Weather Today: Slightly Sarcastic

It wraps all around our house through the rooms and under the trees and it’s wonderful.

Every year she hides the Christmas Vampire

This started when I was a very small got child and spread to all of my friends, including my best friend from elementary school who I just so happened to grow up and marry. Now that we have grown up and moved nearly 600 miles away we still always go home for a week at Christmas for multiple reasons, including the Christmas Vampire.

Needless to say we still partake and things have gotten heated.

Stay tuned for the epic conclusion and to see my husband and father in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s sooty costume when I find the Christmas Vampire First!

“Gilbert Sees The Future From 1986!”

Love & Rockets #17 (June 1986)

Gilbert Hernandez

Evening dress, mid-1880′s

Me, at the very next opportunity where alcohol is offered to me:

Holy shit I was expecting something closer to a scatter plot. This isn’t just a correlation, it is a direct association between income and life expectancy. They are killing the poor.

So the standard “hide all your unsightly things by doing xyz” may look nice for the first week or so, but by the end of the week it’ll look like a tornado made of pure inhuman frustration ripped through the house as I try to find the fucking advil.

To give you an example of the kind of hell I’ve been fumbling my way through the last 20 odd years: dishes will be washed and left in the drying wrack but never put away. Which means I can’t wash more dishes, which means dishes pile up, which means I can’t make food, which means I don’t eat, which means my CFS gets worse, which means I don’t have the energy to put the dishes away, and so on so forth until I have a meltdown, cry to ETD (who also likely has ADHD but has never had it confirmed) about how I can’t cope with life, and then we fix it for a while, but inevitably end up back at square one within about a week.

Pinsky’s solution to this was “remove an obstacle between you and your goal, if that means taking all the doors off your kitchen cabinets to make things easier, so be it.”

And lemme tell you, fucking revolutionary.

Laundry never ends up in the hamper??? why???? is it a closed hamper??? Remove the lid. Throw it out the window. Clothes are now miraculously finding their way into the hamper??? Rejoice????

Mail ends up spread out over every available flat surface? Put a sorting station right where your mail arrives. Put a shredder or “junk” basket under it. Shred or dump the junk immediately. Realize you only actually have two real letters that need attention, feel less overwhelmed, pay your bills on time.

Like I’m not saying this book is miraculous, but it did help me realize that I was effectively torturing myself by trying to conform to certain ideals of “perfect house keeping”, and presenting a certain image rather than just allowing myself to live in my space as effectively as possible. And why? Why was I doing that? Cause people with different lives and capabilities are perceived as the norm? Fuck that. If this was a physical problem I wouldn’t be forcing myself to conform to an ableist standard, so why am I doing it with this?