns every time you need to wipe off your countertop.

It's like, you don't want to be sort of, you know, I've definitely had experiences when I was cleaning and kind of didn't open a window and maybe using something that was kind of on the stronger side and kind of feeling it.

That, you know, that, that feeling?

It's sort of like you, you breathe in and it's like if you're cleaning with bleach or something, it doesn't feel oh no.

I am not at all comfortable with using bleach.

Like I should use more of it because like I don't really cook meat very much.

And part of the reason is because because I don't feel secure that I know how to properly disinfect things.

And I don't have a whole other cutting board for it.

And I don't feel like buying another cutting board.

And I've been in a détente, you know.

But right, it feels like we have pretty much the information we need, I think, to know

how to keep our houses from getting us sick at this point.

Which we didn't always.

Right.

And what we know basically is like, you know, clean your bathroom, wash your hands.

Like, oral fecal is a vector for infection, infection one of the big ones and not that people didn't have a sense of that before we had germ theory they just didn't know exactly why

properly disinfect your kitchen and stuff that you handle and prepare raw meat on or with or just you know avoiding mold keeping things like

dry and um

you know like it's it's not hugely overwhelming, I think.

It's basically about like places where you eat and go to the bathroom are kind of the main focus, you know?

Pretty much.

Yeah.

And but I feel like when we look at sort of the culture of clean talk, like or the cleaning culture that you can sort of see some people exhibiting or at least enjoying a viewership of, it's like, it feels like there's a contradiction, but I think there isn't as much of a contradiction as I think there is when I get closer to it.

Because part of me wants to be like, well, some people don't believe in germs and some people believe in germs so much that they're sanitizing everything all day long.

So that's different.

But really, it's, I think there's a lot more kind of superstition at play in overcleaning, right?

Because, you know, past a certain point, it can't really get any cleaner.

It doesn't need to be deep cleaned again.

You're just doing it because you feel like it or because you're under contract.

Or you're compelled.

Yes.

And if you're compelled and it's.

something that you're aware is a compulsion, but that you're managing and that's not negatively affecting your your life then I don't know that's probably fine I mean if you're using relatively mild products then that's probably fine that's maybe the main thing yeah let's if we're gonna pour too much of something all over everywhere then let's

use some dr.

Bronners

exactly mrs.

Meyers I have never seen someone theatrically pour a whole thing of dr.

Broner's on something and I would love to see that happen and then a dramatic reading of the label it's time it's it's high time yeah but yeah that it's like there's a certain minimum amount of just like hygienic cleanliness that it's not that hard to reach.

I mean, cleaning is always hard, but that you don't have to spend most of the day every day cleaning in order to reach out.

That is like that

even Irish Katie can mandate.

I'm so sorry.

And then on top of that, it feels like...

We're actually kind of getting back into what, to my understanding, was what people basically believed, at least in the United States and sort of English-speaking cultures before we sort of accepted germ theory for a while, which is the miasma theory of disease, which is just that like bad smells are, it's vibes, it's a vibe, it's a feeling.

Yeah, can you talk about that?

Right.

So my understanding, although this, the early modern period is not my speciality, but let's say just in general, my understanding is that there was an early sense, like the word quarantine comes from the Italian word for 40, meaning 40 days, like you separated patients for 40 days.

And they learned that, I think, from physicians from the Islamic world.

Like they, they kind of like germ theory in its very earliest, nobody knew what a germ was, but there was

an observation.

They stole their ideas and then took credit.

Yeah.

Exactly.

And so this kind of seeped into, since things are seeping, Renaissance Italy.

And there was a kind of like general understanding that not what we would consider scientific, that you would sort of need to isolate a patient who had something that appeared to be communicable.

What the vector of contagion was that, you know, maybe didn't know.

And this idea that it was like a fog or a smell or a kind of

bad odor that would descend on an area, you know, and then everyone would get the sweating sickness or something.

