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Wednesday: bun, walk, liveblogging
Mar. 29th, 2023 11:24 amThe crock was kinda full so in addition to my regular english muffin, I cooked a bun. I’m going to have that for lunch with the pulled pork R. made last night.
I walked with M.
T. went to school late again, because it’s an MCAS day and he has already completed that.
I bought the book I was reading the sample of, because it’s so good. I think I would have DNF’ed it if I had read it even a year ago, because there is so much vivid depiction of insanely high (and honestly bizarre) housekeeping standards and shame enforcement thereof. The author is not advocating for those — quite the contrary.
I’m really glad I _am_ reading it, because I can now see very, very clearly how much I was talking back to those standards. That’s why I couldn’t read things like this. Now that I don’t talk back to those standards (I laugh! Much better energy! Or just go, oh, yeah, right, that’s a Thing. So. Weird. But otherwise, no emotional engagement anymore), I can clearly see how useful this book is to its target audience by teaching them to explicitly let these standards go.
After describing watching herself fold onesies, and realizing that she folded things to avoid wrinkles (one really good reason to fold, the other being to be able to fit them in a drawer in a functional way, whatever that means to you), she only folded the things that wrinkled when not folded _and which she cared about those wrinkles_. Good for her! She then used this to further develop her housekeeping values, altho she calls it “rethinking laundry rules”. She did the _utterly_ sensible Put a Laundry Basket in the Kitchen. When I had an apartment in Seattle (twice) the laundry was steps from the kitchen, so easy to just put things into the washer. When I lived in Ballard, the laundry was a few steps out the kitchen door, so I often just chucked it in there. In my condo, the laundry was _in_ the kitchen. When I lived in New Hampshire, there was a door to the basement where the laundry was, so I’d open it, chuck the dirty down the stairs, and deal with it all in a batch the next time I went down to the basement. It was not until I was in my present house that I didn’t have an easy way to deal with dirty laundry in the kitchen. The laundry was now on the second floor (so the basement door in the kitchen and that established habit was a bit of a problem. We would stack dirty things on the stairs, but that was gross (front door _right_ _there_) and a trip hazard. We moved in here in April 2009, and by the 16th, I’d already ordered a visually appealing (basketry), foot pedal hamper from Amazon. It eventually started falling apart and I replaced it in 2020. It has moved around the first floor and currently lives in the foyer, but it doesn’t look gross in the foyer because it is visually appealing and obscured from the door by a piece of furniture. Huge congrats to her for figuring out how helpful it is to have a place to put dirty laundry wherever it is generated.
She _had_ a strategy that was wait until the containers are full and then wash everything. I’ve mostly adopted a do a load in the morning or evening if there’s enough to justify a load. However, with T. doing his own laundry, it takes a while and I’ve been thinking of picking a day or days of the week for the laundry. She settled on Monday. Reducing the cognitive load and telling yourself, it’s not Monday, I don’t have to do it is quite plausible. She did what everyone else is doing: wash everything together, cold. She sets a timer when the machine starts. This is pretty brilliant! Relying on the buzzer to let you know just disappears into the noise of the household.
I know a surprising (to me, anyway) number of people who don’t have dressers or who don’t use them daily. They live out of their clean laundry basket. In her case, with small children, she stopped separating things into different closets because she had to dress all the people anyway, and she stores the clothes where clean clothes are generated — in a closet in the laundry area. *applause* I tried to get the kids stuff into their own luggage when they were little, and then I realized I was shuffling all the bags anyway, so I stopped and just packed it all together, until T. wanted his own, and then I separated that out. More recently, A. has wanted colorful luggage, so I got her her own luggage but kept packing all of our stuff in it. Finally, we’re doing carryon only, and all using our own luggage, but I’m careful to make sure I can manage both mine and A.’s, or I pre-establish with whoever else will be helping to make sure they can manage whatever I can’t. I know this sounds kinda princess-y, but honestly, the level of sensory issues means that the alternative is Not Traveling which is unacceptable to me (look, I know I could travel by myself, but that would generate a host of additional issues; this works and we’re evolving it over time). I have her deal with her own stuff when she can, and when she can’t, we already know we’ve got the capacity to deal with it for her.
