Tidy-up follow-up!

I have made it through the first five sub-categories of the first category, which is clothing: tops, bottoms, hanging clothes, socks, and underwear.  I got rid of two large boxes of clothes.

A helpful question,  as you're sorting: If I saw this in a store instead of in my house, would I want to buy it?  If it wouldn't tempt you in a window, you don't really love it.

There were a lot of "But I used to love this" items.  "Used to" love isn't the same as loving it now. You can enjoy the memories of wearing certain clothes without having to keep them in your home.

"But what if this comes back in fashion?"  Am I really going to live long enough for green-and-purple checked, pleated, high-waisted pants to come back in fashion?  And if I do, why wouldn't I have learned my lesson the first time around?

"If I lost ten pounds, this might fit again."  So every time you see it in your closet, it'll make you feel fat.  Toss it, and if you actually lose ten pounds, celebrate by buying something new.

"But I just bought this not too long ago."  And if you keep it in your house another four years, you'll learn to love it?  Cut your losses, and get rid of it.  I found a bra, with the tags still on it, in the back of my lingerie drawer, the elastic already deteriorating from age.  Give it away while someone else can still get some use out of it.

I'm stalled out right now on the next subcategory, bags, because I most likely have tote bags, backpacks, and purses scattered in various closets all over the house.  Making the mess that will result from hunting for all that stuff will have to wait for next weekend.

Book review: The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo

The thirty-fourth book I read in 2015 is The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie Kondo.  I have a long history with various decluttering schemes because I have always come from a house with clutter, a fact I attribute to a father who remembers the Depression and war rationing, a mother who grew up poor, and what I firmly believe to be a genetic predisposition to hoarding via my maternal grandmother's family.  Will this book make a difference in my life that its predecessors haven't?  Time will tell.

To begin with, Marie Kondo comes at the problem from the point of view of traditional Japanese Shintoism.  She preaches that clutter and unwanted/disused items have an actual negative energy that interferes with one's home and life and that clearing them out can directly affect one's health, career, and relationships.  I can't go there.  However, I know exactly what she's talking about when she writes that having items in our home that we don't really want negatively affects our mood and energy. There are things in my house that make me feel guilty when I look at them: I don't like them, but I am loathe to get rid of them because: someone gave it to me / I spent good money on it / what if I got rid of it and then found I needed it (after literal years of never touching it)?  Would my life and home be happier if I didn't have things I shut away, avert my eyes from, or try to avoid?  Yes, absolutely.

The heart of Kondo's system is picking up every item you own and asking yourself, "Does this spark joy?"  In a less precious wording, "Do I really love this, or is it just here because of inertia?" Life is too short (or, more to the point, one's available storage space is too small) to keep things one doesn't really love.  If you don't love it, toss it.

By this point, you've probably picked up on the catch.  Kondo's program is clearly pointed at single people in small apartments, a pretty good demographic in Japan.  But if you're a family of four in a suburban house, the biggest problem is going to be finding the time to touch every item you own and ask yourself the question.  (On the flip side, once you've successfully completed the system, having too much stuff shouldn't be a problem anymore.)

The problem is exacerbated by her insistence on decluttering by subject rather than by room, i.e., get every book in the house together and sort through them at once rather than running across as you move through.  This actually makes a great deal of sense: as she points out, it gives you an idea exactly how much of everything you have (and how much you need to keep/discard), and it also allows you to store all items in a single category together rather than scattered throughout the house. It also, of course, makes getting started a larger hurdle.

Another hurdle is her instruction not to let anyone else watch.  Again, this makes perfect sense.  The whole point is not to feel guilty about getting rid of what you don't want; someone saying, "But I like that. But I gave you that. But you can still use that," is counterproductive.  But for someone with a family, it limits when you can actually get anything done.

Although I haven't yet had the chance to begin her system by the book, due to the aforementioned hurdles, just reading the book inspired me enough to go through my closet and drawers and sort out a sizeable stack of things I don't really like wearing but have been keeping because it seems wasteful to give away perfectly good clothing.  I'm not sure I'm ever actually going to get a chance to do it her way, at least until I have an empty nest, but perhaps doing a bit in fits and starts will result in, if not "life-changing magic," at least less stuff in the house that makes me feel bad.

Book review: My Lucky Life by Dick Van Dyke

The thirty-third book I read in 2015 was Dick Van Dyke's memoir, My Lucky Life: In and Out of Show Business.  I have been a huge fan of The Dick Van Dyke Show since we got free cable, and thus access to Nick at Nite, in college, and once I convinced Tommy to give the old, black-and-white show a chance, he quickly concurred.  We binge-watched through all 5 seasons when Faith was a toddler, and she loved the episodes when Rose Marie sang.  So when Tommy saw this volume on the clearance shelves at the used-book store, picking it up for $2 was a no-brainer.

Sadly, Dick Van Dyke is no Rob Petrie, though he believes he is.  This memoir is self-justification, writ large.  Things he's proud of, like refusing to do family-unfriendly material, redound greatly to his credit; things like his alcoholism and his extramarital affair ... well, those are just unfortunate natural occurrences, like earthquakes and hurricanes, that could happen to anyone at any time.  He praises himself for helping other men with drinking problems by acting in The Morning After, a TV movie about an alcoholic.  By his own admission, however, the advocacy group, the National Association of Alcoholism, asked that the ending show the main character recovering, to give hope to those who recognized their own trajectories in the story; Van Dyke insisted that his character fail despite repeated attempts to beat his addiction, backing up his rationalization that alcoholism is a random disease that he couldn't do anything about and certainly can't be blamed for contracting.  Some guys, like he, are "lucky" enough to beat alcoholism, and some, like his character in the Movie of the Week, aren't.

This same pattern of rationalization and self-justification repeats throughout his life.  He feels guilty about having an affair only until he explains to his wife that falling in love with another woman was just something that "happened" to him; after that, it becomes her problem that she can't accept the truth, and he placidly moves in with his girlfriend while still married to her. When he argues with other leaders in his church over the civil rights movement, he walks away from organized religion forever without looking back, judging it to be worthless: this, despite the fact that he has just lovingly described two men who worked within the organized church whom he greatly admired.  If Dick Van Dyke doesn't get his way, well, he's taking his ball and going home.

Like most celebrities, I suspect Van Dyke has been surrounded by groupies and sycophants for so long that he has no idea how he comes across to "ordinary" readers.  Toward the end of the book, he describes getting a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and recalling that he spent the evening of his 14th wedding anniversary working late with Mary Tyler Moore on a song for The Dick Van Dyke Show.  He never called home to let his wife know where he was or that he was going to be late or to apologize or to acknowledge the occasion in any way.  When he finally arrived home that evening, he found her dressed up in an evening gown with a candlelit dinner on the table, ruined.  There was no mention of the incident when he was actually recounting that period of his life, nor does he seem to feel particularly bad about it in retrospect.  It was just one of those things that "happened," and, as Morey Amsterdam points out, all the neglect of his family worked out in the end because he got his star.