And weirdly, it happens a lot in poorer neighborhoods.

Oddly enough.

And I'm thinking back to those, like the sort of those wild plague masks with like the beaks that are kind of like during the Great Plague.

But there was this belief that you could sort of protect yourself from the miasma by wearing this getup.

And you would put something nice smelling in it, right?

Yes.

Yeah.

Like something like fragrant, like a posy, a sort of floral or something sweet

that would kind of disinfect.

And so they were, in a strange way, they were kind of it was a stab at something real.

Like they got that there was something in the air.

They just didn't know what it was.

And I think that what this speaks to is this sort of generalized awareness and understandable fear of, you know, chemicals in the groundwater, super fun sites, microplastics, et cetera, that we cannot control.

There is just absolutely no way.

And frankly, if we had all the resources and money and time and manpower in the world, probably still couldn't control it.

Right.

Because it's already out there.

to be honest.

Like there have been a lot of barrels of nuclear waste hidden in a lot of parks, to quote The Simpsons.

In a strange way, I can see where putting your faith in something that sort of can't really be disproven because it's so innocuous, like,

you know, rather than kind of like the reality, which is probably there is there, there probably isn't a way to detoxify all the stuff that's floating around and, you know, that is may or may not be harmful.

And that it's, you know, it's beyond your control.

So kind of you sort of putting your faith in something that's a little bit superstitious, I can see where you can't measure the results.

It's, there's, there is, there are no results.

So, so, why not, you know, kind of say, oh, I'm going to kind of like ritually do this thing.

And it's, you know, it helps.

And then I think the answer to that is, and to the like, how clean does your house need to be question is like, as clean as you need it to be, right?

Because it's for you.

You're the one who lives.

It's yours.

Yeah.

And you, you know, you deserve to be able to feel comfortable with people coming over.

But like, there's in Peg Bracken's I Hate to Housekeep book.

Oh,

one of the things she talks about in that book is that no one has ever said, oh, I I love so-and-so.

She has such a perfectly kept house.

I just love that about her.

Exactly.

And if your house is a little bit ratty, it'll make the neighbors feel better and it'll make your friends feel better.

And as long as it's not, you know, unhygienic, then I think that's basically true, you know?

100%.

I think that, yeah, I have never in my entire life gone over to someone's house and thought, you know, like,

well, have you seen the top of the refrigerator?

Because I just went in there.

I mean, nobody cares.

And it's, you know, I'm pretty fastidious about stuff like this and I don't care.

Right.

It's just, I think that there are things like when people are coming over, I'll do, I have kind of like a, like a 10 to 15 minute supermarket sweep that I'll do to just kind of hit like a few surfaces and areas and kind of tidy up.

But I think honestly, like if you want to make somebody feel welcome, like flowers or something to eat, it's like, that's really, you want somebody to sort of feel like you're happy to have them in your house.

And that like, if they're not going to take a magnifying glass to like baseboards or upholstery or something to say, like, well, there's cat hair, of course, there's, there's going to be cat hair.

Like, that's just, there's cat hair.

But I think there is a kind of anxious response, which I have had to kind of unlearn over the years to be like, well, there can't be any dust.

There can't, because then what will people think?

You know, and that the fact is that most people don't think anything about it because everybody.

They're going to think you're Irish, which is true,

which is accurate.

And they're going to be right.

This also makes me think of, just

speaking of anti-Irish sentiment that famously typhoid Mary's full name was Mary Mallon.

And it does seem interesting that she became the poster child, and this is a phrase we still use today, whether we know the story or not, for the idea of knowingly spreading a disease, right?

Or I don't know if you have to do it knowingly.

I think we use that term just

in a more general way.

I think that's kind of fast and loose.

But I think it's, you know, it certainly is, she's not, she certainly is not endured as a sympathetic figure.

And to be honest, I don't think she really was because she apparently like threatened with a piece of kitchenware, the first guy who came to tell her that he thought she had typhoid.

