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Josh likes to tell people that I talk about waste in the same way that other people talk about murder.  I waste nothing.  I do not even waste the 30 seconds as a meal heats up in the microwave.  I use that time to put away measuring cups from the drying rack.  I do not waste food.  I don’t always eat it myself, but if you stare at Josh long enough, he will make a meal out of the remaining three bites from fifteen lingering Tupperware containers.  I don’t even waste receipts.  I use them as bookmarks.

So I just want to explain the eighty-five open bottles of dish soap, the thirty-one open bottles of shampoo, and the small army of almost-empty hair gel bottles parading across the front of our bathroom cabinet.

They’re all because I waste nothing.

Because I plan to cut open the top of the hair gel container and scoop out the last precious drop with the tip of my finger before I recycle the container.  But the scissors are downstairs and the hair gel container is upstairs.  So I place the almost-empty container in the cabinet and open a new bottle because my hand hurts from trying to squeeze something out of the almost-empty container.  And the next morning, I grab the new bottle because the scissors are still downstairs and therefore too far away if I want to cut open the old bottle.  The cycle continues.

The same thing happens with the dish soap.  When we get towards the bottom of a container, I generally flip it upside down so the contents gather in the top and come out easier.  But I can’t do that with the dish soap because the soap tends to leak out the top of the container.  So when it gets close to the end, I tell myself that I’m going to dedicate an evening to standing in the kitchen, holding the bottle upside down over the sponge so it fills with that soapy goodness.  But that doesn’t happen.  Opening a new bottle on the other hand, does.

Actually, it does happen — all the old stuff eventually gets used — but it’s not before I’ve amassed a giant collection of mostly used bottles.

I’ll admit it — it is really annoying to live with me.

(But I bake cookies.)

I really loved the BBC video last week where the guy was doing a live broadcast and his kids entered.  I loved it for that first kid’s dance she did as she entered the room.  Everyone should aspire to internally (or, frankly, externally) do that dance at some point in their day.

What I didn’t love were the various parody videos, especially the one that showed a woman on air, feeding a baby, cooking a chicken, and tending to the laundry, all while running through her talking points.  Yes, I’m aware that it’s a parody.  I’ve already been told that I need to lighten up when I talked about it on Facebook.

But comedy is a trick thing.  Sometimes we laugh because we recognize a universal truth, and other times we laugh because the piece has pointed out something we never realized.  And sometimes we don’t laugh because the parody misses the mark on both counts.  There’s a big difference between comedy that moves the conversation forward vs. comedy that moves the conversation backwards.

It’s hard to laugh when it’s the latter option.

*******

Men — totally incompetent, amiright?  That bumbling dad in the original video put out his arm in his panic and stammered around.  If a woman had been in that chair, she would have executed dance-like grace, scooping up the child without missing a beat and using the moment to deliver a witty bon mot about work-life balance.

Except she wouldn’t have.

The parody is unfunny on so many different levels.  For every woman who struggles to get everything done, implying that real women have it all together makes them feel like shit.  I don’t know about you, but I do not operate like the woman in that video.  Does that make me as bad as the man in the original video?  Do I lose my woman card?

For every woman who would like to be known for something more than her child-rearing, meal-cooking, laundry-doing skills, it sticks our socially prescribed roles front and center.  Do you remember anything she said?  I’m guessing not because the focus was on the bottle feeding, chicken-sniffing, lint-brushing actions.  Sure, the portrayal is flattering on the surface — she’s supermum! — until you realize that you didn’t listen to anything she was saying due to the distracting exterior.  It’s a gotcha! moment; you think it’s women empowerment… but it’s not.

For every man who does an excellent job co-parenting (or, in some cases, single parenting) their kids, it turns them into a bumbling fool who can’t take care of the kids OR matching their socks.  How did that man get through life before marrying that smart, savvy, accomplished woman?  Or, the alternative is that we look at the man in the original video, who was doing the best job he could in the moment, and sneer at his inability to somehow stay the course when everything is going off track.

