Getting your shit together, as it were.

This, right here, scares me more than anything. It's not that my house is like this—although if you looked at my garage, living room, or craft/sewing room/studio, at the moment, you might wonder (more on that later)—it's that I'm afraid of my house looking like this. Okay,  not the one with the kajillion cats or the 2500 "pet" rats. O.M.G. But just accumulating too much crap, shit...stuff you don't need. Frankly, I look at some of those houses and wonder just how...how....when did you start throwing the empty cat food cans in the bathroom, for God's sake?  And now they're two feet deep?  I lknow hoarding is a sickness and not an easy one to tame, but some of these places look like just plain laziness. But, I'm not the expert... (just an ellipsis abuser!)

I've always been a bit of a clutterbug. Somewhere, there's a picture of my room when I was in the 4th grade. Daddy was taking a pic of my little blackboard, upon which I had printed "EXOTIC HAIRDOS" (don't ask) and in the surrounding area are piles of kid stuff.  My brother got the neat genes, I got the clutteriffic genes. There is a reason, though. My mother took the time and taught my brother how to do it, and him being a tractable, amiable sort, took to it quite nicely. By the time I came along, 5 years later, her approach had changed, but also, me being the distracted, stubborn, ADHD* type...she would finally give up and just come in and do it herself.  That set a bad precedent, lol, but not at all my mom's fault.** I guess subconsciously, I just figured someone else would always bail me out of my clutter-prison. Sort of a Cinderella complex.

The weird thing is, I can organize the hell out of things...but let me get started projects? Oh...dear...  While I'm working on any given project, I'll think of a dozen other things I could ALSO do and drag the materials out to look at them, and then lose interest in all of it and move on to something else.  The ADHD has the weird affect of making you avoid things. I look at a pile of stuff and literally do not know where to start, so I go read a book. There's also the perfectionism theory put forth by Marla Cilley.  "You can't do it perfectly, the way you want to now, so you don't do it at all."   Between the ADHD and the perfectionism...oh, man.

This past weekend, my mother and I drove down to visit my aunt and uncle.  I won't use her real name, but Auntie Di is one of those pre-programmed, born-organized, never in a fluff kind of women you admire, wish to emulate, and hate all at the same time. There's never a speck of dust or anything out of place in her house. Ever. You can't catch her with her guard down. Her pantry is always stocked, her kitchen neat and spotless. She works her butt off in her own business, she and my uncle garden (we had a salad with winter greens they had grown themselves. In Texas!). Oh, wait...I forgot, her myriad plants were still sitting in groups by the garage, waiting to be distributed around the yard in their spring and summer locations--they'd just taken them out of the greenhouse.  *sighs*

If you're like me, you ask, "How does she do it?" Well, I'll tell you. Aliens. That's gotta be it. Aliens.

No, seriously. Here's the secret, as Marla's site will tell you: Routines.  I'd bet you a month's salary if I sat down and asked Auntie Di about her routines, she'd say, "yep, every day I do this, and once a week, I do this, and once a month this."  Because I know that if you clean before you see the dirt (or pile of crap), you'll never see the dirt. I also gave a lot of thought to the notion that you'd never, ever find Auntie Di sitting down playing a stupid-ass computer game for hours. She reads, she watches some TV, and she and my uncle have their cocktails on the deck at dusk...well deserved rest time. But I know that lady is up and doing things all day. And it shows. She's in better shape at almost 74 than I am at almost 60.

So, Auntie, you should be happy, because it's more you prompting me to get things cleaned up and organized than all those gruesome pictures of houses that should more than likely be bulldozed.

As to the rooms that need the most help, really only the living room has no excuse, except that I used it as a staging area for crap from other rooms while I was working on them...and so it hasn't gotten cleaned properly in a long time. This is open-heart admission, here, folks...but I still won't go into detail until I post the after pics. :)

*donning deep-shit diving gear now* If you don't hear from me in a week, call out the Texas Rangers...I've most likely gone down in a crapalanche.

 

*I was not actually diagnosed as ADHD until I was 49...and sure did 'splain a lot, Lucy.
**I've done the same thing with my son, it's easy to do without realizing you are.

A Little Piece of Austin Has Died

If you're not from Austin, I can understand not having heard of Leslie. If you are from Austin--or at least lived here for the last 10 years or so--you've been under a rock if you don't know who Leslie Cochran was. Was. He died this morning at 1 AM. He was just a year older than I.

Leslie was one of the weirder things about a city that prides itself on being weird (much less so than 29 years ago when I moved here).

To read about Leslie (you can Google him...there's lots out there, so I won't be redundant here), one gets the notion that he was mentally ill...crazy...his cheese slipped off his cracker...but I don't know. To look into his eyes...



(c) Austin American-Statesmen 2000

...those aren't the eyes of a crazy man.  Somehow, I think Leslie had the best laugh of all. He lived out those wacky fantasies we all shove into some dusty shoe box at the back of our closet (not that I really want to walk about in a thong and not much else) while enjoying the reactions and adoration of the "freaked out normals." He made enough to live on and did what he wanted to do, when and how it suited him. Society, of course, will label someone like Leslie as mentally ill, or at best nonconformist, simply because he didn't fit the simple, round, 9-to-5 hole.

It's not a life for everyone. And, of course, we need doctors, lawyers, beauticians, mechanics, musicians, and politicians...okay, so we don't really need politicians, but you get my drift. The world works the way it does because everyone fills a niche. Leslie filled a niche, too. He provided entertainment, a topic of conversation, a distraction, a reminder to not take life so bloody seriously all the time. The thing that made Leslie weird was not his supposed insanity, but his chosen avocation. Just another wacked-out homeless dude is not that weird, to tell you the truth; every city has a gazillion of them. As the article points out, Leslie did not have to be homeless, and often wasn't. He could have held down a regular job, too, I'm guessing.  If choices make us who we are (Professor Dumbledore said so), then so do our lack of choices. So much of my life has taken place on auto-pilot, doing whatever the path of least resistance led me to rather than where my heart would have rather been.

So...stuck in a dead-end job, doing crap you'd rather not...or being free to wear a thong in public and run for mayor in silver fuck-me shoes...when you're a guy...and yet still getting by. Makes me wonder who was the more successful....

Farewell Leslie, fair winds and following seas.