Really?

Oh, I didn't know that.

Oh, my gosh.

You know,

you got to do what you got to do.

She's a working woman.

You got to defend herself.

But she had been apparently, I think, spreading typhoid for like six or seven years in these different households.

She works in.

And she was just asymptomatic herself.

Like, And she was asymptomatic and she also apparently believed for her entire life, at least according to her, that

she never believed that she had typhoid.

And at a certain point, there was enough evidence that she really probably needed to accept that she didn't.

But I mean, there's,

yeah, there's some interesting complexity to that.

You know, this was a case of somebody who for many years was working and remaining undetected and just kind of leaving typhoid in her wake.

And actually, I think only when she got to a more wealthy community where there hadn't been typhoid in a while and whether, where there was more of a sense of, oh, we're going to look really bad if there's typhoid unchecked.

Right.

That people kind of brought out the big guns and figured out what was going on because she would always just kind of move on to the next job.

She'd just kind of go to the next house and,

you know, spread a little typhoid and make her famous.

peach ice cream dessert, which is ice cream with frozen peaches with a little typhoid on top.

Which apart from that last part, actually sounds incredible.

I know, it sounds great.

Yeah, we should all have that.

But like, she was not the only person spreading typhoid, you know, but it was just like, it was an interesting story.

It was an interesting case study.

And it was also coming in through an Irish kitchen servant or through an Irish cook specifically.

And so that speaks to this kind of like evergreen anxiety about sort of immigrants as being unclean, which goes back as far as, you know, I mean,

as far as people have had immigrants to be racist about, probably.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Let me read you a little bit more of Anna Maria's housekeeping again, because there's just, I mean, part of this is actually somewhat useful information, but also is just the language of it is really just kind of fascinating.

Her writing style is incredible.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like blown away.

Okay.

House dust is minute particles of soil from the street sprawl in by the feet or sifted through door and window casings, fine ashes from the fire, mixed with minute scales of skin from our bodies and fluff from clothing and carpets.

These particles, nearly invisible themselves, collect in such amount that they will soon show in an unswept room in the locks of lint which gather under tables, along walls, and undisturbed places.

This waste goes on day and night, grinding of dust from roads, wear of clothes and carpets, fine dust flying from fires, and atoms from human bodies.

It irritates the lungs to breathe.

Ever so little damp begins to ferment in it, poisoning the air, and the only safe way to dispose of it is to sweep it up and burn it.

Escalated.

Don't throw sweepings about the yards or vaults, but burn them instantly.

Or if that is not convenient, keep them in a barrel to burn the first chance.

The grime on the paint left by Katie's careless washing is the sediment of dust in the water and dust settled in the steam of cooking, which, if not often aired and washed, leaves the dingy look of frowsy kitchens.

You don't want a frousy kitchen.

Begin to wash doors and baseboards, and you will see the annoyance dust harbors.

In the mouldings of doors and windows, run the dust lice, which gnaw books, paint, and wood, and are ready to fall into food.

Smeary paint invites that ugly moth, which delights in nothing so much as a greasy spot in a warm room and which will lay its eggs next in the dining room carpet.

In that dusty corner behind the wood box, a venturous ant has made her nest, and some July morning you will be surprised by her emigrant family in the storeroom, especially if spilt sugar and meal are left to tempt them there.

Under the sink, in dampness and greets, water beetles and roaches increase like wharf rats.

All these and more in swarms I have found in the melancholy process of clearing after a kitchen girl who could not be at the trouble of keeping things entirely clean.

These insects thrive on refuse, and they cannot be regarded as safe or agreeable things in a kitchen, running over food and leaving corners offensive with their traces.

Wow.

Which is like, I guess basically true, but like, boy, was that a scary way to say that.

And also

really, again, like something like

ants, immigrants.

Yeah.

I know.

