2009

Waiting from RhiannonDaire

As the new year begins and I return from a cozy party with friends, I click through a bunch of blogs. They catalog resolutions, antiestablishmentarian rejection of resolutions, self-help strategies, and a slew of advice that, when taken in all at once, is pretty useless. But through it all, an especially warm-hearted, apparently timeless old sentiment from Neil Gaiman stands out to me:

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't forget to make some art -- write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.

TiLT

Things i Love Today:

- the guy who brushed his fingertips along the Christmas trees lining Astor Place between Lafayette and Broadway, smiling to himself
- fallen leaves on the ground that look like paper stars when the light catches them and I see them out of the corner of my eye
- hearing two guys singing this song in unison as I walked down Washington Place
- getting an 88 on the Human Development test I thought I failed and then getting it raised to a 92
- when my entire German class exclaims in upset unison about getting a recent test back. Those kids are too much haha.

"Rabbit rabbit"

Happy December! I have not been posting much, not for lack of exciting material. Thanksgiving was a really great break for me. I went to D.C. and had a very cathartic, enlightening conversation with my good friend S on the bus back to New York at 10 p.m. Saturday. The two of us discovered, among other things, that the present does not exist - only the past and future - and felt very wise/deep.

But the most valuable thing I took away from the conversation was something S imparted to me while we were discussing our respective, overwhelming levels of stress. She said, and it is so simple: Thinking about the things that stress you out is not going to help you. I told you, simple! But it's something that has helped me immensely in the past few days to control my stress level. For the first time, I am really taking things one step at a time. This morning, I woke up with that familiarly vague sense of panic that my day ahead was going to bring chaos and stress, but I murmured, "First things first. Get up and eat breakfast." And it soothed me.

It remains to be seen whether this attitude is a false sense of security about all the stressful things I still have to accomplish. But whatever it is, it's a quick fix that seems to be working.

Anyway, here is a really cool song that LJ user binsybaby, a very talented artist, posted today. It's a 8-bit Nintendo version of You Can't Hurry Love. !! I loved that song already, but this makes it even more awesome.

Sites I Like #8: Des meubles de cuisine à petits prix

Something I've noticed since spending lots of time in my new dream dorm is that, no matter how pretty and clean a place is when it's brand new, it takes a certain amount of effort to keep it looking nice and comfortable. Our kitchen is one place where our filthiness likes to manifest itself. Neither my roommate nor I do the dishes on a regular basis. Unless you could call "whenever we run out of dishes and decide to do them all in one fell swoop" regular. I'm kind of a hypocrite, because of my history with de-cluttering and my manic need for things to be organized in my California home but not in New York. But I feel like I'm allowed to be messy since I'm in college.

Whatever my excuse, our kitchen gets dirty. It's still pretty, but if you actually look at the floors and run a hand along the granite counter top, you might just recoil in disgust. And, instead of cleaning or doing the reading I need to do for Francophone Literature (in which I have an impossible-sounding midterm on Wednesday), I thought I would present you with this wonderful link to pictures of Low-Cost Kitchen Furniture. Enjoy! It's in French, but I mean... all you really need are the pictures. Maybe someday I will translate the blurbs as an exercise for myself, since I'm taking Translation now, but for now... I don't wanna learn. I do what I want! A lot like Mindy Kaling and Cartman.

Dorm Delightfulness on the Cheap

Katherine of BackGarage sent me this really cool article from the New York Times about the creative ingenuity of college students in their dorms. Some of the ideas these people dream up are amazing!

The only thing that makes me cluck a bit at the article is that a lot of the students showcased go to design schools! I mean, obviously they're going to be amazing and put all the rest of us to shame. I wish I had the cleverness they did. But I do think there's something to be said for discovering frugality during the college years.

