1. Things I’ve overheard recently in my house:
“No…horribly, I’m still in the dating pool.”
“This is my first time being a butt guy, I think. That makes me a team player.”
I didn’t intentionally juxtapose those sentiments…they were just the only two interesting things I eavesdropped lately. I swear!
2. Thinking further about chores: Another way to slot chores into column A or column B is…well, I wanted this to be a legitimate methodology, but now that I’ve begun the sentence I realize that actually all I’m about to say is “There is just one reason I like making the bed in the mornings but HATE changing the sheets.” (That reason is not all that interesting in the absence of a larger framework (ha! Bedframe-work), but I’ll tell you anyway: making the bed in the morning gives me a lovely, clean, made bed. Changing the sheets gives me the least-made bed of all time for some number of minutes while I a) wash the sheets and put them back on, or b) sit around grumpily before getting new sheets from the closet, because I don’t like wrestling with the corners of the mattress and because the fold-job I’ve done on the fitted sheets in the closet makes me feel incompetent.)
I suppose there aren’t really other chores that capture this dichotomy so neatly, other than the general category of “it has to get messier before it gets clean.” That works to a degree – maybe your bookshelf is presentable but not organized, and in order to make it both presentable AND organized you have to chuck all of the books off the shelf and start fresh – but not categorically. Your floor doesn’t get dustier or less presentable when you start dusting it, and your laundry looks no worse when you’re in the process of washing it than it does in the hamper (sequestered, in both cases!)
3. I had a dream that I had just gotten to college, and in the dream the dorm room looked exactly as I had expected college would look. Somehow, this was the most unsettling element of the experience. Things aren’t supposed to look the way you imagine them before you’ve ever been – any time I’ve tried to picture someone’s house, or room, or a new school, I’ve arrived to find that, no; the entire structure somehow feels, regardless of actual cardinal direction, as if it’s facing a different way than it did in my imagination. But this dream-college didn’t. It perfectly mimicked the interior I had created in my mind (my dream mind; this wasn’t some waking vision of college that I’d long held before attending college – anyway, those visions of how you believe something will look usually dissolve quickly after you see the actual place), and was uncanny for it.
4. I’ve been reading the NYT series on procrastination and am very curious about their terminology – “procrastination” and “precrastination.” The only other pair of terms that I can immediately think of are “probiotic” and “prebiotic.”