Well, listening to that made me think that in this time period when she's writing, there's the kind of like dirt and grime of just being a human being on planet Earth that has, that is eternal.

Right.

And there's like the dirt and grime of the Shire.

Right.

And then there's the mysterious seepage of like industrial byproducts, which is something that doesn't begin until at the earliest, the first industrial revolution.

Which probably,

if you're worried about that being dangerous, you probably also shouldn't be burning it in a barrel.

Right.

But again,

she tried.

You know, by the 1880s, it's, you know, we're in industrialization.

So there's, yes.

And there's, you know, there is not a good handle on either one.

So I can actually see, I'm not going to say that I can sympathize with her characterization, like the sort of insect immigrant analogies, like not super great, but I do understand

that sense that you're under siege, that like things are, you know, something's in the walls.

It's kind of, you know, because it's, it takes so much effort and time to mitigate any of that.

And nothing is automated.

Everything is, is hard to do.

Yeah, it's, it's fascinating.

Yeah, and I think it is like the sense of infestation by a new kind of dirt is true and real, but then it's as today

mixing with a sense of anxiety and racism aimed at other human beings and classism crucially, because all of a sudden the clean house becomes a sign of virtue and anyone who can't keep their house clean must be a bad person and un-American as opposed to having no time.

I need to be visited by a social worker.

Yeah.

And let me also read to you just a little bit here about from this

insane book about the tools that you're going to use because here we are in a time of anxiety

racistly describing cleaning a kitchen and cleaning, you know, everything because we don't know where the threat is coming from.

And yet it doesn't cost that much.

So I'll read you what we're supposed to do.

Okay.

Have everything eatable covered closely and put away, tables and sink cleared, plenty of hot water, two pails, an old broom and a clean new one, two scrubbing brushes, a stumpy whisk broom for cleaning windows, a stout nut picker or sharp skewer of hard wood to get the dirt out of cracks, plenty of cloths for wiping glass and paint.

Old flannel or merino underwear make soft mop cloths which ring easily.

You must have good tools to work with and a well-set mop and large cloths will do the cleaning in half the time of poor ones.

If If you haven't old cloths enough, it pays to buy a yard or two of coarse toweling for floor cloths and six-penny unbleached cotton for wiping paint.

For your cleaning outfit, you will want a bath brick, which will cost five cents, a peck of clean sand, ten cents,

a cake of mineral soap, eight cents, a pound of whiting, five, a pound of washing soda, five, a can of solid lye or potash, ten, a quart of cheap ammonia, twenty-five, mop 50, broom 25, two whisks, 10 flannel 25 two yards of toweling 20 two yards of cotton 13 and all four 16 say five dollars to allow for difference in prices you would pay this for the poorest servant one fortnight or for a char woman half a day each week in two months who would not do your work nearly as well and who would waste twice the supplies you will want in the time so again great advice paired with the idea that you're doing this to prove that you're better than working class women, I guess.

That you would hire.

There's virtue in doing it yourself because you've got skills.

Because you're proving, and also, again, this kind of sense of moral superiority of like,

I can clean better than someone whose job it is to clean.

And I don't even make a living doing it, but I'm still better at it and I'm better than everything.

And the ants are emigrating into my kitchen.

You've stopped the wave of immigration to the kitchen.

Well, also, what's super interesting is that it's kind of classifying, it's denigrating the profession of cleaning and valorizing cleaning as a kind of calling right so you're not being because you're right you're not paid to clean your own house you're kind of doing that because it's it's good for your the health of your family and kind of enforcing this idea of a holy bond between yeah the woman and the home which is also interesting because this is really we have all this new dangerous dirt or you know some of it is i mean there's like soot everywhere if you're living in a city you know i mean right

things are grimy and you're breathing in a lot of really dangerous stuff.

You have during this period when industrialization is making homes dirtier, also kind of because of that technology, the first women who can be expected to keep a home all by themselves, which wasn't really, you know,

exactly, which wasn't possible before.

