TMM – Week 3 (Pt. 1)

Sunday:
I haven’t been keeping up very well with my MM routine this past weekend. Not quite sure why the exact cause is, but I’m determined to keep up with it. I slept in today too, and did my MM in fragmented sessions. I’m determined to get back into the swing of it tomorrow, though. I need to get up early anyway, so I can help my boyfriend clean the apartment in preparation for his mom’s visit for Thanksgiving later this week.

Speaking of cleaning, we went to Costco yesterday, and while walking around, I saw this random book lying out-of-place on a display of (I think it was) toilet paper. The book in question? The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing. We ended up buying the book, all on account of one of the testimonies listed in the Introduction of the book. The author states: “A dramatic reorganization of the home causes correspondingly dramatic changes in lifestyle and perspective. It is life transforming.”

The selling testimony: “Your course taught me to see what I really need and what I don’t. So I got a divorce. Now I feel much happier.”

If that is not one of the best contextual testimonies that you have ever heard, please tell me a better one, ’cause that one is just so out-of-the-blue and somehow still applicable that I basically walked around flipping through the book for the rest of the time we were in Costco. I’m about halfway through already — it’s a short book — but I like the ideas in it so far. This method of tidying (the KonMari method) splits the work of tidying into two kinds: deciding whether or not to discard something, and then deciding where to put the items you keep. My boyfriend and I went through the kitchen today discarding and reorganizing stuff, and it just *feels* better now. In any case, it being such a short book, I recommend at least picking it up and flipping through a few of the topics in it if you happen upon it at some point in a store.

Monday:
So, I finished reading the book about the KonMari method of tidying, and I thought it was pretty interesting. Some of it seems a bit silly, but honestly, the affirmations part of the MM also seems silly to me. The interesting thing about the this method is that you decide on whether or not to keep things by asking yourself “does this item spark joy?” That way, in the end, you’re only left surrounding yourself with things that you enjoy. It’s a very subjective way of doing things, rather than the objective standards like “hang all your clothes backward, and switch them around after you wear them and put it back; the clothes that are still hanging backward by the end of the year, get rid of.”

Another thing about this method is that you’re to visualize the kind of lifestyle you want at the end of your tidying expedition — have a destination before you start. Otherwise you are wandering aimless without a goal. I guess the thing that I like about this method is how mindful it is.

Tuesday:
Chris’s mom flew in today. Luckily, we got pretty much all of the cleaning done yesterday, so all that was left this morning was to finish up the laundry and put the sheets back on the bed. She treated us to this Italian place near where Chris was working tonight, and I got one of the weekly specials that had veal, shrimp, angel hair pasta, and some other stuff in some wine sauce. It wasn’t bad, but it lacked flavor. It might’ve been just because the soup that it came with was very flavorful, but I felt like it needed some more acidity to it. We also got calamari appetizers, and those were DELICIOUS. I ate a lot of those, of course. After that, we tailed Chris around the store for a bit before his team got in for work, and then we got to meet a few of them.

I ended the night watching Guardians of the Galaxy with Chris’s mom (Mrs. Lazarus) after leaving the store. She’d never seen it before, and as it’s one of Chris and my favorite movies, it just seemed appropriate to have her watch it after she noticed the Lego version of Star Lord hanging from my rearview mirror.

Wednesday:
Hey-o, I’m actually typing this one in the morning, like I’m supposed to! I postponed my MM for an hour — I had trouble falling asleep even though I was really tired by around 10:30 when the movie ended last night. I think I didn’t actually get to sleep until closer to midnight. I had to play on my 3DS to make myself drowsy again.

When you have bad dreams about being totally unprepared for both your presentations that are due in a week, it probably means that you’re pretty stressed out about them and should really get to work on them. I’d been hoping to have gotten so much more done by now than I have. That’s part of the reason why I opted to not visit my family during this week — I knew I’d have more than enough to catch up on, what with presentations, projects, exams to prep for, and applications to work on. Having to use the weekend to clean and prep for Mrs. Lazarus’s visit ate up a lot of time. Not to mention I was really tired this past weekend and napped a lot. It’s probably a combination of stress and sleep deprivation.

At least Mrs. Lazarus is understanding and doesn’t expect me to entertain her, so I can feel less guilty about working on stuff while she’s here. I’ll need to do a lot of it.