Personally, I have been spending more money than I'd like to lately. But a lot of it is on necessities like food and shampoo, stuff like that. So I'm not really stretching my budget, per se. However, I can hardly dream of spending anything on design-ish things right now, because I'm all about function over fanciness haha. Make no mistake, though, I would love to have a more personalized dorm space. My current room, as you probably noticed in my post on Gramercy, features two measly posters and a lot of blank wall. I'm just cheap. Furthermore, NYU doesn't allow us (technically) to bring in outside furniture. Whatever, I'm making excuses for my lack of creativity.

For now it's nice to look at the pretty pictures in the article and be jealous of the creativity of others! Thanks so much for the link Katherine!

Positivity

I was just about to write a moany, bad mood sort of post about fashion in New York and at NYU, and how I feel inadequate and poor. But then my brain, already having jumped into procrastination mode, told me to check iCiNG and lo! She has written an article (or a "reminder" as she titles it) about not comparing yourself to others in a negative sense. I'm so happy I found her site; I think I stumbled upon it over the summer, and it is wonderful. I highly recommend it. I may even start "Things I Love Thursday" on this blog, because I think it is a very positive way of looking at your life, and that is something I do far too seldom.

Wall-E

Tonight I saw Wall-E! I wish I could say everything about it that I want to, but I don't want to spoil it. Especially since I highly recommend it and I want you to see it for yourself! It was heart-wrenching in ways I did not expect, and, from my nerdy linguistic perspective, possibly involved some fun phonology and voice-recognition research on the sound guys' parts. Phonology is so far my least favorite sub-field because it makes no sense and all the experts on it seem to disagree, but voice-recognition is super interesting.

Anyway, for reasons I won't give away, the movie got me thinking about downward spirals.

Not only is it painfully easy to get into a rut with clutter, but it's even easier to dig yourself deeper into it as the problem gets worse. You delude yourself and run away from the problem whatever way you can - the movie has a very interesting portrayal of escapism - whether it's psychologically acclimating to the messy home or just physically spending less time in what should be your safe haven. Or, sometimes, despair wiggles its way in and masquerades as your solution, causing you to lose all hope and just live in a completely and unacceptably unhealthy situation.

For me, I suppose, this threat of impending hopelessness is what drives me to make my life better. I wish I could have something different to motivate me, something more positive, but it is what it is. And after all, if it gets me to clear out closets, clean under the bed, and pawn off my possessions to strangers, that's something.

Watch the trailer for Wall-E here.

Sites I Like #5: Seven Dumpsters and a Corpse

As with most of the links I absorb into my bookmarks, I can't remember how I found this one. But the URL (www.messiemother.com) is extremely endearing, it's relevant, and it has a flash game!

Today's site: Seven Dumpsters and a Corpse

So one of the things I like about this is that it's German. The end! No, I'm just kidding. :) But German things really do entice me. Anyway this is the site for a documentary made by Thomas Haemmerli about his mother's death and the clutter at her house that he and his brother had to wade through in the ensuing month.

There are several things I particularly enjoy about the site:

• The dumpster flash game (or muldenspiel)! I found it too hard because they make you take the wind direction into account! F that. But give it a try when you're taking a break from de-cluttering your own home. That guy down below makes a funny angry noise.


• The family history twist of the film. The brothers find so many amazing relics of their family's past throughout their project; it's inspiring. I'd really like to see the film, and this aspect is actually more intriguing to me than the de-cluttering. I love finding old photos of my mom's past when I'm cleaning. They're like decades-old Easter eggs that don't smell half bad.


• The film's relevance to my own fears. I sporadically get this feeling of dread that of my mother will let the clutter consume her again when I leave home for good and go make a life for myself. I don't want her to die alone in a sea of carelessness and disorder, despite how much I can dislike her (in times like this week, when she refuses to talk to me because of things I've said to her out of frustration and callousness brought on by the project).