Yeah.

Because either you had,

you know,

you were just kind of getting by and you were doing what you could and taking care of your own house and your own stuff or you were rich and you had a house that other people could take care of.

And now this sort of era of the servantless virtue signaling housewife or the housewife who has a cleaning lady but who's not good enough and who she always complains about, which certainly is a type that has endured and who she says veiled racist things about also.

Okay, I'm just looking up how much $5 in 1884 is today.

Are you on the inflation calculator?

So about $160, but that's like for

the rest of your life, you know?

Yeah, it's pretty good.

He's also advocating for using steam heat to loosen stuff up, which again is like, you know, exactly what we're doing now.

So it feels like looking at our Victorian forebears, you know, things have changed and things have stayed the same.

And the thing that stayed the same is that expressing the lack of control you feel about the world on your home by trying to control it is, I think, just something that people do.

But it used to cost less.

And there are now so many more ways for us to overconsume products while doing it.

And one of the things that this all made me think about, and that this is, of course, inevitably related to, is, you know, we're sort of fixated on the performance of hygiene, perhaps more than actual hygiene.

And that also seems linked to the fact that we're being very, at least, and there's a lot of social media culture that is pushing us to be very over the top about how much we consume and then all of the storage space that we need to house it and organize it and reconfigure it and put it in clear containers and organize it by color and all that and i think home organizing is honestly one of the most important things that a person can do but only if they do it to the level of their own happiness because anything more than that it's a recipe for business is unnecessary it's not for you if when it stops being for you it's that's there's no point to it or you know when it stops being for the people who live in the house.

And this is, you know, I think a big driving idea behind everyone's big Marie Kondo phase, which I still haven't read that book, but I feel like I probably absorbed it through seepage into everybody else's stuff.

Right.

But this basic idea that it doesn't have to be minimalism, I think, so much is just.

having your object serve you, that like everything you bring into your home takes up a finite amount of space and energy that you have.

And so you have to make sure that the things things you have are things that you really like because everything you own is something that has to live somewhere.

You have to clean it.

You have to pick it up and clean under it.

You have to move it around.

You have to find a place for it to go.

And part of the aesthetic, I think, that we're seeing with over-the-top cleaning and also big open plan houses is

getting a big house and then needing to get a lot of stuff to put in it so that it feels complete and then needing greater systems of organization in order to make it all seem cohesive as an aesthetic.

And so really, I think the big question is, is your house serving you and is your stuff serving you?

Or are you serving your stuff?

And also, in the question of, do you need all this?

Isn't this overconsumption?

I think the answer we've come up with culturally partly is like, well, it's fine if people can afford it.

Which, like, A, you know, there's a lot of questions surrounding what affording anything means

when the dollar is so destabilized and when the economy is so erratic.

But also, I think, like, even taking that out, you could also ask whenever you want want to get something new or thinking about,

you know, just bringing a new, like a new gadget or a new gadget or a new Gizmoa plenty into your life, like, can I afford this in terms of time?

You know,

because the stuff you own costs time.

And the cleaning technology that you own and the things that you decide you have to clean in order to be, you know, maybe not necessarily happy, but keeping up with everybody else, no matter what, it costs time.

Your characterization of Marie Kondo seems right on to me because I remember watching her show and kind of reading up on her.

And I think I wrote something about her when the show was on Netflix.

And she's kind of actually not anti-maximalism per se.

Her philosophy essentially is like, she doesn't care if like, if what you really want is to have your like collection of like 800 China dolls on display in your living room, that's what makes you happy.

