Every now and then, I realize that I might starve if I could not do the white-collar work I’ve become used to.

The most recent occurrence was last night, while I was cooking a tasty yellow dinner. (Yellow? yes: grilled salmon steaks coloured yellow from butter, snow peas with cheese sauce, yellow mashed potatoes, and some other crunchy veggie in yellow/brown sauce, yellow grapefuit juice) The trigger for my today’s weblog entry was the prepation of the snow peas.

Other than a quick washing en masse, getting snow peas ready for consumption involves taking each individual pod, and ripping off the two thread-like fibres that seal their long edges. These threads feel weird in the mouth, and must therefore go. The ripping movements take about five seconds per pod, and require a only a bit of finger dexterity. However, the sheer number of pods needed for a meal can be make this task utterly maddening: probably thirty or forty per person!

While a factory worker from the 1800s might have been happy doing the exact same movement hundreds of times a day, there is a sense of disturbance, of building tension, whenever I work on snow peas. After the first few dozen, my neck muscles tighten, I get a cold paralytic chill running down to my hands, and an irrational anger starts to build, as my body starts to refuse to do the same thing over and over and over and over again …. and over. It’s a spectacular sensation that I can’t seem to control consciously.

But finally I figured out a way, something I’m sure those old factory workers have too, to introduce artificial variation in a fundamentally repetitive task. I switched hands! I exchanged my holding & ripping hands, and the task suddenly became a small challenge. The brain stopped rebelling for quite some time. Each time I started tensing up, I switched hands or positions, and the work could continue.

I periodically go through a phase wanting to train a bit of ambidextrousness into myself, operating door knobs, toothbrushes, performing ordinary habitual motions with the “wrong” hand. It turns the mundane into munderful. Or something. Try it, next time you’re bored.

UPDATE: Knitting yarn must be saturated with some sort of gas to block the immobilizing intellectual pain inherent in its similar repetitive-motion assembly.