Category — Uncategorized

Cleaning the storage room is like picking at a scab.

No.  Not quite.  You shouldn’t pick at a scab; doing so leaves a scar.  You should clean out the storage room, gutting it of everything you don’t need anymore.  But in both cases, you bleed.

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There was a line on page 85 of The People We Hate at the Wedding: “Explore your grief until you’re one telling the story, instead of the story telling you.”  The fact that we kept so many baby items tells a story.  We thought we’d have more children.  Each item tells a story.  This is the baby mat that our imaginary baby was going to play on.  This is the stacking toy our imaginary baby was going to use to demonstrate eye-hand coordination.

Cleaning out the storage room means telling a different story.  We’re not having more kids.  We’re choosing to take control of our space and clean out the items we don’t need.  We’re the ones in charge; changing the space so it fits our needs.  This is the stuff we don’t want anymore.

But that’s the funny thing about stories: you can tell them, but that doesn’t mean you believe them.

I don’t have any need for an old stroller.

It doesn’t mean that I don’t want to have a need for an old stroller.

I wish I had someone to tuck into the stroller.

But I don’t.  So I’m telling myself a different story and gutting the storage room again.  One of these days, the last of the baby things will be gone.

The New Yorker has an article about a Japanese service that allows you to rent missing family members.  You may use the service to replace an actual person — a wife dies and the rental wife steps into her place to pretend to be your wife for a few hours — but it can also be used when a person hasn’t entered or exited your life at all.

A rental boyfriend or girlfriend.

A rental best-friend.

A rental baby.

The article gives the reason for why the creator started the service: “A lot of problems, it seemed, were caused by some missing person, and often the simplest solution was to find a substitute.”

It’s brilliant, actually, because comfort given by an actor is still comfort.

While this is about emotional comfort and emotional connection, the service isn’t that far from other forms of caretaking: “What are babysitters, nurses, and cooks if not rental relatives, filling some of the roles traditionally performed by mothers, daughters, and wives?”  Or, I would argue humans, since, you know, people with penises can fill those roles, too.

The article points out that sometimes the fantasy family ends up being better than the real thing.  One woman says that the husband she divorced had been abusive.  The rental father-of-her-child that she got in his place makes her happy; makes her laugh.  The fake ex-husband says after she leaves: “It proves a possibility that—even if we’re not a real family, even if it’s a rental family—the way we interact with each other makes this a form of a family.”

There was a part of this that appealed to me in the same way that helping out with babies sometimes appeals to me.  During those times, I get to experience the cuddles without having to go through any injections to get there.  There is no crying, no two week wait, no expensive bills from the clinic.  Just a moment of imagination while I change a diaper, give a bottle, rock in the chair.

I don’t pay for the service, but it seems like I take it anyway.

What do you think?

Josh and I are in the process of gutting the basement.  We’ve been in the process of gutting the basement for a long time.  We cull out the things we don’t need, but then we shift things from our normal living area into our storage room, and the process starts all over again.  (I know, why don’t we skip this step and just move it out of the house?  Because sometimes we don’t know that we don’t need it until some time has passed.  This is our process; we’re not going to change it.)

This time I mentioned that we should add books into the mix.  We have a lot of books.  Like half of our processions are books.  All four walls of the basement are bookcases, and all of the bookcases are filled beyond capacity.  We do not need this many books.

But I find it really hard to get rid of any.

Even when we have doubles of the same book.  (What if we both want to read Ulysses at the same time?)

There are a few that I know I will never read, or the contents will be out-dated by the time I need the subject.  There are the non-special picture books; the ones the twins liked enough when they were little, but they weren’t the ones they always grabbed for story time.  Or fiction that sounded like a great idea, but the first page never grabbed me.

What I can’t get rid of are old travel guides, even though I would never use them even if I was going back to the same place.  College books that remind me of a class.  Signed copies, even if I didn’t love the book.  Anything I may read one day.  Anything I enjoyed reading.

I don’t collect anything else.  We have almost no decorative pieces in our home.

Maybe I should just install more bookcases.

Do you get rid of books?

I finally read a piece of life-changing (or, at least, mind-changing) productivity advice: Hire your to-do list.

So the article starts out talking about how we conduct our life as if the to-do list is in charge and we are working for the to-do list, rather than recognizing that we are the boss of our time and the to-do works for us. It begins by hiring your to-do list; figuring out why you’re keeping it in the first place and how you can make it efficiently work for you as a paper employee rather than a paper task master.

But what I love is that she keeps a three-part to-do list: (1) stuff that needs to get done sometime, but it doesn’t matter when, (2) stuff that needs to get done immediately, or by the end of the day, and (3) stuff that does not need to get done. A not-to-do list, which serves as a reminder of all the tasks she rejects from her to-do list so they don’t weasel their way back on.

She explains:

This realization forces you to acknowledge there are lower priority items that you will likely never complete. Delete those non-essentials, put them on your not-to-do list, and commit to letting them go. This will prevent you from wasting precious time continually re-evaluating whether you might get to them.

It sort of feels like that advice Alton Brown gives about cleaning out the kitchen drawers. Put everything in a box. If you use the utensil, wash it and put it back in a drawer. Everything still in the box in six months are things you don’t need.

Things that languish on a to-do list are probably things that could have gone straight onto the not-to-do list, never to be thought about again.

Nerding out on this one.

The Verge has a very cool optical illusion that it borrowed from Reddit.  If you stare at the picture long enough, it disappears.  Stare at it for a few minutes without blinking.  The screen will go white in front of you if you relax your eyes.  If it doesn’t work for you below, click over and look at it on the Verge.

This picture will fade away if you stare at it (may take a minute) from r/woahdude

How does it work?  According to the Verge:

The reason the colors disappear is because the brain stops paying attention to visual scenes that don’t change … Usually, movement in the environment and of our eyes is enough to keep a scene vivid. But in this case, with a blurry image and a fixed gaze, the colors fade away.

It made me think about all the other things that fade out because my eyes grow accustom to seeing it.  A metaphor for everything that we take for granted.