Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

The prompt for this month's writing group was "New Year's Unresolutions, or Irresolutions if you prefer. Perhaps it's things you're going to let go off, or stop giving a monkey's about, perhaps it's things that you've no intention of giving up, even though you probably should, or the things you want to celebrate. Anything that isn't a New Year's resolution, or maybe kind of is."

It was such a great idea that I wish I'd been able to do something better with it than say I'm not going to lose weight and I'm not going to KonMari my house, haha.

We talked quite a lot about both things, about the desire for control but also about the judgment and shame and moral values that are put on the state of our houses and our bodies (espeically as women; this isn't a WI group any more but it's still "women writers").

Of course with the Netflix show, talk of KonMari is everywhere and I'd found it incredibly stress-inducing since one of my friends talked about it a lot last year (right before she moved on to talking about weight loss, actually...). It was such a relief to see this come up in the "Unfuck Your Habitat" facebook group I'm on, where while some people were saying aspects of it had worked for them, a lot of people were saying it set off their anxiety, it wasn't for them because they were too poor, too disabled, too neurodivergent. Here I was thinking it was just me, with my weird combination of feelings about all I abandoned when I immigrated here, about living with someone who finds tidying stressful and pruning the bookshelves not just impossible but undesireable...but it's not just me.

But as with everything popular, there is a backlash. The one against Marie Kondo seems to have focused on her advice not to own many books. This one-size-fits-all type of proclamation is a big indicator that she's not talking to people like me, and I'd leave it at that, but people have been absolutely vicious about this and I've seen several memes and "jokes" already and heard of more. Inevitably, these reactions have been racist and sexist to varying degrees, in a way I'm grateful to my Japanese-American friend for calling to our attention.

And even on its own terms, the demonstrative love of books has crossed a threshold into a kind of fetishization, as if books are inherently sacred objects. I heard it called "owning books is a replacement for a personality" on Twitter and that sounds exactly right to me. One of the images-with-words-on I saw on Facebook said "It doesn't count as hoarding if it's books" which I think is terribly disrespectful and far too flippant way to talk about something as serious as hoarding, which is already surrounded in so much shame.

So anyway, I got home from writing group and the first thing Andrew said when I walked in the door was that Book Twitter had so annoyed him about exactly this subject that he'd done something I spent years trying to get him to do and always failing: he piled up some books to get rid of. They're mostly duplicates, and books he realized are really racist so he doesn't want them any more, he said. But it's something! There's a couple dozen books piled up on a chair now, and he did it without me even mentioning it.

He did it, in fact, because he thought Book Twitter had been so racist and obnoxious toward Marie Kondo that even though he knows nothing else about her or her tidying-up system or anything, he did the opposite of what they say just to spite them.

It's an unorthodox motivation to declutter, but I'll take it!

Andrew says he's aging in dog years so he's nearly six. Sounds about right.

But to his fellow humans, he's forty today! Happy birthday, love.

The dog jumped up onto Andrew's lap and Andrew said "I do wonder what Gary thinks of me," for the millionth time, as he's always curious about the internal state of dogs. "Am I just a useful cushion, or am I his friend or what?"

He might have said some more but I was laughing too much at "useful cushion." Bless him and his endless insecurity.

Andrew wrote a book! Set during the second world war, it's a novel about Alan Turing, Aleister Crowley, Ian Fleming and Dennis Wheatley who combine math, magic and espionage in what ends up sounding like one of Wheatley's novels.

This sounds like the last kind of thing I would read normally, but I really enjoyed it! (And I'm not just saying that because sales will help pay our bills!)

"Hang on a second," I said, starting up the stairs just when Andrew was nearly ready to go out. "I need to get some different shoes."

Trying to catch possible comments before they might happen, I said "I know you only have one pair of shoes because you have one pair of feet, but I can't do that."

"I know you do!" he said, rightly a little defensive at my pre-emptive unfairness. "I don't get it but I don't get a lot of things."

"And do you know why I can't have only one pair of shoes like you do?" I called down from the bedroom where I was buckling pointless but cute little buckles on my sandals.

There was a long pause.

I'd taught Andrew that women have to choose between comfort/suitability and acceptable appearance a lot more in our clothing than men do. I've never had one of those jobs where they mandated high heels, but I've certainly had criticisms for insufficiently-"professional" footwear even at temo jobs (where I couldn't afford new shoes!). Andrew's black brogues from Clarks are the overlap in the circles of functionality and approbation but for women in almost all of society, these two circles of the Venn diagram don't meet.