And like the way to make room for that is to sort of deaccession some other stuff, then like make it, make that work, like make it work for you and it isn't necessarily what somebody else would want and it's not necessarily you know it doesn't necessarily look decluttered per se but that's right it's it's about kind of exactly what you're saying essentially making your house work for you because you're the one who lives there which is a great idea to to keep in mind you know that i accidentally learned without having to read a whole book but you know that like because as you were saying like it feels like everybody is looking into each other's houses now there's more of a sense of like the home as performance and yeah it's nice to sort of come back into the reality that like it has to be for you because it's not anybody else's and you're paying for the stupid thing.

Right.

You're and you have to be there all the time.

And like chances are you have to work there.

I'm actually working right now on a piece that's tentatively called in defense of the china cabinet because there's this kind of like, I think that we've culturally we've fallen out of love with the idea of the vitrine that people are kind of, you know, it seems very old school because we have so much, there's such a push toward kind of clutter solutions and kind of organizational solutions for your house, your garage, whatever, that I think we forget to celebrate the objects that are meaningful to us sometimes.

And it's like things that you want on display that you want to look at every day that somebody made for you or that you collected somewhere that collecting, there's nothing wrong with collecting stuff.

And it's cool to have stuff on display.

But, you know, let's sort of find smart ways to display that stuff

that doesn't feel like it's a problem to solve.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

And I think it's just, it's one of those things where like cleaning and eating are like, are two things that basically everybody has to do or they should be doing.

And so they inevitably become expressions of sort of how people feel about the world.

And then you'll see people, you know, this is another big use for social media, people

telling you with absolute certainty something that you must be doing in your house or else you will die very soon, you know, or that you must be doing or else you're gross.

And nobody wants to be gross.

Yeah, I think that what maybe feels a little bit radical at this moment is the idea that it's all personal and you get to, you know, above the level of hygiene where, you know, your house isn't dangerous to you, you know, and if it doesn't make you uncomfortable, then like, it just doesn't matter what you do.

I love going into somebody's house and finding that it's really unusual or just seems very them.

You know what I mean?

Like that's so much more interesting than going into a house that's sort of like perfectly immaculately clean that looks like it was scrubbed with an intimate slice and has no personality and no stuff and no mementos and no souvenirs from travel.

And, you know, just I like going into a house that sort of has, that's full of stories.

And if you, if you declutter the bejesus out of it, then you're missing all of that, that narrative.

And, you know, it's a way to learn about a person.

Right.

And also it's like decluttering isn't something that you do once and be done with.

You just kind of have to be thinking about whether the stuff you have is still stuff that you like kind of as you go.

And

yeah, the two things I've learned that I find so annoying to be true, but I really think they are is that you just kind of always have to be cleaning stuff a little bit and then you'll never have to be cleaning stuff a lot or you will sometimes, but not that much.

And B, that if everything has a place where it typically goes, then you can find it a lot easier, which is why I have seven different measuring tapes.

Because they all went to different places.

And every time I needed one, I had to buy a new one.

And then last year, I cleaned my whole house and I found them all.

And I have seven.

Well, maybe seven is the perfect number of measuring.

It probably is.

Like one for every room.

Like you can just have to have like a me and my six roommates someday.

We all have to measure things simultaneously.

A certain amount of ritual is helpful in terms of just, you know, however much it is helpful to implement into your life.

But the answer, I guess, is just that everybody, people know individually how much they do or don't need and what does or doesn't work for them.

And I think it's just that so much of capitalism is being driven now, or of consumer capitalism is being driven now by telling us new categories of things that we're not doing enough at in order to be happy.

And maybe that's why we're not happy because we're not sleeping with all these appliances on our heads, you know?

Exactly.

Right.

I mean, they're always looking for a new problem to solve.

Yeah.

But also, if you, like me, thought that acrylic frigge bins would make you happy, it's okay.

And also they did kind of make me happy because it's easier to get stuff from the back.

Yeah, I'm right in the middle on fridge organizing.

Like, I think that you can take it too easy.

Do you still use that?

No, I do.

Oh.

I'm very impressed by that.

The back of the fridge is a problem area, right?

It's a no man's land, yeah.

