september's coming soon

Going home to the parents for Easter, with a delayed and ultimately cancelled plane meaning I likely won't make the connected flight. So I've been waiting here for three hours, eight minutes on foot (without luggage) from my flat, and likely to spend the night at a hotel unless they hold back a flight just for me. Which is unlikely, but with STOL flights you never know.

The more interesting part: I'm doing this after all.

Picture this: A place with snow and cold, where cars are iced down after eight hours at work. I live by what in any city of size would be defined as "downtown" (I walk to city hall in eight minutes), but ironically work ten kilometres away. Thanks to an ongoing pandemic, I've been driving to work the last two years, even though I far prefer the bus.

Picture this: After ten hours at work, I start the engine while I scrape the ice off the windows. Picture the frozen car lock. Picture the moment the door snaps close and I realise that oh, my bag's inside, and the car is locked, and I'm ten kilometres away from home and my phone and my wallet and the keys to work are all inside the car blasting music and blaring lights with the engine running. And outside is me and my nifty telescope ice scraper/snow broom.

That is how I ended up waiting ten minutes on a bus, and riding twenty minutes without a ticket together with my broom, until I was home and could pick up the spare keys and my credit card, scarf down an apple and get on the next bus in the opposit direction (where I couldn't buy a ticket manually, because of course everything happens on our phones these days, and my phone is still inside the car)

and that's twenty-five minutes, and by that time my car has been running and blasting music and glaring the headlights for something like an hour, and because the cold is set to last at least another week, I ended up going on an hour-long drive out of town just to make sure the battery was charged.

I have not known enough Americans IRL to really tell how many of the stereotypes are true, but I'm ghosting my Noom coach because her faux friendliness makes me uncomfortable.

To my own defence, I'm there for the easy calorie counting and the categories of food which I mostly knew but are eye-opening for sure. I like the weight-tracking graph and the peppy ~psychology of weight loss~ lessons, desperately trying to be hip though they might be. It's very friendly and supportive, and I like it!

But the lady in the chat who is paid to talk about my ~goals~ lowkey freaks me out.

I'm honestly not entirely certain if it is her being all friendly with me. It is entirely on brand with the app itself, so the affected tone might just be the natural byproduct of stock phrases she's required to use during customer interaction. But god damn, it is so hard to take it seriously. I'm not here because of grand visions about my life and you're not my friend and frankly it's just creepy when you "can tell that I'm really motivated for this journey" because of some BS ~super goal~ the app required me to enter.

I put "look good in a waistcoat" as my ultimate goal because that was the most concrete thing I could think of in my rush to finish the sign-up. It's not that deep. I'm just overweight enough for it to border on unhealthy, I've thought of myself as fat ever since I was five (and patently wasn't), and I felt like finally doing something about it. I want to know I'm in the healthy bracket, I want a lighter body when I run, I'm tired of feeling like I can't wear cute clothes. My breasts are too tiny for my belly fat to be pretty. I've been doing 5:2 for years and dropped 10 kilo from that, but since I've been stuck at in the lower-to-mid seventies since 2015, I clearly need to do something with what I eat.

The "goal coach" feels like the embodiment of that stereotype about Americans and their therapists. It isn't like I don't want advice and encouragement, but the familiar adress is just so, so out of place. Look, Ashley, I'm a name and a profile pic and a questionaire and nothing more to you. You don't need to talk as if you're my guide to enlightenment. I appreciate your purpose and I wouldn't mind having some stranger pick my brain about it, normally, but I never asked for a personal lifestyle blogger. Please can you tone it down a little and treat me like a grown-up so that I'm not afraid to talk to you.

ETA: scrolled through my tag just to see what kind of stuff I'd put up there, and lo and behold, from march 2017:



Hah.

"Pffft, everything is microwave safe these days", I assure myself as I stick the glass bowl straight outta the fridge into the mircrowave.

Let's just say I hope my mum isn't horribly attached to it.

I got out my box of Christmas decorations, and after having put up 90% of them, discovered that the bottom was covered in mouse droppings.

So that’s going to be a story full of fun for whoever does the janitor services here, but I’m more curious about whether or not my flat reeks.

Because, well, mouse pee is smelly and there’s been a little clan walking around in my Christmas decorations, but I live alone and my nasal lining is "chronically inflamed" which means I'm living with an endlessly stuffy nose and I haven't smelled anything for the last three months.

The upside, I suppose, is that it nothing's been chewed on, so they probably haven't been nesting there, at least. And that the family who recently moved in next door asked me if it was okay that they got a cat.

1. I can sew, and I can sew a lot quicker once I get into it. The cutting is by far the most time-consuming part of the process.

2. Maybe not use denim for a piece with lots of open edges

3. If I practice the difficult parts in the songs we're playing, I get better at them. Even the parts too difficult when sightreading because they're too fast. Who would've thought, right???

