Quitter

It's rare for me to quit a book.  My dear husband notes this with a certain amount of awe and puzzlement.  I will hate and gripe my way through a book for weeks (or put it down for a year, only to pick it up again) out of a compulsion to finish.  Maybe it's guilt. Maybe it's that I want to give the author the benefit of the doubt.

But recently, I've become less patient.  I've become.... a quitter.

You may already know I own too many books.  Too many?  How is that possible?  

Because they are threatening to crush us.

This doesn't even account for all the books in the house.
Yikes.

I need to read my way down.

So I am hereby announcing that I have renounced two books: S. Shoenbaum's Shakespeare: His Life, His Language, His Theater, and Bill Bryson's The Lost Continent.

I'm back!

Hey y'all... took a little bloggy sabbatical in June.  I'm back!

Things that happened:

School ended. I'm not a teacher, but it's amazing how busy the end of the school year can be simply as a parent of a school-age child!

Snoop!

There's nothing like having significant renovation work done to one's home to make you feel more than a little... revealed.

How appropriate that in the thick of home deconstruction / renovation, I should finish Sam Gosling's Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You.

Yesterday we removed our several-years-defunct masonry chimney, original to our circa-1950 house.  For the last 63 years, a feng shui master would have had nausea and vomiting upon entering because the dang chimney ran RIGHT UP THE CENTER.  And when I say "up the center," I don't mean snugged up against a wall, closet, or stairwell.  I'm talking right up the very middle of both our living room and the master bedroom (and considering the modesty of our home, I use "master" extremely loosely).  Like an ugly square pillar.  Like an 800 pound gorilla.  Like Jack's Beanstalk. 

Are ALL Americans at risk of hoarding?

A while back I read A Perfect Mess, making me feel okay about disarray - it's productive and a sign of a my active, creative mind!  Yeah!

Last week I read E.L. Doctorow's Homer & Langley.  Oh boy, not the same good feeling.

Doctorow's Homer and Langley Collyer live in a brownstone on 5th Avenue.  Homer is blind, and later deaf, and Langley is a World War I veteran, injured by mustard gas.  He is well enough to care for Homer, but becomes a severe hoarder.  Over decades, the large, multistory home becomes a labyrinth of "stuff" with only narrow pathways.  The windows are shuttered, and all but a single door is blocked. They meet with a very sad end. One day in the 1970s the hoard topples on Langley, crushing him to death, and miserably, Homer, now quite old, blind, deaf, and trapped in the house, cries out in vain for Langley....

Public safety workers removed 140 tons of
stuff from the Collyer Mansion.

Homer & Langley is in the 1st person, purportedly a letter by Homer to a mysterious "Jacqueline" (you learn who she is toward the end).  It's a bit rambling but very believable, and tragic.  It wasn't Doctorow talking, it was Homer. 

Doctorow's Collyers are fictionalized, but the Collyer brothers were real.  They lived at 5th & 128th, and their hoard killed them in 1947.  It took weeks to clear away enough stuff to find both bodies.  They had amassed 140 tons of "collected items." I've heard that in the 1950s if your kids had a messy bedroom, you'd tell 'em that they were going to turn into the "Collyers."

I have a bizarre interest in hoarding.  Or maybe I have a fear of it.  I'm not alone, because there are television series that focus on hoarding (TLC seems obsessed with them).  Clean Sweep puts kind of a funny, quirky spin on hoarding.  Although there are very often tears involved in the cleaning-out process, the subjects always get a big, lavish home makeover.  And they all live happily ever after.  Hoarding: Buried Alive is a lot grittier, following individuals whose homes are truly dangerous, who can't use their kitchens, or their bathrooms. Who are often in rough shape financially, in poor health, and terribly isolated from their family & friends. These are people who need a lot more than a professional organizer; they need loving support from family, a clinician on site during the big "clean-out," as well as significant mental health treatment ("after care").  Even What Not to Wear gets in on the game.  Part of the schtick is a segment in which Stacy & Clinton discard every single piece of (often junky) clothing that their victim subject owns so the lucky lady can go out and buy... OTHER clothes.