The pause got almost long enough that I was going to give the answer when two words floated up the stairs: "The patriarchy?"

"Yep!" I said, slapping my knees for dramatic effect as I stood up, feet newly sandaled and ready to take on the world. He got it exactly right; I'm so proud.

I just found this as a note on my phone, saved several months ago. No idea why I wrote it. Figured I'd share it.

Andrew's just answered the phone and said "hello?"

Pause.

"HELLO?
‎
"WHAT WAS THAT?
‎
"Does sound have a weight? No."‎

‎I think that might be an even better phone call from his dad than the time he rang to ask Andrew who the singer is that wasn't Roy Orbison.

Here's what Andrew posted yesterday.

Ten years ago today, give or take a time zone or six, I got married. (Coincidentally, so did Holly.)

I’m not very good at talking about my feelings, so I won’t talk about how much I love her, or how lucky I am, or any of that. And the wedding day itself is not one we particularly look back on with any great pleasure — it was less than two months after Holly’s brother died, and she was moving to another continent away from her family, which among many other things made the dynamics of the whole “not losing a daughter but gaining a son” thing rather different, and not in a good way.

But our wedding *was* the occasion of the one actual romantic gesture I’ve ever made, so I can at least mention that.

Holly and I both enjoy the work of the songwriter Stew. I’m a bigger fan, but we both knew and loved albums like Guest Host and The Naked Dutch Painter. These days Stew is a Tony Award-winning writer of musicals, but back then he and his band The Negro Problem didn’t have even the small level of celebrity he does now.

And because of that lack of celebrity, Stew offered an occasional service where he would write and record songs on commission. So — with the financial help of several friends who helped me pay for it as their wedding gift to us — I managed to scrape together enough money to pay for a song about Holly, for our wedding. (This was a major effort. At the time I was working three jobs just to pay off enough debts to get into a position where I could meet the financial requirements for her getting a spouse visa).

Here it is. https://olsenbloom.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/nows-eternity.mp3

To help make sense of some of the less obvious bits of lyric, my wife’s name is Holly, she comes from Minnesota (“the land of ten thousand lakes”), we’d met over the Internet originally (this was back when that was a relatively rare thing), and she was moving from the US to the UK.

I still think it’s a truly great song, and I’m pretty sure I’d think that even if it wasn’t about a truly great person.

"I'm sorry," I told Andrew after he'd endured a day of pain and feigned neurotypicality for me.

"You didn't invent axial tilt, or the Abrahamic religions, or the capitalist system that gives us only a few days off a year," he reassured me.

"Southerners don't even think 'good' rhymes with 'blood'!" Andrew announced, no doubt something he learns from the internet he's glued to every waking moment. I've been busy tidying so if there's a context for this I don't know what it is.

When my brain finally gets around to processing this I say, "...They don’t!"

To which of course the only reply is to shout both words, because volume and repetition will solve everything. 
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Then a terrible realization dawned on me. "Oh, God, this is gonna be like how you think I'm saying the same ‎thing when I say 'rum' and 'room,' isn't it?" That one went on for ages, and it was such a long time ago -- maybe even before we were married? -- that I hoped we were done with it...
‎
..."for good," I was gonna say, but no. Turns out it's still "for blood"! Ha.

The shape of my mouth is different and everything, I now notice, when I say these words. It wouldn't be the first time my dialect aligns me with the south of England (I prpnounce "scone" so it rhymes with "phone" too). 

I hear a distinction between these two words that he doesn't, and that's fine. Because some people's linguistic capabilities really do develop in such a way that they retain or lose certain sounds; most remain separate but a few that don't get used enough to be worthwhile can get elided together. "Cot" and "caught" sound the same to some English speakers and different to others.‎ There are many and varied examples of this phenomenon of people who hear and speak a variety of languages.

But then there are also people who insist that their way is Right and all others are Wrong and Inferior. 

It's much easier to be one of those, I think, if you basically have always lived in the same place. ‎

"Good! Blood!" Andrew said again.‎ "Goodbloodgoodbloodgoodblood..."‎ ad infinitum until it was time for me to leave the house. Which, thankfully, was only a few minutes later!

"I must be doing worse than I thought," Andrew said as we were on our way out of the cinema after seeing Mr. Holmes. "I actually started tearing up at the end of that!"

I smiled. "That is not a sign of any problem."

It's a marvelous film, emotionally powerful but no overwhelming, as my anxiety leads me to find so many stories these days. Ian McKellen's performance is so tremendous I think I might have to add him to my usual list of favorite Holmeses -- Merrison and Brett. I never expected that duo to become a trio.