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Yesterday ruled. Bit of background: It's been about a year since I started my career, and started by living in a 2br/2ba and just kinda left a bunch of poo poo that I rarely touched strewn about the second bedroom, and just had a table in my living room with a bunch of junk on it and just kinda, boxes and whatnot that i never bothered to throw out. It was cluttered, but not enough that it impeded my ability to go on my computer and go to bed, which is basically what I did after work, so I basically ignored it. That was the first six months, and then I moved into a room in a house for under half the rent, but that room was small as poo poo, and even with a ton of my stuff in storage, felt oppressively cluttered. About three months ago I moved into a larger room in the house because the previous tenant moved out. Upon seeing this thread, I decided to really step it up and make a serious effort to not have that room feel cluttered, with stuff on the floor. My main problem, of course, was not having a place for everything. I've been progressively doing things here and there, purchasing plastic drawers and getting rid of some old clothes that I'm not happy to wear. I've not yet reached maximum tidiness, but holy poo poo this is the first time in my independent adulthood that nothing is on the floor without being a container itself, or in the closet, and it feels great. My clothing drawers are...less cluttered on top than before. There are vitamin bottles that I've resisted designating a 'put away' place for, but it just now occurred to me by writing this that I only use them for 30 seconds in the morning so OF COURSE I have no reason to keep them in the open all the time. I probably was thinking like I would forget to take them (the horror), but "opening" and "closing" my regular tasks is something I need to incorporate into my morning routine. I had a streak of a few days last month of making my bed every morning, and flaked on it for a while, but I'm hoping to get a week in a row and turn that into 2 and so on. Just posting in this thread has gotten me excited to get home and put away those bottles and a couple of other things I've been hesitant to make a place for because the surface of my dresser felt like "place enough." I always fret about moving, so I told myself that I have to prove to myself that I can make a nice environment out of my current situation, before I move out. This challenge has had the added benefit of making it easier to pack once I do want to move, which is what always gets to me (oh no I'll take too much time oh no I won't be able to use what's packed oh no where to put all these boxes). Now most/all miscellaneous stuff is in boxes by default! Sweet!
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Nov 3, 2015 00:30
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| # ¿ May 3, 2024 08:27 |
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I've kept this thread bookmarked as a reminder, and I finally picked up the eBook (figured a good first step is not getting another object, right), which is definitely helpful because the stories and details help you establish the right state of mind. I was worried about having trouble discarding things, but it turns out it's not too difficult. In addition to the room I rent, I also have a storage unit meant to keep stuff that wouldn't fit when I moved to this room, as well as kitchen stuff that there's simply no place for here because my landlord is overdoing it and converted a den and dining room into bedrooms. They'll go into my kitchen when I move to a 2br with whomever I find on craigslist that isn't a degenerate flake, and with whom I can actually communicate. Anyway, I had a big box of clothes (as well as a few boxes of stuff that I'm tossing to Goodwill) and managed to get that onto my pile along with everything else. I ditched 80% of my gym clothes because I exercise elsewhere now and I realized a lot of them I didn't enjoy wearing even if I were going to the gym. I filled two 13-gallon trash bags with clothes, which probably reduced my total by about one third to half (hard to tell). I don't have the hang of the folding technique, but "it doesn't matter how you fold the sleeves" was one of the most relieving statements I've read so far, and I can still basically make the vertical thing work—all my non-hanging shirts now fit in one drawer instead of two, and my non-hanging pants (including swim trunks) in one and a half instead of 3. Now I need some help with the "rising to the right" concept for the closet. Below is how I have it right now, and it doesn't seem quite right.  I've been treating long-sleeve shirts as automatically "heavier" than short sleeve, but I'm not sure if that really make sense. Also I don't wear my dress shirts that often, but I might wear them to work more if I view them in a different light, because I do like them but feel like they're "supposed" to go with a suit jacket. Any tips would be appreciated.
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Nov 28, 2015 18:03
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Enfys posted:I'm about halfway through the KonMari book, but I'm struggling to take it seriously because of all the woo-woo stuff. For me it's just a matter of interpretation, translating the animism into its psychological foundation. She talks about socks having feelings, but I just see it as shortcut language to my own feeling when I open the sock drawer. As humans, we do project a certain amount of feeling into objects, and their presentation can have very real, empathetic effects on our mood. It's why there is such a thing as setting the dinner table with parallel utensils as opposed to a random skew. The 'niceness' of objects, as it were, and their arrangement impacts the mind that perceives them. A more clear example is, when my pants are discarded on the floor or my bed is unmade, that weighs on my mind a little. When everything is tidy, there is no weight. Sometimes it is easier to say "what the pants want" than "what can be done with the pants that best serves me." When my accouterments are up and ready, so am I. When my socks can breathe, so can I. When they're twisted and tangled, that subtly tangles my mind. It's not the difference between feeling sluggish in the morning and feeling great, but it is a small difference that can add up with others. That said, I'm not sure her sock method works on all socks, but the point is to find a natural-feeling state for your items that brings you peace, and if a prescribed method doesn't achieve that, it is up to you to find a method that works. Another way to think about it is to compare how we talk about plants. For instance, I'm reading a gardening book that says, "marijuana prefers just a little more lime (a more alkaline soil) than corn or wheat," but of course the marijuana prefers nothing because it has no feelings. It's just easier than saying "marijuana will respond to soil containing a little more lime in a way that we, the growers, prefer, than does corn or wheat." Stinky_Pete fucked around with this message at 00:08 on Jun 7, 2016 |
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Jun 6, 2016 22:31
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