Spring Cleaning

No time like the present...better late than never...I have finally been doing some spring cleaning. When the energy moves me, I move.  Dunging out, mopping up, polishing things,  dealing with the accumulations of the past year...in some closet cases, over the past 15 years.  And who knew there would be a Wikipedia entry on "spring cleaning," where I learned that my timing is perfect:

In Greece, and other Orthodox nations, it is traditional to clean the house thoroughly either right before or during the first week of Great Lent, which is referred to as Clean Week. This also often corresponds with the Julian New Year, or April 1.

In the same way my elderly Japanese orchid-fancier neighbor says, lamenting the latest dent on his Honda, "I'm not a very good driver," I always say to people who take their shoes off, local style, before entering my apartment, "Don't bother, I'm not a very good housekeeper."

I didn't learn much from my mother, really, about domestic order.  She made me stop "dusting" after I broke the antique vase and she never much involved me in kitchen duty. She mostly taught me how convenient a dishwasher can be.  And there were the negative lessons: to remove stains from a bathtub, do NOT soak it overnight with a strong solution of chlorine bleach.  (It completely destroyed the stains, along with the fine porcelain finish of the tub.)  What I did learn from my mother was summed up in a commentary she wrote on a essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

"We do not know today whether we are busy or idle. In times where we thought ourselves indolent, we have afterward discovered that much was accomplished, and much was begun in us." --Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Awakening from a daydream, one may be filled with much guilt at the thought of such idleness when there is perhaps something more important to be done.  But this sense of guilt may not be valid, for a man is not necessarily idle when he is absorbed in thought.  The private workings of the mind often prove creative.  In such seemingly idle moments, we have the rare chance to find ourselves, develop a sense of values; the truths which are not to be found in the laboratory or in the classroom may thus be discovered in such private explorations Such thoughtful periods store treasures for the years ahead." -- My Mother 

My approach has always been random and delimited by a fairly high filth tolerance and a predilection to daydreaming.  Basic hygienic maintenance --cat boxes and toilets-- I keep pretty much under control, but sometimes I do dishes the way people do laundry...by the load, and sorted.  For some reason, I have always found it more satisfying to make something that's really dirty clean, than cleaning something that already falls far below the limit on my tolerance scale.  There are so many more interesting things to do.

Like watching Star Appeal, (in Chinese, Xingxing xiangxi xi) a movie I couldn't resist that turned up in my Netflix suggestions.  I'd never watched a "Chinese gay-themed sci-fi movie."  I never knew there was such a genre.  I assume it was the "Chinese" tag and not  the "gay sci-fi" that put it to me.  But still, I'll watch anything once.  And I'll only watch this one once, not that it was that bad.  A blue movie, in the technical sense, erotic and blue-toned, like a Viagra vision (I'm told), but sensitive and arty enough to elevate it above porn, although I did learn something about yang-yang intercourse that I probably didn't need to know.  Interesting, and if anything, so what?  Maybe watching this would build all sorts of tolerance in the gay-bashing community (to say nothing of Chinese-bashers and Martian-bashers).  They're just like us!

"Xiao Bo, a bisexual man who discovers a stranger by the roadside, naked and claiming to be from Mars...takes the Martian home to his live-in boyfriend and girlfriend, and together, they begin instructing him in the ways of earthlings.  But when the mysterious stranger lapses into a coma, only the discovery of true love can bring him around."  

The dialogue was pretty simple for my limited Mandarin ear, and I can remember at least one line clearly: "Wo ai ni, ET." Though not everyone loved ET. In the end, love triumphs, if a little weirdly.

Hiroake Murakami as Jubei

Moving to a different alien culture, I finished a set of samurai DVDs lent to me by my haiku-writing Chinese friend, Legendary Swordfights of Yagyu Jubei.  I told my friend I wasn't really into the bushido aesthetic (some very strange hairstyles, that reverse mohawk), but she assured me of Jubei (Hiroake Murakami), "He's very handsome."  But, I'll watch anyone once. And indeed she was right. He seems to have violated the hair regimen the way Sammo Hung did in The Shaolin Warriors.  And he would be an excellent driver. (Although maybe not with only one eye.)  So I learned some history about the Tokugawa shogunate, and was impressed with the sword style, slow and elegant really, a little like intense insects with curved razor sharp blades.

And maybe there is something to the whole Japanese style. Such sparse tidy homes. Nothing to clean up!  Zen housekeeping.  Something new to daydream about.

WHAT IS THIS THING CALLED BLOG?
(Actual date of this post: Feb. 26.)
A considerable few days ago, a blogger to whom I link asked his readers if he should decrease his blogging frequency from every day. And I've been wondering if I should increase my frequency. I'm approaching the first anniversary of the TAO 61's and I am quite aware of how FEW posts I make. Another of my friends has apparently discontinued a blog, I hope because she plans to publish its content in the real print world, although her copy editor will surely throw up hands in despair. There is an advantage in the world of on-line vanity publishing: NO PESKY EDITORS!

As a result of these events, I began thinking about the what and why of this blogging thing, self-publishing in the vast sea of noise that is blogland. I think a blog, being your own private publication (I exclude the sites meant to keep family and friends up with intensely personal activities), finds its nature in frequency and its topic and tone. Are you a daily newspaper (a shopper or the New York Times), a weekly news magazine (Time or People), a monthly review (The Atlantic Monthly or Vogue), a quarterly journal (Granta or Tricycle)? Such distinctions also describe the nature of the subscribers to those publications. My own blogging tendency, it is obvious, tends toward the biweekly essay (partly because of the compulsive copyediting). I admire Anna Quindlen, who turns out a piece for Newsweek about every other issue, alternating space with the more conservative George Will (a yin/yang thing). I'd love to have a gig like that, although I have little interest in politics, sports or the minutiae of current events. I aspire to be an essayist, not a commentator or entertainer, and I write mostly for myself. It's difficult for me to toss off the quick irate and irascible daily posts characteristic of so many bloggers, frequently not well written or edited or thoroughly thought out. (My rants turn up in personal emails.) I am still THINKING about events that happened a year or decades ago which I bring up from time to time to make a point. I am writing history (and possibly a novel).

So it happens that today, while reviewing the events of the past week or so, on the morning after the new moon (and Ash Wednesday) I feel the yang energy rising out of the empty yin. As it has been quite cool in the mornings here I said to the Wizard, "I wish I could go somewhere warm and just bask in the sun and relax." Then I remembered the many folks who are here in Hawaii right now from Minnesota and elsewhere doing exactly that. That's yin/yang relativity.

Later at the elevator (which at my building is outside), impatient to get to work, I was delayed by a small boy wearing hardly anything who came runnning to the door to hit the down button repeatedly. Then two more boys with the same military haircuts, an older and younger brother, the younger in the older's arms, arrived and blocked the door. "We have to wait for our mom," the half-naked one said. I was a little irritated; I needed to GO. But after a few moments she arrived. "Aren't you cold?" I asked the shirtless one. "No," he said, bouncing off the walls of the elevator. "My Dad's coming home today...from Iraq." Mom looked very weary and explained he was returning from a 15-month deployment. The youngest boy couldn't have been 15 months old; his father had never seen him. I abandoned my irritation and wished the family a happy reunion. These rambunctious boys and the weary mom have been in my mind since as a kind of prayer.

Another observation earlier this week, on Mardi Gras, I saw that someone had finally discarded their Christmas tree at the dumpster. So someone else lives season-to-season, event-to-event. Maybe it was the boys' tree. (The poor dry brown thing would surely be depressing for Dad's homecoming.) I bet whoever finally cleared out Christmas probably doesn't blog every day either!