Friends, I fear I may have misled you.

Yesterday, I was all about how organized I was being. This may have led you to think that I FINISHED the project at hand.

But it turns out, upon waking up this morning, I have not.

I know, this came as a shock to me as well. I was rather hoping that some kind of nanorobotic maid service would arrive and finish up the mess that represents the rest of my apartment. But I guess I didn’t pay for that service because it’s still a mess here at Casa Sara.

But that Pantry though. That is a work of art. (although it is Labelless, so it’s probably not a masterpiece.)

I have come to the unavoidable conclusion that I am going to have to reorg my Living Room closet, where I keep all the cleaning supplies and emergency whatnots and whosits.

This really does call for some super extra value added will power, because I really don’t want to. I just want the apartment to look nice.

But the apartment is now filled with detritus from the Pantry and it needs to be put away. In the Living Room Closet, which is filled to its capacity with stuff. Much of which, I cannot tell you what it is.

Do you have a closet where you have stuff but you aren’t actually SURE what the stuff is? Or is that just me?

Please tell me I’m not the only closet hoarder. I pretend I don’t hoard because normally my living space is nicely sparse. But the closets… That is another story.

Trump, we made him

I was listening to a podcast yesterday about a man with autism who is in prison for life. I was lamenting how terrible it is that he is in hell for the rest of his life, when the direction of my mind was changed. Said man is a racist Trump supporter. He literally said we need a bully in the whitehouse.

Here’s the thing. No matter who you are, you don’t deserve the life conditions we subject maximum security prisoners to. Our prisons are the clearest a reflection of us as a brutal society than almost anything else. And yet… once I knew this man was a Trump supporter, I stopped being able to feel much sympathy for his plight.

Trump is the personification of a society that is drawn to extremes and wants the world to be dualistic. Them and Us. When I was younger, I generally had a preference for one candidate over another, but the idea of the other guy winning didn’t really bother me.

But these days we have pushed ourselves into corners and Trump takes full advantage of the boxing ring mentality with all of his ridiculous blathering, making sure everyone finds their corner and fights it out.

He is a product of us, all of us. Even those of us who think he is a diarrhea stain on the planet’s backside. Because we want to feel that there is a THEM. And that means that there should be no way to sympathize with THEM. No middle ground, no way they are like US. And Trump plays into that American Mentality quite well.

He is running a reality show not an election. He’s working people’s greed and hate and fear so that he can be the last one standing. I hope there is still enough sanity in America to flick him out onto the side of the road like a used cigarette butt, but I’m not going to stop worrying about it until he’s part of the litter in the gutter.

Have you ever forgotten to wear your bra?

I did. Well sort of. I realized as soon as I was outside. Apparently my brain has some association with the outdoors that includes breast support?

I stood at the top of the steps and contemplated my options. My hands were full of trashbags from cleaning out of the pantry and going back through two locked doors with those bags seemed hard.

And then I realized. I’m the only one who really cares. And I just won’t. So I kept walking. And when I was driving to Kroger I was wondering whether I could ACTUALLY do it. Go into Kroger with the girls unleashed.

I got gas and spent the whole time feeling like I was naked.

I parked the car, sat in the car, then reversed the car out of the parking space and went home. I couldn’t face Kroger with my boobs undocked.

It’s hard to say how much my natural antipathy for Kroger played into that, but it’s definite that my brain was screaming at me that I was naked.

It’s amazing that these free blowing breasts that I am so unaware of when I’m at home could become so all encompassing in my mind when I’m not at home. Our brains are a blizzard of irrational associations and urges. Today, despite fitting all the criteria for legal decency I felt like a naked school girl on test day.

Dilemmas in Organizing

You know what the problem is with cleaning a pantry or closet? The resulting closet and/or Pantry looks MARVELOUS. The rest of the residence, not so much.

Because there are things that don’t really belong in the Pantry but lived there for reasons unknown, and it would be CRAZY PANTS to return them there… After all, that was the reason for the reorg.

But now, I need to find homes for them. In other closets. But those closets could use a good rubbish clearing and organizing…and so just jamming in these new items seems sort of wrong when clearly I am just going to need to pull it out again…

Sigh.

Basically, I have just rearranged the mess and spread it about the place a bit. I could reconsolidate the mess into a different closet but that does take the shine off the accomplishment of my pretty pantry.

You know what would fix this? A label maker.

Trust me. Labels would just make all of it work.

No, I’m not deflecting. SHUT UP with your damn logic.

Labels are super important parts of the organizing process and I don’t have ANY! All the articles and the youtube videos endorse the labels as the key to making your life organized.

And if they were CUTE labels that would of course make it nirvana. But I’m willing to compromise on that since Cute almost always means Money and I’m cheaper than I am organized.

I hate throwing away food.

I am cleaning and organizing my pantry. In it are lots of expired foods. Food I never ate and am now going to throw away.

It’s a terrible thing and exposes me as the ugly American that I am. I often buy a thing because I’m sure I will eat it or use in a recipe and then it languishes forgotten on a shelf.

