Reading The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo

Getting organized is upsetting.

Which is why I end up reading about it. I am avoiding doing it.

But most books about organization tell you stuff you already know, like “File, don’t pile.”

I know that.

What they don’t tell you is how to make yourself do it.

So, when I read in the New York Times about The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, a book by a Japanese professional organizer, Marie Kondo, and it seemed ... well … different, I read it.

Marie Kondo, who is as cute as a button, is kind of nutty. She treats objects as if they are alive. She tells you to fold your socks a certain way because when they are in your drawer, they are “on holiday” and deserve to be comfortable. She admits having a hard time bonding with people, saying “It was material things and my house that taught me to appreciate unconditional love first, not my parents or friends.”

You’d think she wouldn’t be keen on throwing stuff out, but she says unwanted objects want to be discarded. She tells you to thank a thing for its service before you can it. A gift you hate? “Thank you for the joy of receiving you.” Clothes you don’t like? “Thank you for teaching me what doesn’t suit me.”

Kondo’s clients end up getting rid of most of what they own. “My basic principle for sorting papers is to throw them all away,” she says.

But, really, she focuses on, not which things to trash, but which to keep. “Take each item in one’s hand,” she says, “and ask: ‘Does this spark joy?’ If it does, keep it. If not, dispose of it.”

While I won’t be folding my socks anytime soon, I am all fired up to throw stuff out.

La, La, La, La Lola

Yes, I am the type of mother who tells stories on my kids they wish I wouldn't.

When my son was seven years old, we got our new puppy – and he named her “Lola” after a girl in his first-grade class. Awww.

(He swears that this girl “wasn’t a girlfriend, but a friend who just happened to be a girl,” and he may be telling the truth. If Puppy Lola had been a boy, his name would have been “Max,” after my son’s other good friend in first grade.)

“Lola” is actually quite a common name for dogs. For the most part, it fits what people look for in a dog name. It’s short and it’s cute and it even ends in a vowel.

But what I find most interesting is how people respond to my dog’s name.

When people hear that her name is “Lola,” they will almost always start singing one of three songs:

“Lola,” by the Kinks;

“Copacabana” by Barry Manilow, which starts off, “Her name was Lola; she was a showgirl, with yellow feathers in her hair and a dress cut down to there;”

or

“Whatever Lola Wants, Lola Gets,” from the musical Damn Yankees. The people who choose this one tend to be older, which makes sense since the musical was written in 1955.

Whichever one the person chooses really does tell you something about them, I think.

 Got a song stuck in your head now?

The Color Green

Our front porch.

I am sitting on my porch, contemplating the color green.

Not only is our house and our balcony furniture and even our car and, gosh, my cellphone case green, but we live in Houston, where the climate is “humid subtropical,” which is a fancy way of saying “swamp.”

From Rick & Mambo,
a California radio show

 

We live two doors down from Joshua’s, a nursery, which, come to think of it, painted its building a startling lime green the day after we put a bid on this house.

If you are going to live near a commercial enterprise – and since we wanted a walkable neighborhood, we were going to – you could do a lot worse than live near a nursery. Joshua’s has beautiful plantings and you can always pop in for a dose of greenery. Being in the woods or garden or a nursery always makes me feel better. Maybe it’s all the oxygen the plants are producing. As Franklin Roosevelt said, “Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people.”

According to Wikipedia, the word “green” comes from the Anglo-Saxon word “grene,” meaning “grow.” It is associated with youth (a greenhorn). You can be given a green light, a good thing. It is the color of environmental causes. It is also the color of jealousy and envy. (Iago called jealousy “the green-ey’d monster” in Othello.) And it's the color of nausea.

I read, here, that green eyes, which I have, are the rarest eye color; only 2% of people have them. I’m not sure I believe this since the same website has a page about violet eyes, and I’m pretty sure violet eyes, if they even exist (do you know anyone with purple eyes?), would be rarer.

And that’s all I got about the color green.





Brookwood!

My editor at The Buzz Magazines asked me to write about Brookwood, a community for functionally disabled adults just outside of Houston.

I didn't know what to expect ... but it really is an amazing place.

Click here for the article.

