When we lived in Seattle in the early 90’s, I became a big fan of the simplicity movement. I went to some simplicity circles and read a slew of books on the topic, and though I didn’t fully understand my motivation then, I do now. I ache to feel less overwhelmed.
This is what our garage looked like in our old, much larger house.
A couple of years ago I started to notice a trend among “lifehackers” – those people writing productivity websites – with getting down to 100, or sometimes 500 things (the latter folks were often counting individual forks and spoons). Last week I started a list of my own. I was mostly curious just to see what I’d put on it, having spent hours as a teenager writing lists like, “The Ten Best Tapes To Be Stranded With On A Desert Island”. Yes, I said tapes. You kids will just have to look that up.
The exercise is proving to be fun, as well as helpful to de-cluttering. I realized things I hadn’t before, like that I have 22 pairs of shoes. TWENTY TWO. How is that possible? I’m not a girly-girl, I don’t spend hours in Nordstrom squeeing over, you know, those girly-girl shoes. Lesson #1 of The List: squeeing over hiking boots and sandals in REI (a.k.a The Mothership) leads to much the same thing. Birkenstocks can beckon to a woman, too. I have three pairs of those, in case you’re wondering.
What I found really surprising was how much making the list helped me de-clutter my books. I only put books on the list that I’d be willing to box up and move with me to the next house, something I’ll inevitably have to do when we buy our own house again. The next house might even be smaller than this one, which means less space, fewer shelves, and fewer things; so what books would I really be willing to haul with me and give up valuable space for? It turns out not nearly as many as I thought. I’ve got 34 listed so far, which is maybe 1/6th (or less?) of my library. Thank goodness for my Kindle, which takes up just one spot on the list, but is currently holding a couple hundred books for me.
I’ll post updates as I go along. I’m only up to 59 things so far, but when you break down the categories (Books, Clothes, Shoes, Plants, etc.) it ends up being closer to 200 things. I don’t know if I’ll keep things in categories or if I’ll whittle it down to a true one-to-one type of list. Everyone seems to be doing it their own way:
Have you ever been tempted to go on a vacation with a health/food theme?
The website for a vegan cruise (from the propaganda factory PCRM – I used to like this organization for their vegan ethics until they started their program to help people go vegan, and all the foods and recipes I got in email every day were made up of gross soy meats and soy this and soy that – made me wonder where the money was coming from)…..
….and what is was like for Mark Sisson (author of The Primal Blueprint, and committed carnivore) when he went on a vegan vacation with his wife and her family. Stories of plates piled high with pasta and breads, and skinny-fat vegans.
Cholesterol and saturated fat from the perspective of people who aren’t terrified of it…..
I really enjoyed reading all this, and while I didn’t turn around and start gorging on fat, I have hugely lowered by intake of processed vegetable oils. I also liked this article on cavemen who walk among us.
I was also stunned at this woman’s before and after photos, after she went on a paleo diet. It’s hard to imagine making my own beef tallow or EATING RADISHES (heh), but I do love the idea of less processed foods, less sugar, and more healthy fats.
I myself am still working at weight loss, but I’m taking it slow and not worrying about the numbers on the scale too much. I did decide I wanted to keep track of my carbs, sugars, and fats, and for that I needed some kind of calorie-counter or diet application. I finally decided on getting an account at Calorie King, which had a special deal running for March. It’s GREAT, I am hugely impressed with the the interface and how easy it is to track foods, find foods in their database, enter foods in the diary, and print out the data you’re putting in. I recommend it to anyone interested in tracking their food and nutrition intake.
I finished Alice Sebold’s book, The Lovely Bones, last night. It was 4:14am when I finally turned the last page, and then another ten minutes of grabbing Kleenex before I could even think about sleep. I could tell Greg that the reason he slept so poorly was because of the dog farting, but it was more likely my tossing and turning, trying to manage the paperback and the unwieldy book light, unwilling to just put them both down and get some rest.
Susie Salmon (“like the fish”) is the narrator of this odd and captivating story. In the second sentence we find out she’s dead and narrating from heaven, and in the first chapter we are witness to her rape and murder at the hands of a neighbor in the winter of 1973. It’s a scene brutal in its elements and almost familiar if you watch the news, but told with such a soft clarity, details planted like signposts, not beaten over your head.
…and, as I shook, a powerful knowledge took hold. He had done this thing to me and I had lived. That was all. I was still breathing. I heard his heart. I smelled his breath. The dark earth surrounding us smelled like what it was, moist dirt, where worms and animals lived their daily lives. I could have yelled for hours.