3 years ago I lived in a car and quite naturally didn’t have a pantry of food. And this year I’m throwing away food. In just three years I accumulated enough to nearly fill the kitchen trash can with expired foods in packages.

I admit it – I have been carefully and thoroughly inoculated by the American Food Industry. I won’t eat their food after the little printed on date. I am aware that they are probably still safely edible. There is a whole ridiculous thing around food expiration dates in the US, which basically mean nothing.

Expiration Dates are triggers the manufacturers put on the packaging, sometimes by law, sometimes because it’s just damn good business. They make us feel that the food turned bad on that day but in reality it’s just a date, often fairly arbitrary, that the manufacturer claims the food won’t taste as good anymore. Of course it is also a nice way to get more sales. What it ISN’T is a date when the food is no longer safe. But consumers think it’s that.

But… But… there are a few foods that can go bad after a period. Not all of them have obvious warnings in smell. And that right there is just enough uncertainty for me to throw it all away if the expiration date has past.

The likelihood is that EVERYTHING I am throwing away is fine. A kitchen trashbag full of perfectly edible foods. Most free food pantries won’t take expired food either. So that’s not even an option. Plus that feels even shittier somehow – like throwing a moldy bread crust a starving man. So yesterday I bought $20 of non perishables for the free food store. Because… it felt like a bit of nonlogical atonement for my sin.

I live in middle of a boxing match in my head. The Intellectual knowledge and the guilt of throwing away food vs the FEAR of bad food. Fear has won. Guilt is throwing a wake for my morals.

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Dear WordPress:

Look. I like you. Mostly.

But today. Today, you have pissed me off.

I got a comment on my blog post. I read it in your fancy schmancy hovering bell notification thing. I HATE the magic hovering stuff that pervades the web, but I get it – you have to keep up with the latest, even if it’s glitchy and pointless.

Today I responded with a rather lengthy and thoughtful comment to my kind commenter. I was quite pleased with my comment. And then when I hit send it disappeared and a notice came up that I had somehow sent my kind commenter to Spam Hell.

THAT, that right there, is the reason these stupid Hovery Magicy things are a problem. I’m sure I clicked something odd while it was moving mysteriously between one form and another. I certainly didn’t do it intentionally as I had no idea that was even a damn option. And the comment WASN’T spam.

I then fixed Your pointlessly created problem by Unspamming the comment, but I have no idea if my commenter was notified of this embarrassing mishap.

AND (and this is the crux of my anger) because it is UNFIXABLE, I lost my response to her comment. My thoughtful and rather long comment was LOST. Because of this UTTERLY pointless thing you have going with the hoverboard of notification hell.

I like the idea in theory – I want to have easy access to my notifications. But I’m all kinds of OK with them being in their own page. Being captured and STATIC is fine. The hovering stuff is more annoying than good. Stop the Madness. Lead the charge away from the sparkles and into the hard and fast reality of things that are FUNCTIONING PROPERLY AND CONSISTENTLY.

Sincerely,

Sara

Smiling like its normal

Yesterday SmirkPretty posted an amazing essay on 100 Blessings. Take a moment and read it. It’s worth your time. Seriously worth your time.

I decided to try it. Just look for a blessing, a small thing to be grateful for, a small thing that made me smile, a small thing of worth. 100 of those things in one day. I called them blessings, although I’m a non believer, because I think we all recognize that a blessing is a good thing in life, a thing worthy of gratefulness.

I really can’t tell you how ridiculous an undertaking this is for me. There have been times in my life, just as recent as last week, where I can’t find a glimmer of hope or light or good in the world because my brain has painted all the world into a deep void of darkness. On those days finding even one or two things to be grateful or happy about is an olympic level effort.

And then on a whim, inspired by a gorgeous blog post, I just decided to do 100 of them. In one day.

I took the approach that anything in my life or that touched my life, that was good, was a blessing worth counting. I got 20 done in less than 2 minutes. After that the hardest part was remembering. My brain is not in the habit of looking for the sparkles of light in the darkness that inhabits my life. I’m busy feeling my way in the dark.

But when I remembered, I could just look up and find 5 in under a minute. Look up right now and you can too. For example in front of me is a book shelf of my absolute favorite books in the world. Curled up next to me is a fluffy ball of pestering love, covering me is a quilt made by my grandma, under me is a comfortable bed, surrounding me is a safe apartment… Later it was the smell of cut grass, the newly planted flowers at work, the laughter of friends, the job, the purple pen, the kindness of my boss, the hard work of a co-worker, the generosity of a co-worker, the safety of the water I was drinking…

As the day progressed my day became lighter. I definitely forgot about it for hours at a time. And I lost track of what number I was on several times. I have no idea if I accomplished 100. I do know I accomplished a personal moment of revelation. I became both lighter in heart and more aware of my surroundings by merely noting to myself the blessing. It made me far more mindful.