Can Kids Make You Smarter?

Many years ago, an acquaintance landed a great writing gig.

A children’s publisher had asked him to write about the how’s of everyday life. How does the electricity in your house work? How do airplanes work? How do computers work? All stuff adults supposedly know, and know clearly, but that most of us are – come on, admit it – a bit fuzzy on.

The great thing, he said, was that, while interviewing experts, he didn’t have to admit what he didn’t know. If he didn’t understand, he could say, “Yes, yes, of course, we as adults understand that, but how would you explain it to a child?”

My daughter recently started college. She calls to tell me what she’s up to and it’s the same things I faced when I was her age: figuring out classes, being nervous about making friends, handling roommate disagreements. (At orientation, a school representative asked for a show of hands from parents, “How many of your kids have never shared a room before?” Most hands went up. He waited a beat, then said, “Yeah, well, thanks a lot.”)

My daughter is dealing with these things, in many cases better than I did when I was her age, and it is instructive for me to watch her. Also, it is instructive, for me, to try to help her.

It was the same when she and her brother were young. Sit near a sandbox for an afternoon and you can observe every human emotion and impulse being thoroughly explored. And sometimes you are required to intervene.

Some studies, summarized here, show brain changes in parents that make (rodent, at least) parents “smarter.”

Given what happens when you interact with kids – explaining things to them, watching them work things out on their own – that makes perfect sense to me.

Secret Stash

I thought I had come up with a great idea.

I was having a hard time getting myself to do a really hateful chore: inputting information from our financial statements into the software QuickBooks for our accountant.

We have an extension, so, for us, October 15^th is April 15^th.

And no, I couldn’t just have the statements automatically download. That was my first question when this chore arose years ago. According to the accountants, there are too many glitches and errors when you just let things download.

And no, smarty-pants organized person, while I realize it would have been ideal to input the monthly statements as I got them so they didn’t pile up at the end of the year, I didn’t do that.

And it is just a peculiar kind of torture: being forced to review every single purchase and deposit we made over the past year.

So, working under JK Rowling’s theory that chocolate keeps dementors at bay (which, incidentally, it actually does), I stashed a pack of chocolate bars at my desk.

Every time I got myself to sit down and input those statements, I could have a chocolate bar.

I didn’t tell anyone in the family about my secret stash. A. My kids, being my kids, would have immediately devoured it. And B. My sweet husband, who lost 60 pounds a few years back, is dedicated to healthy eating and exercise. But if he knows there’s something sweet in the house, even if it is hidden away, the idea, as he puts it, “starts burning a hole in my brain,” until he’s begging to know where it is.

Alas, the strategy was not without its problems for me either.

The last day of getting those QuickBooks files together?  It took 3 candy bars.

 

I Hate Chain Letters

From radio station Hot 104.5

Why do chain letters even exist?

Yet, people send them on.

To this day.

Now, I haven’t received one in the regular mail, a paper letter in an envelope with no return address, since I was a kid.

I do still receive them by email, though, usually in the form of some weird horror story – someone pretending to be the police pulled a young girl over in the middle of the night, call this secret-code phone number and the police will tell you if they are the ones pulling you over or, holy shit, there’s this new computer virus going around, quick! panic!

My husband once got one by email that said if he didn’t forward it to 10 people, something bad was going to happen to him. He replied to the immediate sender, telling that person off, and then he replied to the original sender, telling that person off. And THAT person had the balls and the stupidity to get mad at my husband for daring to contact HER.

 

And like a pernicious virus, chain letters have evolved to survive in the environment called Facebook.



Chain letters ARE virus-like and they ARE gross. The worst are the ones that threaten you if you don’t send them on but any of them, including the ones that just insult you for not sending them on (like the ones on Facebook: “I know most people don’t care about cancer patients, but if you do, you will share this Facebook post”), and even the supposedly positive ones, which promise that God will love you if only you send them on (and send you to hell if you don't), are creepy and twisted.

Chain letters are little pieces of useless stupidity and ugliness that you perpetuate when you forward or share them.

Don’t do it.





Incidentally, every one of these
Facebook chain letters came
to me from a single person.