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.

MESS, Part 2

Still contemplating "A Perfect Mess." This is the most inspiring thing I have read since Lao Tzu.

The organization industry is like the diet industry: a bunch of self-styled professionals ready and waiting to charge us to get our homes or bodies in the same shape as portrayed in magazines. They prey on the guilt we suffer when viewing the images of beautiful rooms, svelte bodies, the promise of perfection and happiness and --more than anything -- the ideal images that we would like to project to other people.

It's just self-help for people who really don't need help, they have just been convinced they do. That guilt thing. That desire thing. That fear thing. That American thing.

Now, there are some truly pathological messes--cases of people being killed when stacks of old newspapers fall on them, the organizational equivalent of 650-pound people who can't leave their home without the help of a crane -- they do need helping hands and counseling. And now that I think of it, our preoccupations with anorexia and OCD seem like parallel pathological overboard reactions to the self-help and perfection movements.

I have often thought that it would be nice to have a drug that would make me a little more OCD (without any of the annoying physical, mental and legal side effects of cocaine or meth), the mirror of the pharmaceutical that stops people from washing their hands 120 times a day, something that would push me to make my bed and clean the litter box every time the cats use it. But now, after reading this book, I realize I'm okay. (The Perfect Mess authors observe that making the bed every morning is something akin to tying your shoes after you take them off.) Not that I didn't know I was okay all along, but I did buy the book for some reason. But now I'm going to make an effort to love my mess. (Still, it bothers me that I can't discard those size eight tweed suits in my closet...and I will probably file the other two organization manuals, useless and unread, right back in the pile with "A Perfect Mess.") So no zen existence for me. Yet.

I realize too, that for many of us, our messes develop because we no longer have attics and basements, the normal repositories of junk and, upon excavation by the next generation, treasures. eBAY is our communal attic. In my little storage-challenged condo, you might be hard-pressed to tell whether we are moving in or moving out. In fact we are going nowhere, having paid off the mortgage and looking forward to retirement, possibly funded by a sell-off of all the crap we have accumulated. And who would pay money for all these collected camels and Chinese objets d'art and costume jewelry and old computers and complete runs of magazines like Fate and T'ai Chi and Allure and Life? Well, I did.

The Life magazines, truth be told, were rescued from an old public library weeding and resided for a long time at the in-laws'. "But we threw those out once already," they complained. It's a lot of fun to get a miscellaneous box, say July-Dec 1956, and just read them, a kind of history lesson. More fun than looking at them on CD, the solution, as yet untapped, for my now-discarded 15 years' of New Yorkers. For Life, it's not so easy though, because they are in our commercial attic, a storage locker about 8 miles away. That means going to get them, lugging them up and down to our 10th floor appartment, and taking them back. Just like a library without overdue notices. And I am loosening my grip on the fashion and decor magazines, a certain effect of my Taoist training over the past two years. All these magazines accumulate because things come upstairs in little bits almost on their own--and between us, we must have 20 magazine subscriptions--but it takes a real effort to get them back down to the dumpster.

I'm sure someone out there would love to see pictures of my messes, and that may come in time. But right now, just go look at your own. I just know you have some somewhere! I think , like those tours you can go on to visit people's beautiful homes, we should have tours of other people's closets. And now I see a retirement gig for myself: Closet Inspector. There are people who would pay good money!