“Laundry does not have to be done the way you have always been taught to do it.”
My mom was super weird about laundry. It was the one household task that she didn’t let go / actively force onto other people. Any time any of us wanted to do laundry, she was just insanely hypercritical, so for the most part, we just let her. In the kitchen, I was prepared to argue to use the kitchen and meet her clean it up after standards, but in the laundry, whatever. So I knew she had a lot of rules, and when I was still at the first apartment, I’d call her up and ask questions, but she was very unhelpful. By the time I was in Ballard, I’d just given up and started asking all my friends what they did. And what they all did was wash everything together on cold (almost all my friends were men). I did run into a few people who would wash single items on cold delicate, rather than hand wash (usually for “dry clean only” things, because none of us were paying money for dry cleaning).
Same destination, different path.
She has a nice chapter on perfectionism and domestic standards involving recycling, sustainability, etc. The doesn’t _call_ it perfectionism, but she does conclude with “Imperfection is required for a good life”, which is a really interesting take on it. I like it; it feels akin to my gleeful prefatory, “I am a terrible person”, which is designed to take me off the hook of convincing anyone (including myself, but mostly anyone else) that I’ve done anything/everything right. (If I did this from a place of shame, it would be a totally different thing and I wouldn’t advocate for it! The gleefulness is natural, at least for me at this point in my life, and is crucial to this being a tool and not just another way to beat myself up.)
Actually, more than one chapter! She has a Nora Roberts metaphor about glass balls vs plastic balls as a way of thinking about what you can drop and what really must not be dropped. Earlier, she presented a 9 square from the Spoon Theory person.
TIL about pre-pasted disposable toothbrushes. Who knew!
Great paragraph from Imani Barbarin about how “the acceptable use of plastic is always set according to what a healthy person needs to be healthy …. But when it comes to someone with a disability using plastic, everyone wants to shame them for killing the planet.”
I walked with M.
T. went to school late again, because it’s an MCAS day and he has already completed that.
I bought the book I was reading the sample of, because it’s so good. I think I would have DNF’ed it if I had read it even a year ago, because there is so much vivid depiction of insanely high (and honestly bizarre) housekeeping standards and shame enforcement thereof. The author is not advocating for those — quite the contrary.
I’m really glad I _am_ reading it, because I can now see very, very clearly how much I was talking back to those standards. That’s why I couldn’t read things like this. Now that I don’t talk back to those standards (I laugh! Much better energy! Or just go, oh, yeah, right, that’s a Thing. So. Weird. But otherwise, no emotional engagement anymore), I can clearly see how useful this book is to its target audience by teaching them to explicitly let these standards go.
After describing watching herself fold onesies, and realizing that she folded things to avoid wrinkles (one really good reason to fold, the other being to be able to fit them in a drawer in a functional way, whatever that means to you), she only folded the things that wrinkled when not folded _and which she cared about those wrinkles_. Good for her! She then used this to further develop her housekeeping values, altho she calls it “rethinking laundry rules”. She did the _utterly_ sensible Put a Laundry Basket in the Kitchen. When I had an apartment in Seattle (twice) the laundry was steps from the kitchen, so easy to just put things into the washer. When I lived in Ballard, the laundry was a few steps out the kitchen door, so I often just chucked it in there. In my condo, the laundry was _in_ the kitchen. When I lived in New Hampshire, there was a door to the basement where the laundry was, so I’d open it, chuck the dirty down the stairs, and deal with it all in a batch the next time I went down to the basement. It was not until I was in my present house that I didn’t have an easy way to deal with dirty laundry in the kitchen. The laundry was now on the second floor (so the basement door in the kitchen and that established habit was a bit of a problem. We would stack dirty things on the stairs, but that was gross (front door _right_ _there_) and a trip hazard. We moved in here in April 2009, and by the 16th, I’d already ordered a visually appealing (basketry), foot pedal hamper from Amazon. It eventually started falling apart and I replaced it in 2020. It has moved around the first floor and currently lives in the foyer, but it doesn’t look gross in the foyer because it is visually appealing and obscured from the door by a piece of furniture. Huge congrats to her for figuring out how helpful it is to have a place to put dirty laundry wherever it is generated.
