Thursday’s sourdough is exuberant

I had trouble getting the lid off, it had expanded so much. I had not overfilled the container, either. Happy dough, I guess! Probably because we’ve had the HVAC off for a few days now, since the weather has been relatively temperate; it’s been warmer in here as a result (which is fine!) and the dough loves that.

We went to Bistro 603 last night. We had some discussion about when we had last been there (almost exactly a year ago). M.’s dad passed not long after and we didn’t see them for a while because of general sadness and other commitments and similar, and I think we didn’t go back to that restaurant because of the closeness of the timing. We talked about it a little. I’d been right on the fence about even going back with them, but we’d had a lovely time the last time, and I hate to love a great, all-woman restaurant to unrelated events. I had the avocado toast for appetizer, and the tuna poke. Totally excellent, and we brought R.’s brussel sprouts home for me to eat later.

I had a whole lot of Thoughts about Feelings this morning waking up, thinking about the decluttering thing I’m noodling about. It was helpful to move from thinking about writing about decluttering, to thinking about writing about decluttering discourse. I think the next step in this process is to make the discourse very plainly about all the therapeutic ideas and language in decluttering discourse (self-help in general) and the parallels to diet and exercise discourse. M. (who is in the business) remembered the Walsh TV show when prompted, and volunteered a lot of interesting comments about the rushed nature of the therapy-aspects of the show. She started from a place of “our society”, which is one of those things (like, “In Europe”) that I alert on, because usually the next ideas / words are going to be the kind of commentary on “our society” (or “Europe”) that if someone had come up with those ideas themselves, they’d actually have some specific examples to back it up, but since the ideas just get passed around, there’s no backing anecdotes much less data, and when people stop and think for a moment, they rarely even really believe what they just said.

Yesterday it occurred to me to ask where the therapeutic community was on hoarding disorder (added in DSM-5) — no real treatments yet, but there is a picture scale called the Clutter Image Rating Scale (CIR or CIRS) that has been validated in both middle-aged and older adults. I kind of believe that the Needs Multiple Professions end of that scale, which goes with “often doesn’t believe they are the ones with the problem”, always involves dementia, but I really want some data before fully committing to that belief. It’s not totally clear to me that anyone has really dug into that correlation yet, mostly because everyone tries as hard as they possible can to avoid thinking about dementia, so they mostly only do it when someone starts wandering because then you really can’t avoid it any longer.

Looks like another beautiful day out there.

Unexpectedly good summary of hoarding

https://www.spauldingdecon.com/blog/hoarding-is-on-the-rise

This is a company that provides cleanup services. Cleaning up a hoard at an apartment building is a service they provide to landlords. You can see where they might develop some real insight as a result.

“This can leave seniors feeling lonely and as if they are separate from the rest of the world. They look for things that can help them to better cope with their feelings of isolation and depression. In most cases, this means collecting more things for the house or apartment. It could be anything from clothing to food to trinkets, and even animals for companionship.”

There’s a lot more there, but it is a surprisingly forthright and compassion description of the issues, that does not treat it as an individual problem but rather as a problem that is the result of a number of specific changes in our society.

I knew that people who hoard don’t need to buy stuff to create a hoard, but it was also very clear to me that things took a turn in the 1990s, and likely that was because there were so many inexpensive things that one could buy versus earlier. While this blog entry does a good job of hitting all the points, it could more clearly lay out the problem. Things are so cheap in our society, that there is no value extraction possible for many things, so the quality of free / abandoned goods is very high compared to what it once was. You put free / abandoned and simultaneously In Good Shape / Nice together, and put that in front of someone with a set shifting executive function problem and I think you almost automatically get a hoard.

ETA:

This is a look at literary representations of hoarding.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9629820/

“ Neither these classical European writers nor their medical contemporaries appear to consider hoarding a medical disorder during their time, but rather a prudent response to the economic circumstances in which most people lived. Hoarding was misjudged from this standpoint until the present when hoarding was seen in situations with a lack of a true economic, historic, or cultural reason, helping to focus attention on this visible disorder.”

You could just as easily conclude the reverse. Hoarding is a prudent response, that has ceased to make sense in our time, and so we treat it as a medical disorder.

Cyberst… er, online researching someone I used to know

Not an ex. I’ve already cyberst.., er, yeah, whatever.

Honestly, I hadn’t really thought about this person for about 10 years. 10 years ago, my DisneyWorld trip was supposed to (and did) include my sister and her family, JJ and their kids. It was, in theory, also going to include the H.’s (they wound up getting divorced), an ex, and the person that I am currently researching. None of those people showed up. Planning the trip was kind of surreal, because I was trying to figure out at least dinner reservations for this very large group of an uncertain size, but it kept getting easier as people bailed out on us. I was super relieved the ex didn’t show up.

But J was really distressed that the person I’m currently researching never showed up. That person, DAS, only told J that he wasn’t coming when he found out that he was being included on dinner reservations. At that point, DAS offered up a whole bunch of information: he no longer was living in Florida caring for his aging parents, because his dad had died, and he had moved to NYC to help his sister raise her very young child or children. J was kinda freaked out about the whole thing and somewhat frosty at finding out only in this very strange way.

Over the years, some information came out about J that J had not previously known, or if he had, he’d suppressed it. His mother was not Jewish, so in the view of some, he was not Jewish, but his father was Jewish. The other J, his wife, had a mother who was Jewish, but her father was not. But she counted as Jewish by people who think of things in this particular way. I don’t recall exactly the point at which J figured it all out — it was when J did a bunch of ancestry research, if I recall correctly. Finally, I want to point out that Jewish-but-didn’t-know-it J had a mother who was RLDS. I’m somewhere in this picture too (exJW) so there’s a lot of reason to see all of this as foreshadowing.

Anyway. J is worried that DAS is being taken advantage of by a crazy / domineering / verbally unpleasant sister and will be turfed out when the kids are grown. I’m skeptical. Kids tend to love the person who raised them, and it takes a lot to erase that. I knew DAS at least a little, and I didn’t see any kids he raised as hating him and being okay with mom turfing him out when they went to college. Also, the story J is telling is one of DAS’ sister orchestrating the care of their aging parents by telling her brother (or brothers) where to go and what to do. Does not sound like a person who will use ‘em and lose ‘em.

I thought, Self, do what you do best. Find out what the hell is going on here. Because it more and more sounds like there’s a religious component here that has not been fully appreciated. And indeed there is. I knew that DAS was vegetarian when eating out at other people’s houses / in restaurants, and kosher isn’t something you do lightly. I was betting on Orthodox in the background and boy did I find Orthodox in the background. Close enough to where everyone was living in Seattle, in Florida, and in NYC to be walkable on Sabbath. So. Gotta have a weird phone call with J. where I tell him that DAS didn’t let him into his house for Reasons and everyone is suspicious of DAS having social connection to J for same Reasons, and it all comes down to none of us are Orthodox, and if you are Orthodox, you aren’t supposed to have close connections to people who aren’t.

Ugh. I guess it’s better than randomly awful family. There’s at least congregational support in the background.