The real question is – can this be done everyday? Can I count 100 blessings every day? The idea doesn’t seem overwhelming. The idea makes me smile. Perhaps it feels doable because I’m not at the bottom of the Abyss this week. But I will take it because it feels like a celebration rather than an existence.

Can we discuss… Emoji?

Last night I sent a message to a person who is taking care of her boyfriend in the hospital. She was exhausted and feeling defeated and I sent her a tweet of sympathy and what I hoped was validation for their most recent and shitty choice. In it I put the “shit” emoji. On my emoji keyboard it’s just a pile of poo, no face. After it posted on twitter it had a face that looks like surprised, possibly smiling pile of poo. It changes the entire emotional impact of the thing. To say the least.

A new language is evolving. A language of emoji. But rather than everyone the world over having the same picture, we have let every goddamn company design their own emoji picture – and so now we can’t speak to each other in what could POTENTIALLY be a universal language.

Because you can’t trust that they are going to get message you sent.

Unicode specifies “pile of poo” for these ASCII characters but every platform can interpret the pile of poo differently. Adding a face to a pile of poo vs a wave of smell means those two pictures have 2 different connotations.

Take the grinning smile for example: Look below and tell me that which of those grins look like the grimace of someone on a toilet with constipation? 3318bad000000578-0-image-a-100_1460464915474

You know I’m right. Apple, Facebook, Emojione and Twitter’s Graphic Artists need more fiber in their diet. I’m not going to send that and expect that someone is thinking I’m thrilled with something. I’m going to be afraid they will think I’m begging for fiber.

Samsung and LG nailed it. But don’t use it on your LG phone just because it looks great on it. You friend with the apple is going to be wondering if you are in pain.

I don’t understand how this opportunity for creating a world language could have been so horribly missed. WHY in a world that constantly feels the language barrier problem could the idiots with power at Unicode not hire someone to make each emoji, and then handed those out with the code? WHY? They could have saved countless horrible and embarrassing moments.

Fucking Morons. 😤

I’m sitting in the Living Room.

This is so rare that I don’t even remember the last time I did it. And I know that in the 2.75 years I’ve lived here I’ve sat in here less than 5 times.

I sit in bed. It’s not healthy.

But I am waiting for the UPS guy and I won’t hear him in the bedroom, so I’m sitting in the Living Room like a normal person.

I opened the blinds, which are always closed. Its actually quite bright and cheery despite the greyness of the morning. Huh. Lily is all kinds of interested in this new development and is sitting on the window sill. This is probably not wise, since she is kind of a lease breaker, but the management is aware of her and pretending she doesn’t exist because I keep her litter clean and she’s not destroying the place. And they are a service for mental health. Not having her would destroy my very tenuous path to mental health.

I am wondering if I could rearrange the furniture in such a way that I would be more likely to use the Living Room. I think if I had the small writing desk in front of the window, with a chair, I might sit in here more. It’s kind of nice to look out the window and see the world.

The heat is still on in the apartment. Low, but on. Because it’s run by an agency that is NOT always super efficient. They usually turn ON the heat in mid November to Early December. This is the first year where they forgot to turn it off though. I may have to call. sigh.

Anyway, that’s life in my house this morning. I feel like I’m in a stranger’s apartment because I’m sitting in the Living Room.

Did you know Mothers Day is NOT supposed to be a Hallmark Moment?

Listen to the memory palace podcast for the best version of this story but to summarize Mother‘s Day was supposed to be Mothers’ Day. A Day to fight for and recognize the work that women do in a home as equal in worth to work outside the home.

It was an idea created by Anna Jarvis when she wanted to pursue the work done by her mother. Her mother was also Anna Jarvis and in the mid 19th century she was an activist for women’s rights. She spend her life teaching women about healthcare and their workplace rights.

After she died, her daughter wanted to continue that legacy by bringing her campaign for women’s work into proper respect and she thought that if we had a Holiday it would raise awareness and respect for the work women do inside a home. A day that would bring women together to fight for their rights in their unpaid work. So as a legacy to her mother she focused herself on that task and won. Congress declared Mother’s Day.

And almost immediately it became a commercialized day about saying I love you to your Mom. Which upset Anna Jarvis A LOT. Because it was supposed to be about the bigger issue. It wasn’t supposed to be a Hallmark Holiday that exploits your love for you mother into a money making venture.

So instead of being able to rest on her laurels, she spent the rest of her life fighting the commercialization of a Holiday she created to change the perceived role of women in our culture. She died alone in a nursing home surrounded by Hallmark cards and candy that her oblivious fans continued to send her. She was never a mother.

Now, of course, no one knows the real reason Mother’s Day was brought into existence. And it’s hard to call the celebration of our affection for our particular parent a bad thing, because of course it’s not.

But it’s also true that we still have the problem of getting respect for the unpaid labor of Moms. That terrible term Mothers Who Don’t Work continues to plague us. We have started to head more into the direction of shared parenting, but it remains a cultural norm that women are the responsible party for all child rearing and house care and men are just helping. Clearly a holiday isn’t the route to take on improving that though.