I don’t like being reduced to a stereotype — mostly because it makes me feel like crap about myself because I really don’t fit that calm, cool, collected supermum stereotype — nor do I like to reduce other people to a stereotype.  And that’s where the conversation went this week in terms of the roles of men and women (not to mention the various other discussions that came out of commentary on that video).  I want to blow those stereotypes out of the water; not reinforce them.  Even when it’s just a parody video.

Speaking of the KonMari method in terms of my ugly couch, Forbes from time to time presents the idea of KonMari-ing your calendar.

The point, it seems, to saying no is that it frees you up to say yes to what you really want to do (vs. what others want you to do).  And that’s great but… what about not filling up the calendar at all?  Like what about saying no so you have an empty space in your calendar and then not filling it with anything that needs to be written down on a calendar and is tied to a certain block of time?

Anyway.

I decided to do this with my calendar.  I left off work engagements because I enjoy work AND it doesn’t really matter whether or not it sparks joy.  I still had a considerable number of promises on my calendar, but I immediately ran into the problem that the author addressed in the article:

So last spring I decided to analyze my calendar and, using the KonMari method, ask whether each commitment brought me joy. I believe this is why Kondo has become a guru to many Americans at the end of their proverbial ropes. She doesn’t ask if things are necessary or useful. She asks if they spark joy. Joy! That is a high bar, especially if you are using it as the filter for socks or a trip to the DMV.

I would say about 50% of my commitments sparked joy.  I genuinely enjoy the volunteer work that I do with teaching coding to kids.  I’m helping advise a new nonprofit on their social media strategy, and it’s a lot of fun to apply what I know and dream big.  But I also do a lot of things that I don’t really like at all because they’re obligations.  They’re part of living in a community.  They’re part of giving back to the world.  They’re necessary for our family to run.  It’s not that I’m so busy; I just don’t enjoy a bunch of ways I’m spending my time.

So… I dropped pretty much nothing.

I find KonMari great in theory and terrible in practice.  I can apply it to one or two things — clothing, for example — but I can’t apply it to most items in my house.  And I certainly can’t apply it to the intangibles and have the ideology create a life-changing impact.  Grab me back an hour, sure.  Grab me back full afternoons so I can read a book or take a class?  Not quite.

Instead, it felt worse to say to myself, “This doesn’t spark joy… but you have to do it anyway.”

I take ownership of my calendar.  I know I’m in control of setting my own boundaries.  I know how much is on my plate and how much I can reasonably take on and not make myself miserable.  Sometimes those facts control my calendar.  Sometimes there are other elements that are more powerful that take over my time.

Do you think you could KonMari your calendar and really achieve a difference in the way you spend your time?

Updated at the Bottom

The sofa in our basement is called the asscracker.  It’s a sectional, but we’ve put together unrelated sections, which means that there is a strange metal bar that runs down one of the grooves between cushions.  People who do not know about our affectionate nickname for the sofa have plopped down on said metal bar and gotten a sore bum.  Hence the name, asscracker.

We inherited asscracker because… well… this is a long story.  You may want to get a cup of coffee.  And we should probably begin with ugly couch.

Ugly couch is a different sofa: one that does not harm people’s bums insomuch as it harms people’s eyes and sense of taste.  It’s ugly; a hideous tan, the colour of dried urine.  We didn’t realize how ugly this sofa was when we purchased it early in our relationship.  All we knew was that it fulfilled our two requirements: (1) hid a sofa bed for guests and (2) was the most inexpensive piece of furniture in the store.

Over the years, as we sat on other people’s sofas, we wished that we had made a different choice.  We weren’t really using the sofa bed feature, and while it was a decently-made piece of furniture, it likely had been sold at such a low price because no one else wanted a sofa the colour of a urine stain.

When we moved into our current house, we made ourselves a little grownup promise.  We were adults now, and we were going to take our hard-earned money to the store and splurge on a new sofa.  The current sofa — ugly couch — would be moved into the basement’s rumpus room.

But then we moved into the house and the movers could not get ugly couch down the stairs.  They tried for a long time to turn it in various directions, but they couldn’t make it past a turn in the stairs.  Ugly couch was left in our living room.  It didn’t make sense to buy a nice, new sofa for the rumpus room.  My parents donated asscracker, which had been in storage.  We took three unconnected pieces because I liked them the most and I didn’t know about the metal bar until they had gotten rid of the other sections.