4. Yes, playing the Legére plastic reed #3 was a mistake in that it's so soft that my mouth suffers during extended playing on the harder reeds I should be using. But that plastic reed is so goddamn sensitive that anything but perfect embouchure creates a shite tone quality, and the right ring finger even slightly out of place makes me squeak, so it's actually forcing me to mind my two biggest hurdles towards playing the clarinet passably.

5. Four years and I'm still bad at bullet journaling

There's this idea that your "someday"-things cause bad conscience and stress, and ultimately procrastination. The language-learning book you never finished, the books you never read, the games you haven't played. For me, add the art equipment rarely used, and a shitton of bullet journal BS that I just couldn't make look as good as simple black lines and highlight markers. And the keyboard I don't practice my chords on and the books of songs I've never played, the sewing machine I ultimately never used for all the fancy DIY stuff, and for years now, the spinning wheel I inherited from my grandmother.

The idea is that they feel bad becaues we know we should be using them. I should be reading the ninetysomething unread books, I should be studying French vocabulary, I should be using one of the three different sets of coloured pencils, not to speak about the unopened sets of plain drawing pencils. I should be playing one of my fifty handheld games, I should be watching one of the eight unwatched anime box-sets, or my Crunchyroll queue, or the three or so reasons I subscribed to HBO for a while, and let's not talk about all my half-finished fanfic.

If I was serious about minimalism, the sewing machine and the keyboard would go instantly, along with the eight years worth of sheet music from two different ensembles and one choir, the six-ish music books and the pile of printed and photocopied piano music, two different sets of watercolour and six tubes of acrylic paint, a ton of pencils too soft for writing, a Japanese-German dictionary, a "teach yourself French" book (also in German), six shelves of books, a food processor cum blender, a Wii, two DVD players, a GBA, a DS Lite, a 3DS, a typewriter, a shameful amount of markers and fineliners and gel pens.

In the pits of self-improvement reddit, there is a vision of my life where I keep only a tightly curated collection of books and DVDs; my pile of notebooks is gone, replaced with a single one, and a single sketchbook in which I draw with one of the fine ballpoint pens that has been my go-go art equipment for a decade and half. My harddrive is emptier. My three different online bookmarking systems are tidier. I practice my clarinet.

Our things are our identity, and it's telling, isn't it, that I could throw out half my wardrobe and cooking utensils and dishware and knick-knacks and curtains with no problem. But when it gets close to the creative side - the things I want to make, the art I want to consume - I find it deeply uncomfortable to resign myself to the fact that yeah, I'll need five years to get it all done, and should just spare myself the bad conscience of everything undone and throw it out and forget about it, already.

A small-ish step in the right direction is that I did sit down with the spinning wheel and having spun the two wheels of wool my grandmother left behind, now find myself wanting more. (though this comes with the downside of getting rid of the yarn I make, because I've got enough yarn lying around from before ha ha ha )

So I'm doing Project 333, apparently.

It's about limiting your wardrobe to 33 items for 3 months, so here's me taking the plunge to see if I can pull of the shirt/tie/waistcoat combo as well as all the stylish girls on pinterest.

This because I finally caved and made a reddit account singlehandedly to moan about all the books I don't want to throw away but god there are so many of them.

Four or five years ago, I did a Mari Kondo on my habitat, and got rid of 50-ish DVDs, a good number of CDs, twelve shopping bags worth of clothing, two boxes of kitchen stuff, and a number of books I've since forgotten. I think it was more than a hundred. My home did not feel emptier for it, only tidier, and the only thing I regretted handing off was a Desigual sweater that had been hideously expensive and worn maybe twice in the year since I bought it. I never missed a single thing I carried out; even the sweater was more a matter of being sad about the wasted money and how it was beautiful but it wasn't me.

I don't know what I did wrong to get there, but the last couple of weeks has seen youtube replace my normal dish of musicals, political satire and cooking with bullet journaling which turned into weird lifestyle vids which turned into meal prepping and minimalism. All of which is met with I'm not some coconut oil lovin' youtube housewife, I'm not one of those people while obsessive watching their vids for tips anyway.

And the core tenet of minimalism, the entire "useless physical objects demand your attention and divert your focus from life", is one that is undeniably tempting.

The problem, which I'm sure is in fact what minimalism is philosophically out to solve, is that what is left of my clutter (minimalist lingo for useless physical objecrts) is now mainly things that I feel define me as a person, or at least the person I would like to be.

Tellingly, when I did my Mari Kondo, there was one category of things I couldn't get myself to "purge": My video games, almost all which are as unplayed today as they were then. Because I want to be a person who plays video games, okay, and I keep them around for the day when I surely will finish them all. Because here's the second thing: Video games are stories, and I collect stories.

( And now they're piling up and I'm a horrible person )