Another thing that occurs to me is that I have never seen a clean talk video sponsored by Barkeeper's Friend.

And I'm not saying that means they haven't done it.

I'm not saying their hands are like, like, you know, perfectly clean.

But Barkeeper's Friend is the perfect product because you buy one thing of it.

I have, like, the thing of Barkeeper's Friend I have will be like a third full when I'm dead.

Because you don't need it.

I mean, it's not like Windex.

Yeah, you don't use that much of it.

You don't need very much of it.

It doesn't look cool when you use it.

It's not an interesting color.

It doesn't smell that good.

It doesn't show up well on video.

All it does is what it says it's supposed to do.

And it does.

Yeah.

So I guess also, like, it's, it's a truth, unfortunately, that like a really good product is not going to be marketable in this way because it's something that lasts forever and that you don't need to buy that many of.

Right.

That it's not inherently disposable.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So the stuff you really need, you're maybe not going to be encountering in the most spectacular visual way.

And that's okay, too.

And also, it's okay that we want to watch toilets filled with ice.

You know, I'm not going to tell anyone not to.

After we finish this conversation, I'm gonna go watch six or seven of those.

But okay, so Miss Sarah Archer, I threw you a curveball because I sent you a poem by Jonathan Swift that I told you I wanted you to read in this episode.

And I hope that it makes a little bit more sense now why I asked you to read it.

Okay,

so this is called, and I don't know what year it's from, but this is called The Ladies' Dressing Room

by Jonathan Swift.

1732.

Ooh, wow.

It's about Strefon and Celia.

Not enough Strefons running around.

Five hours, and who can do it less in?

By haughty Celia spent in dressing, the goddess from her chamber issues, arrayed in lace, brocades, and tissues.

Strefon, who found the room was void, and Betty otherwise employed, stole in and took a strict survey of all the litter as it lay.

Whereof, to make the matter clear, an inventory follows here.

And first, a dirty smock appeared, beneath the armpits well besmeared.

Strefon, the rogue, displayed it wide, and turned it round on every side.

On such a point, few words are best, and Strefon bids us guess the rest, but swears how damnably the men lie in calling Celia sweet and cleanly.

Is that meant to be clean lie?

Is it meant to rhyme with men lie?

I think that pronunciations have shifted during the flight.

Pronunciations.

Yeah.

In calling Celia sweet and cleanly.

Now listen while he next produces the various combs for various uses.

Filled up with dirt so closely fixed, no brush could force a way betwixt.

A paste of composition rare.

Sweat.

dandruff, powder, lead, and hair.

A forehead cloth with oil upon it to smooth the wrinkles on her front.

Here alum flower to stop the steams, exhaled from sour, unsavoury streams.

Hard by a filthy basin stands, fouled with the scouring of her hands.

The basin takes whatever comes, the scrapings of her teeth and gums, a nasty compound of all hues, for here she spits, and here she spews.

But oh, it turned poor Strefon's bowels when he beheld and smelled the towels, begummed, bematted, and beslimed, with dirt, with sweat, and earwax grimed.

Why, Strefon, will you tell the rest?

And must you needs describe the chest?

That careless wench, no creature warn her, to move it out from yonder corner.

All the time before,

as from within Pandora's box, when Epimetheus opened the locks, a sudden universal crew of human evils upward flew.

He still was comforted to find that hope at last remained behind.

So Strefon, lifting up the lid, to view what in the chest was hid, the vapours flew from out the vent, but Strefon Strefon cautious never meant the bottom of the pan to grope, and foul his hands in search of hope.

O never may such vile machine be once in Celia's chamber seen.

O may she better learn to keep those secrets of the hoary deep.

The petticoats, the gown perfume, which waft a stink round every room, thus finishing his grand survey, disgusted Strefon stole away, repeating in his amorous fits, When Celia in her glory shows, if Strefon would but stop his nose, who now so impiously blasphemes her ointments, daubs, and paints and creams, her washes, slops, and every clout, with which he makes so foul a rout.