So that’s how we ended up with two piece of furniture that we don’t like for the last fifteen or so years.

A perfect storm of a bathroom renovation (which makes you look critically at everything else in your house) and a lot of articles about minimalism has made me think that it’s time to say goodbye to ugly couch.  We could get a simple IKEA sofa for the basement — something with a bed so guests could use it despite the fact that no one has used the sofa bed in the living room in the past twelve years.  And we could get the sofa of our dreams for the living room.  I don’t actually have a sofa of my dreams, but you know what I mean: something that is not ugly couch.

But here’s the thing: the ugly couch sparks as much joy as it sucks away.  It’s a sofa with a story: how we ended up with ugly couch and not the couch-not-taken (yes, there was a third couch I left out of this story) was part of our first fight as a couple.  That couch has known us from the very beginning of our engagement.  When we first got it, we used to take trips to our living room and sleep (or, really not sleep because it was so uncomfortable) on the sofa bed for a change of pace.  The sofa features heavily in early baby pictures, when we’d prop up the twins and pretend they could sit up on their own.

So first I need to talk a sibling into taking custody of ugly couch.  I need to have visitation rights and be able to go back to ugly couch and bask in its tan-ness.  I need to sleep on its uncomfortable sofa bed and say, “sofa beds really are an excellent idea.”  If that can happen, I can let my sofa-that-sparks-joy live somewhere else.  If not, I don’t know, it passes the Konmari test so I’m at an impasse.

Asscracker, on the other hand… totally fine getting rid of that one in a hot second.

Update:

The twins read this post and informed me that the proper name of the sofa is “Assbreaker.”  They wanted this corrected.  So I’m correcting it.

When we got engaged, we bought a wedding planner and Josh wrote on the first page: “Mommy, what was it like to live above ground?”  See, we were soooooo funny when we were in our twenties.  We liked to joke that by the time our kids were interested in looking at our wedding planner, we would be living in an underground bunker because the earth would be uninhabitable.

That doesn’t seem to funny anymore.

*******

Every morning when I go to wake up the kids, I peek out the window even though I know there hasn’t been snow in the forecast.  Why do I do this?  Wishful thinking?  Disbelief?

I am a lifelong Marylander.  We are owed snow days; it is our birthright.  It is the promise our state makes to all residents: we will get snow AND we will be incapable of clearing said snow from roads.  The tradeoff is the snow day.  We get to stay home and not do anything in exchange for putting up with the fact that Maryland cannot obtain sufficient numbers of snow plows.

I like this system.

But this year, we haven’t gotten any snow days.  Yes, there is snow in the forecast for Monday night, and people are running around, shrieking, because we could get anything from one inch to 400 feet of snow.  But the Capital Weather Gang has gently reminded us like a patient, cardigan-wearing grandpa not to get ourselves too worked up.  There is more of a chance for things to go wrong with this storm than for things to go right.

Sometimes you get a gut feeling on things: I just don’t think we’re going to see a school-cancelling amount of snow.

*******

I am aware that there are plenty of people on earth who have never experienced snow in the same way that I am aware that there are plenty of people who have chosen not to live on either coast and therefore going to the ocean is a big deal or doesn’t happen at all.

But that’s not the choice we made.  We made the choice to (1) live in a place that goes through all four seasons, (2) live within close proximity to the ocean, (3) live in a place that may get a little soupy in summer but is overall not too hot and not too cold.

The thing about global warming is that it’s entirely possible that some places will never see snow again.  I’ve thought about ocean levels rising and flooding.  I’ve thought about species dying out due to climate change.  But I’ve never given a lot of thought to the idea of year after year without snow.  While I know there are plenty of other people who live that way, it isn’t our norm.  It’s unfathomable that we will have to travel to experience snow, something that used to fall down all around our house.

It makes me sad, first, but it also gives me the energy to fight the good fight and support the work of environmental groups to address global warming.  Emissions are NOT going to take away my Maryland-snow-incompetence days, not if I can help it.