Just last week Time reviewed a book by UCLA researchers, exploring just how much STUFF Americans have: Life at Home in the 21st Century: 32 Families Open Their Doors.  Even Yankee Magazine ran a recent how-to article: "Hide Living Room Clutter".  Not "reduce" it... "hide" it.  What is wrong with us?  When a true-blue YANKEE has a problem with clutter, what have we become?  We buy too much stuff, for ourselves, and our kids, we're given "free" stuff all the time (go to just about any public event and you'll get a promotional travel mug, pen, frisbee, flash drive, reusable shopping bag, t-shirt...) According to Time, "The UCLA researchers say  accumulating bigger piles of stuff may in fact decrease happiness and increase stress."
Did you know: there's even a subset of hoarding called bibliomania?  Not to be confused with bibliophilia, the LOVE of books.  However, bibliophiles are very often avid book collectors.  Where is the line between -philia and -mania?

Do you ever fret about having too much stuff?  How do you feel about it?

I'm a perfect mess

Many women continually find fault with their bodies (my butt is too big/flat, I’m too tall/too short, my hair is too straight/too curly).  Nobody’s gonna mistake me for Scarlett Johannson, Halle Berry, Sofia Vergara, or Gwyneth Paltrow, but I don’t have a “body image problem.”

Instead, I have a “home image problem.”  There’s some crumbs, dust, maybe a little grime, but mostly clutter I’m constantly keeping at bay which sometimes provokes “CHAOS” (Can’t Have Anyone Over Syndrome – thank you, Flylady!).  Friends and family tell me that our home is cute and cozy.  Objectively I know that is true. My husband and I have put quite a lot of effort into updating and beautifying our 60-yr-old house (on a thrifty budget, naturally ;-).  Even so, mostly I see the flaws.  My perennials are coming up vigorously, but I see the scruffy lawn.  We’ve recently done a lot of work updating our kitchen, but I still I can’t stop moping over the sad vinyl flooring that we haven’t addressed yet.  We’ve updated our heating system, roof, electrical, windows, doors, and insulation, but every evening I frown at our shabby “tv couch” – the one that takes a daily beating from kid, pet, spills, and just plain hard wear.  Paperwork needs to be filed, laundry in all states of processing, and especially the artifacts of three people who enjoy skiing/boarding, camping, gardening, fishing, and friends, three people who are artists, musicians, readers, writers, couponers, crafters, movie buffs, and science junkies.  We would rather enjoy the truly enjoyable things about life than vacuum every single day. Being excited about these things makes life, well, messy.

the ultimate “take heart, it’s not so bad”
message for people like me.

Enter A Perfect Mess.  Not all mess is bad mess.  Some mess is extremely productive.  There are different kinds of messes, and different kinds of mess-makers.  Some potentially helpful, some downright pathological.  A college professor’s stacks of books and papers may be helpful to her in developing a new concept, but take it several steps forward and compulsive hoarders can literally become trapped and killed by the mountains of stuff they’ve frighteningly packed into their living space.  The most nimble businesses are the ones that can tolerate some operational “mess.” It’s more effective to try new ideas that don’t work out than to not try anything new; throw enough spaghetti on the wall and some of it will stick. It’s been said that creativity is most often the result of combining existing elements in a new way.  Geometric shapes, the human form, and oil-on-canvas are very old, but Cubism is relatively new.  Telephones, cameras, a pocket calendar, and devices that play recorded music are 19^th century technology; iPhones are 21^st.

“Orderliness” is a matter of personal taste.  My supervisor uses Post-its very effectively for personal visual cueing – reminders of projects pending, etc.  Conversely, I once knew an executive whose desk was always completely vacant, even when he was genuinely hard at work.  To me, I couldn’t figure how on earth he could find anything if everything was always put away (I need a goodly amount of visual cueing myself).  But it worked for him. 

A relative has asked me a couple of times, “You’re such a reader; wouldn’t you rather have a Nook?” (Note: I know this person reads quite a lot, but I’ve never seen an actual book in the public spaces of his/her house.)  NO!  I like books.  I like the bindings, the paper, and yes, they do take up a lot of space, but having no physical books in my home would feel as lonely as if I had no friends.  There’s emotional warmth to books that a Nook can never have.  I can write a loving message to a friend and give a book as a gift.  I can donate it, or I can keep it forever.  I can pass it down to my child.  When my son was in pre-school, he gave me a bookmark for Mother’s Day.  I use it often.  There are no laminated, crayon-colored bookmarks for Nooks.

I’m cutting myself some slack about my mess.  I wouldn’t be me without these things.  Or not the right style of me.  A happy side effect of not needing to be uber-orderly is that I’m also quite spontaneous (or as much as I can be with a school-age son).  A dear old friend calls to go out for a drink on a Tuesday night?  Can do!  A little ordered disorder in life is a good thing.

But I can’t decide: now that I’ve finished reading A Perfect Mess, do I keep it or give it away?