Life Laundry
The less I post, the more traffic I get. It’s an odd phenomenon, and the only thing to which I can attribute it is my uncanny ability to brighten any room…just by leaving it.
But my relative silence for the past few months has nothing to do with increasing readership and everything to do with doing laundry.
Life Laundry is a show on BBC America where they help people who have incredibly cluttered homes. We’re not talking about everyday clutter here…we’re talking crazy-cat-lady-but-without-the-cats clutter. The first thing they do on the show is empty everything out of the house, stacking it on the law. Then they go through all of the rubbish that has collected over the years, forcing the homeowner to make hard decisions about what stays and what goes. Then, after all the excess has been sold, donated, or trashed, they allow a reasonable number of carefully-considered items back into the newly-redecorated house.
But Dawna Walter, who hosts the show, isn’t so much an organizational expert as she is a storage therapist. (Think: Dr. Phil meets California Closets.) So as the homeowners go through their mountains of belongings, she helps them understand the reasons they got into trouble in the first place. Some people are hoarders because they grew up with nothing. Some people keep everything from their past because they don’t much care for the present and have no real hope for the future. And as you watch them make this personal journey of self-discovery and handy storage solutions, it’s all very cathartic.
I had a similar catharsis with my own personal belongings a few years ago, but I hadn’t catharted enough. Because, while my sock drawer is impeccable, I still had an incredible amount of cruft clogging up my brain. I couldn’t get from the temporal lobe to the occipital lobe without circling through the parietal because of all of the old newspapers I had stacked in the hallway.
So, for the past four months, I’ve had my life out on the lawn: sorting through the crap, quitting about a dozen non-paying part-time “jobs” I’d picked up somewhere along the way, finishing up a number of long-overdue projects, and tying up what seemed like tens of thousands of loose ends (technical, personal, professional). It was, quite honestly, a miserable four months, with little sleep and even less down-time. But it was worth it. I think.
But now, before I can move a reasonable number of carefully-considered items back in, I need to acknowledge the reasons I got into trouble in the first place.
They are numerous:
- Saying “yes” far too easily and far too often.
- Not guarding my personal time with the same vigor as a mother bear guards her Tuesday bunko nights.
- Allowing the Internet to destroy me.
- A familial propensity to squander vast amounts of temporal resources in endless tinkering.
But my biggest problem is that I keep falling into the trap of “If time allows…”
“After the girls go to bed, I need to finish the laundry, clean the bathroom, and re-string the autoharp. Then, if time allows, I’ll work on <insert really-meaningful-and-important-but-not-absolutely-urgent project here>.”
…or…
“This weekend I have to rebuild those two computers, upgrade the school’s firewall, and varnish my thighs. Then, if time allows, I need to get back to work on <insert really-meaningful-and-important-but-not-absolutely-urgent project here>.”
Those really-meaningful-and-important-but-not-absolutely-urgent projects are, as the name would imply, the ones that are the most meaningful and important to me personally; the ones I don’t want to rush through or try to do when I’m distracted. And I keep thinking that if I can just get the trivial and tedious stuff out of the way, I can really concentrate on the really meaningful and important stuff.
But the problem with “if time allows” is that time doesn’t allow for crap. The trivial and tedious stuff always expands to fill all available time, so while the trivial and tedious stuff gets done, the really meaningful and important stuff never does.
I’m Getting Stuff Done, just not the right things.
Of course, this isn’t time management rocket science. (Mr. Covey and His 7 Dwarves were tackling this problem a decade ago.) So now that the laundry has been folded, and the previous obligations have been fulfilled, and the deck has been cleared, and the palette has been cleansed, and the belfry is bat-free, let’s see if I can get the right things done.
Comments
Pam
I’m just really glad I don’t have to look at Jack Black anymore when I check your site for new posts. Phew.
jenny
You should have included “cluttering” in the list of family traits:
“A familial propensity to squander vast amounts of temporal resources in tinkering and in acquiring and endlessly re-arranging physical, mental and emotional clutter.”
Kate
This explains a great deal about your thighs.
As many people know, I certainly am not to the point that I can deal with my brain-cruft. I have far, far too much LITERAL cruft. And I GET TO SAY IT - but NO ONE ELSE NEEDS TO TELL ME I HAVE TOO MUCH STUFF EVER, EVER AGAIN BELIEVE ME I KNOW IT AT SUCH A DEEP AND ABIDING LEVEL THAT I COULD GET TO THE POINT THAT ALL I OWNED WAS A TOOTHBRUSH AND ONE MUUMUU* AND I WOULD FEEL CLUTTERED FOREVER AND FOREVER. Oh, pardon me, I think my neurosis is showing
I did, the other day, discover an inadvertent way to get rid of SOME cruft. The main water valve to the house is in “my” bedroom. Oh, the power I wield - at any moment I could deprive the whole household of water - mhwaa ha ha ha (and other maniacal laughter). Anyhoo, my Parents are re-doing both upstairs bathrooms (they are only taking them apart one at a time, but there are tiles, new and old toilets, baskets and bins and five-thousand towel racks EVERYWHERE). The other day the nice man came to take out the old vanity and toilet from the master bathroom. This, evidently, caused a very bad flood (ew - don’t think too hard about it). It sent water down into my bathroom and made the patch in the ceiling where it use to leak damp. A cave-in is inevitable. That’s where the Kitten Children like to sit, especially BeBe - next to the “lucky” bamboo that’s not bamboo. We’ll see how lucky that is. Now, Sarah had been turning the water on and off all day, and at some point she came in to the guest room where I was sleeping and said that there was a “drip.” I told her where a towel was and instructed her to wrap it about the pipe (along with the athletic socks already in place - ??? - Dad????). What I did NOT know was that it was actually a flood on and off all day; I put a big garbage can under it later when it was dripping consistently (with the water OFF). What I didn’t know, because right at the site of the flood was evidently where I had been discarding cardboard boxes in order to break them down and recycle them (so we were walking on them in their sad and squished state - saving me the breaking down energy?), was that there was that the lime green shag carpet was SOAKED for at least four or five yards about the area of the faucet. Shirleen followed the instructions of our very nice plumber on the phone to tighten the valve and fixed the problem (related to flooding - NOT related to the other flooding - I don’t know - just TOO MUCH WATER, as Mickey Mouse would say - I’ll explain that another time). Shirleen got rid of many of the boxes and other random junk from the area. So I just need strategic household disasters and I will even put up my shoe racks and PUT ALL MY SHOES IN THEM. And yeS, I DID, and I will NOT take any Imelda Marcos-type remarks right now (just because my “dress” shoes have to live in the guest bedroom closet because there is no room for them…)
*I do not own a muumuu, truth be told. It was just the most all-encompassing garment I could think of at the moment. So take THAT all you cynics who think I own EVERYTHING. I don’t own an athletic supporter EITHER.
Kate
Wow. That’s blog comment cruft if I’ve ever seen it. Sorry…
Grettir
Pam, I think I may have set back Mr. Black’s career rather significantly. Even years from now, regular readers of this site may not be able to see his face without being overcome by feelings of profound disappointment.