Of course, she didn’t live. I hated that scene because it was done so well, and the violence clung to everything afterward, like a stench the story couldn’t put out. But that’s exactly what makes the book so powerful. What happens to a family after a daughter is lost to murder?
Susie’s experience of heaven was a new one for me, a way of explaining the afterlife that I hadn’t seen before. I like it when writers work on what life is like after death, I think my favorite is still Connie Willis’s book, Passage. Alice Sebold’s heaven is a place where there’s still room for personal growth. Susie finds that it’s built personally for her, a heaven made up of familiar places and objects, but with a power that slowly unfolds. She discovers she can control her environment by what she chooses to think about, elements and even people changing as she processes her own grief. She can also watch scenes from her past, and she can see everything that’s happening on earth.
She watches her family and friends deal with the aftermath of her death, and we spend a lot of time tracing everyone’s turmoil at the lack of evidence. We know who the murderer is, Susie’s dad is suspicious at first and sure of it later, but there is no proof. The heart of the story centers on how this tension affects Susie’s experiences in heaven, and the lives and feelings of everyone connected to her over the course of several years.
I kept waiting for this to turn into a murder mystery, I thought the point must be about how Mr. Harvey is taken down for this crime, and I realized later that I got this impression from watching the trailers for the movie based on the book. I won’t spoil the ending, but I will say that if you’re anything like me and your fixed preconceptions can make or break a story, don’t read this as a murder mystery, because it isn’t. It’s the story of the family, and it’s a little bit about the man who kills Susie, but most of all it’s about Susie’s transition from living to dead.
Saying it’s about “letting go” is accurate but not nearly interesting enough to describe what happens and how everyone ends up in the end. It’s more than letting go, it’s very much about how entangled we all are, and how the people that love us are a part of us, just as we’re a part of them. How does that change when we die?
I got some email today, for a local theater’s customer club members. The Lovely Bones is playing at a cheap-seats theater close by, so I roped Jason into taking me. We leave in a few minutes. The movie is directed by Peter Jackson, and I’m so curious to see what he did. I can’t imagine making this into a movie, but then I couldn’t imagine trying to get Lord of the Rings into a movie either, and Jackson did that excellently. We’ll see!
This explains why my skin starts to crawl with a weird knowing, whenever I hear the 60 Minutes ticking sound. I know exactly what’s coming next, exactly how it will be presented, and exactly how my emotions will be manipulated, even though I can’t explain why. After seeing this video? I can explain why.
When my kids were very small I was once irritated by how often our favorite kid’s shows repeated – it was the middle of the year, didn’t anyone have new episodes? I did some reading and found out that this is normal, that in fact research into child development shows that kids love repetition, and Sesame Street knows this; the same reason they have the Number Of The Day repeated twelve times in a show is the same reason Blues Clues repeats entire episodes five times a week. It’s intentional. Repetition makes a framework in little minds where information can slip in.
What does it say about both the networks and the audience when some of the most highly rated news shows on television structure themselves for five-year-olds?
I woke up to Greg and Miles leaving for work and school respectively. Miles ran, jumped on the bed, and gave planted a big kiss on my cheek. He was happy, like he always is when he’s going to school. I’ve never met a kid with as few bad school days as he’s had (I [...]
I made this sign up tonight while helping Miles clean his room. He tends to struggle a lot with keeping it clean, which I have to admit he comes by naturally. My Mom has legendary stories of my messy room when I was a kid. It was so bad that the entire family had a [...]
Ever since I decided not to become a vegan, or even vegetarian, I’ve been feeling an internal tug to leave my food blog (www.grassdirtcorn.com) behind, and start writing about my food adventures here, in my personal blog. I’m sure these feelings are partly in response to my frustration at the last 18 months of vegan-related [...]
We went to IKEA last week, to pick up some shelves. I was able to wrangle a new and desperately needed dresser out of the deal. You know it means love when your husband spends Valentine’s Day putting together furniture. It also works great for making dirty jokes at each other all day, like pointing [...]
First she pretends to call Grammy and “put her on speakerphone”. She dials the pretend number (actually making a seven digit number up), and then puts the phone on the table. “Now say hello!” she pipes at me cheerfully.
“Uh, HELLO GRAMMY!” I say. “It’s rainy here, what’s it like in Ellensburg? How are you doing?”
Silence. [...]
Listening to Pema Chodron last night while I waxed my legs. Her soothing and slightly mischievous voice commenting on the dangers of aggression, while every few minutes I RIIIIIPPPPPPEEEEDDD twenty to thirty hairs out of my leg at one time.