She _had_ a strategy that was wait until the containers are full and then wash everything. I’ve mostly adopted a do a load in the morning or evening if there’s enough to justify a load. However, with T. doing his own laundry, it takes a while and I’ve been thinking of picking a day or days of the week for the laundry. She settled on Monday. Reducing the cognitive load and telling yourself, it’s not Monday, I don’t have to do it is quite plausible. She did what everyone else is doing: wash everything together, cold. She sets a timer when the machine starts. This is pretty brilliant! Relying on the buzzer to let you know just disappears into the noise of the household.
I know a surprising (to me, anyway) number of people who don’t have dressers or who don’t use them daily. They live out of their clean laundry basket. In her case, with small children, she stopped separating things into different closets because she had to dress all the people anyway, and she stores the clothes where clean clothes are generated — in a closet in the laundry area. *applause* I tried to get the kids stuff into their own luggage when they were little, and then I realized I was shuffling all the bags anyway, so I stopped and just packed it all together, until T. wanted his own, and then I separated that out. More recently, A. has wanted colorful luggage, so I got her her own luggage but kept packing all of our stuff in it. Finally, we’re doing carryon only, and all using our own luggage, but I’m careful to make sure I can manage both mine and A.’s, or I pre-establish with whoever else will be helping to make sure they can manage whatever I can’t. I know this sounds kinda princess-y, but honestly, the level of sensory issues means that the alternative is Not Traveling which is unacceptable to me (look, I know I could travel by myself, but that would generate a host of additional issues; this works and we’re evolving it over time). I have her deal with her own stuff when she can, and when she can’t, we already know we’ve got the capacity to deal with it for her.
“Laundry does not have to be done the way you have always been taught to do it.”
My mom was super weird about laundry. It was the one household task that she didn’t let go / actively force onto other people. Any time any of us wanted to do laundry, she was just insanely hypercritical, so for the most part, we just let her. In the kitchen, I was prepared to argue to use the kitchen and meet her clean it up after standards, but in the laundry, whatever. So I knew she had a lot of rules, and when I was still at the first apartment, I’d call her up and ask questions, but she was very unhelpful. By the time I was in Ballard, I’d just given up and started asking all my friends what they did. And what they all did was wash everything together on cold (almost all my friends were men). I did run into a few people who would wash single items on cold delicate, rather than hand wash (usually for “dry clean only” things, because none of us were paying money for dry cleaning).
Same destination, different path.
She has a nice chapter on perfectionism and domestic standards involving recycling, sustainability, etc. The doesn’t _call_ it perfectionism, but she does conclude with “Imperfection is required for a good life”, which is a really interesting take on it. I like it; it feels akin to my gleeful prefatory, “I am a terrible person”, which is designed to take me off the hook of convincing anyone (including myself, but mostly anyone else) that I’ve done anything/everything right. (If I did this from a place of shame, it would be a totally different thing and I wouldn’t advocate for it! The gleefulness is natural, at least for me at this point in my life, and is crucial to this being a tool and not just another way to beat myself up.)
Actually, more than one chapter! She has a Nora Roberts metaphor about glass balls vs plastic balls as a way of thinking about what you can drop and what really must not be dropped. Earlier, she presented a 9 square from the Spoon Theory person.
TIL about pre-pasted disposable toothbrushes. Who knew!
Great paragraph from Imani Barbarin about how “the acceptable use of plastic is always set according to what a healthy person needs to be healthy …. But when it comes to someone with a disability using plastic, everyone wants to shame them for killing the planet.”