As far as our own progress, we're a bit past the one-month mark and things are going ok, but not as good as those deutsche Brudern. We can actually sit (well, one of us can sit) on our couch in the living room! The ottoman has space to lie flat! WE USED THE CORNER OF THE COFFEE TABLE TO PLAY SCRABBLE (and I won 3/3). Contented sigh. Also, even in the face of our tiff (which is still going on because my mom is 5), my mother managed to cart off a carload of stuff to our standbys (Goodwill, Books for the Barrios, and her favorite used book store, Hooked on Books).

The Cluttering Blogosphere

So after a little jaunt to ProBlogger.com (which I believe I found through iCiNG, my newly budding obsession), I decided to take action in my blogging. ACTION! I gotta participate on other blogs, do some online bloggy networking and generally be a bit more awesomer. I warmed up by Googling "clutter blog" and found a slew of good stuff.

Here's what I noticed:

• There are a lot of blogs out there done by professional organizers. Remember when I insulted them unintentionally? Well it's really too bad that I'll be remembered for that thoughtless phrase of mine because I really do respect them (and I have respected them! I never meant to insult anyone! I can tell I'll be apologizing for this for a while), especially now that I've seen some of their sites. There are really good tips out there, and I also found out you have to be certified to be part of the NAPO. Dang. Anyway there are a lot of sites I like which I may profile in a future Sites I Like post but for now here's a teaser, from a woman who commented on my controversial post: Clutter Diet Blog. She looks like a friendly lady. Shoot now I feel even more horrible for offending people.


• There are, likewise, a lot of before and after photos online. But as I perused them, I found myself thinking many times, "Psh! They should see my apartment." And after a few instances of that, I realized, "Ferk I guess that's nothing to be proud of." But this means my before and after pictures will rock the internetzzz. Oh yeah. Expect it.


• They're good at blogging but they get no props! I see very few comments on these clutter-related blogs but next to no comments. It's lurkers Batman!! I myself am guilty so whateva, we be changing that soon/already.


• There are few (as in I haven't seen any yet but then again I'm only on the first page of Google results still so that doesn't really mean anything) blogs about people undertaking the de-cluttering process on their own. Maybe I win! Maybe people will discover me and someday I can make six figures blogging. Curse you Darren Rowse.

Sites I Like #3: Apartment Therapy "Small is Cool"

For many eons (at least 24 months - hey, you gotta admit, that's a lot of months) I've been unearthing an interior design fetish of mine. I prowl the internets in search of what a friend of mine once accurately dubbed "real estate p." You can guess what the "p" means. Google cannot. Take that, dirty old men on the internet at work.

Anyway, I somehow came across this gem, our Site I Like #3.

Today's site: Apartment Therapy's "Small is Cool" Contest 2008

All my obsessing is a little on the easy-to-decipher side if we're talking Freudian: clearly, these spaces inspire me and my grand plans for the day that I am rich enough to move out and live in a real-estate-candy big city like San Francisco (home to the insane kitchen at right, here) or New York. Ok, maybe I'm just biased in favor of those two cities. But to be fair, Apartment Therapy's contest site has some great entries from all across the nation, all respectable and even drool-worthy.

The main idea of the site's contest was to show just how much you can do with a small place. It gives me hope, because our apartment is definitely the definition of that. And some of these people have risen to the challenge of such small quarters in ridiculous, awesome ways. Look at this incredibly ace loft from Seattle. I don't know about you guys, but I've wanted a loft ever since I knew what it was. Maybe I'm naive, but I think it would be so fun.

I do understand that it takes patience and a plan to decorate and design the way these people do, but I'm hoping to steal some inspiration from their lovely, Internet-published homes and make ours just as great. It's certainly going to be a lot of work, since my mom hasn't done a whole lot of her own part around her for several days. Guys, you should all understand that this is a very difficult task. It's easy enough to start a blog and say that, but to look around at your messy digs every day and know that you and one other person have to undo all the years of laziness you put on yourself... that is tough.

Luckily, I spend all my time gazing at photos of beautiful homes for inspiration. Shoot. Back to work...