Eh? Gender? Me?
The name “Sean,” like actress “Sean” Young of Bladerunner, and Stripes, as in so many Celtic names, is non binary. (Dana, Beverly, Riley, Shirley, Kelly, Brett, Reece, Robin, Casey, Morgan, Kim, Carroll, Quinn and more)Today, binary-wise, you may call me “Dude.”
I sympathized when a baffled young woman asked me: “Do dudes even see dirt?” Dudettes would say: “Obviously not.” I don’t know much about dirt, so I will digress…
There I am: After a week or two or three of constantly forgetting to buy a new box of Kleenex for my studio cabin… how frustrating… I finally buy a new box—not a normal one, but a tall square one, in tasteful blue, and I plunk it onto a dark cabinet top almost in reach of my office chair. Next day? Glancing down? At the black printer by my chair? I see there’s another square box. In dark blue. How did I miss it?
A couple days later, I glance at the top of a white counter, only a couple steps away… There, among two or three sculptures, and one or two random books, crouching extra low and rectangular, is a special Kleenex box. “What? How long has that been there?”
If I can’t even see Kleenex, no wonder my fellow males don’t see dirt.
Which brings me to The Life Changing Pulsing Magic of Tidying Up. Strange how the U.S. title dropped the word “pulsing.” Now, the help of a dude is not sought when you are “Marie Kondo-ing,” at least, not in her book. Still, what if a guy has their own place, and they sorta, kinda, know how to clean up, yet they somehow, mostly, don’t? I sympathize.
“Part of my problem,” a lady my age confessed to me, “is that I don’t make decisions easily, about where stuff goes.” My advice is— …but wait… lots of experts know lots more than I do— so who am I to give any advice? Although I could say, as the Self Help crowd would say, it’s always fine to say, “What works for me is…” using ‘I’” statements… OK then.
What is “true for me” is I’m not saying that decluttering is an athletic pursuit, but “I” read where some guy said that athletes and artists do their best in a “state of flow.” How fascinating for readers of Self Improvement books. I found a definition of flow as “knowing what to do next.” Well. I bet my lady friend would flow better if she didn’t have to pause for decisions.
What works for me better than “doing Marie Kondo,” better than classic advice to ‘declutter one spot and then start expanding the perfect area,’ and better than being “decisively (decision-ly) organized,” is to have “a form of knowing…” I mean, of knowing what to do next. What I don’t mean is any mantra like “first find all the garbage, then tidy all the floors, and then…” because that perfect advice isn’t for imperfect me. My “knowing” has to be from a paper sequential list, a list that is super-detailed with crazy-small items of categories-in-geographic-areas. For example…—never mind, I won’t embarrass myself.
The way I proceed is: To take action “after every X minutes.” You may wonder, as a fellow human, whether my “time until X” gets procrastinated and stretched.
May I digress? Although we live in an age of media consuming, and comfy couches, here’s a fact unknown to some: The federal rules for television in the early days of colour TV used to allow “twelve minutes of commercials every hour.” And no voice-overs as people were enjoying the ending tune, and reading the credits. I well remember: You could set your watch by the commercials, with six breaks per hour, meaning “mini cliff hangers” every eight minutes, with the second biggest climax always halfway through, at the bottom of the hour, so folks wouldn’t change channels. But then, well, “lobbyists happen.”
The rules now allow “16 minutes per hour.” Of course this means squishing the story; means breathless rushing end credits, with stupid voice-overs; means there will never again be any nice opening ballad like for Gilligan’s Island or The Beverly Hillbillies. And of course when old reruns do include the ballad, then some of the story must be cut out… Go capitalism!
Before you imagine me as a gifted athlete, speeding around swift and sure for every slow commercial, the truth is less romantic: I pop in a DVD, and every time the clarinets start trilling for the commercial break, I hit pause: ending up with more than sixteen minutes worth of cleaning for every hour.
With sympathy for young ladies: This “Sean method” could be yet another cleaning tool in your cupboard, one you might suggest to your “main man.” It’s better to say, “Some clown with a DVD collection made a big long list…” than to tactfully shove a Tidying for Dummies book under his nose. For couples, I guess the most realistic thing is to compose the list together “as you go along” for your first run through. How exciting, such a great excuse for a lady to hold on tightly to the remote. “The couple that de-clutter together, have their hearts go flutter together.”
At my place, I have to cycle through my list daily, daily I tell you… But still I wonder: …Am I not seeing dirt?
…
…
…
Sean Crawford, Leave your dusty comments here,
In the province of Alberta,
August
2020
I once thought of sending PBS an angry letter. Regarding a show about a man’s life: Jack Parr, the Johnny Carson of his epoch, the man who had to leave his show and then, when he came back weeks later, started with, “As I was saying…” and took up right where he left off!… This icon ended his last show by walking upstage with his big dog wagging it’s tail… And when I wanted to digest what I had just experienced, as the PBS show’s makers intended…—stupid Voice-over!
We’re talking about a man’s life! Maybe, statistically, the audience loves voice-overs, the way they apparently love movie trailers that blab the plot, but not this specific time!