He soon would learn to think like me, and bless his ravaged sight to see

such order from confusion sprung, such gaudy tulips raised from dung.

Wow.

I've been thinking about that for a long time.

Oh, Celia, Celia, Celia shits.

Shits.

Does she ever?

And don't we all?

And I mean, yeah, tell me your thoughts.

When you're intimate with somebody and you're attracted to them and want to be as close to them as you possibly can, that they're also still a human being who does things that are like...

you don't want to be all up in and that that that you you need to kind of navigate those boundaries in in whatever way you can and it's kind of that the edifice of this idealized person kind of falls away when

you share a house with them or a room with them.

It's, you know, and everything is up close and personal.

And when you shit in the same box, which probably is what marriage meant in the 1700s.

Or maybe they had separate boxes.

I don't know.

Different chamber pots or different.

Yeah, who knows?

I don't know.

Right.

Yeah, that you're confronted with somebody's humanity and you never kind of quite see them the same way again.

But if it's, you know, that's what you want.

Part of, I think, what the sort of cleanliness theater that we're watching people go through with kind of, you know, whether we're actually doing it or doing it sincerely or just watching it as a spectator sport,

that so much of what women are doing online lately is basically like obsessively cleaning ourselves and the spaces we live in so that not a single flake of skin can exist as evidence that we were there, even on our own skin.

We have to take that off too.

And just the idea that like, I don't know, to be a person is to be gross it's fine you can be gross it's yeah i mean it's you can't get away from that and i think to be kind of continually gross is to be alive yeah that's true to survive is to just keep finding new ways to be gross and also it's like as you age like your butt like not only right like not only does your appearance change but also like you know

It just keeps doing new weird shit.

You get hairs in new places like throughout your life, not just in puberty.

I'm getting chin hairs now.

I don't know why.

Welcome.

It's good to have you here.

And what if the wind comes up and blows them in again?

And it is only the beginning, I know.

It's only the biggest.

Yes.

You have such a long adventure awaiting you.

It's also kind of, I think there's like a generative AI slop aesthetic.

Now I have the word slop on the brain because of the poem, but it's also AI slop that is exceedingly smooth.

And the idea of kind of computer generated or synthetic, you know, is an entity that doesn't have like gross hairs or gross skin cells or whatever it is that we're constantly shedding in our domestic spaces and all around the world.

And kind of wanting to be free of that messiness.

All the stuff that we, like birth and death, all the stuff that we kind of push to one side and don't focus on.

Things that used to be much more common to see in real life that nowadays are much less so.

Yeah.

And this idea of sort of women's work being partly

concealing the grossness that just is required by existing and having babies and taking care of babies and raising beautiful cats as well.

Yeah, exactly.

Raising beautiful cats.

Exactly.

Yeah, if you want a real depressing deep dive, go into the history of advertising for products to make women less odiferous.

Oh, yes, the vaginal odor industry.

The vaginal odor industry is, yeah, it's just, it's so...

I wish they would just leave everybody alone.

I, I mean,

who decided that vagina wasn't a perfectly nice smell is what I would like to know.

It's perfectly pleasant and people need to just, yeah, just let us live.

If anything, we should make more things smell like vaginas.

And with that, I will see myself out.

It was great to have you here.

And that was our episode.

Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you for listening.

Thank you for journeying into the future with us.

Thank you to Sarah Archer for being such a delightful guest.

As always, Sarah Archer has written books that you should check out, including The Mid-Century Kitchen, Mid-Century Christmas, and Catland, The Soft Power of Cat Culture in Japan.

You can visit Sarah Archer's website at sarah-archshire.com and you can find her on Instagram at SarkshireEyes.

Thank you to Miranda Zickler for editing.

Thank you to Carolyn Kendrick for editing and producing.

We will see you in two weeks.