Been thinking about domestic things lately. Of routine and clutter from a life lived by convenient habits and distraction. I have had visitors to my house and each caused me to see my living space through their eyes, making adjustments where I could in order to make both my space and myself to be more welcoming.
My day to day life revolves around critical reading and technical writing. But this discipline is a transmutation of my core passion of collecting information from people and telling clever stories back to that audience.
My sister told me that her day to day life is slow and uneventful. Things can take a while to accomplish and sometimes a day is taken by chores like doing a full laundry cycle. I told her that I would still love to hear that from her. Because, it is not always the action that is interesting to me, but the intention behind it. What you notice in the passing moment of being forced to take your time in a process.
I can easily write a thousand words about any book or film I experience, as I try to figure out why it was made, what was trying to be communicated, and what it stirred up in me in response. Even if it is a colossal squandering of time and talent involved - so many hands were involved in the process of bringing it into my view. And therefore, many somethings had to happen for it to get to that release stage, and that process is guaranteed to generate at least one interesting story along the way.
But today, my hamper was full, so I determined to do laundry. This process was dramatized by my annual evidence that living in a mid-century house on a concrete slab makes maintenance troublesome. My drains are rather hard to physically repair or replace when embedded in a firm foundation. I have sought professional counsel on this front, and have been often given advice on dumping enzymes down my drains periodically to eat the buildup and gunk. So I bought a tub of anti-protein powder and occasionally try to debuff the swoleness of my drains. Surprisingly, my service company is never considering bringing along a camera snake to investigate the depths of my flushed sins, despite my confession through submitted service requests in detail, laying out evident consequences of my house being set in its ways. Occasionally each winter, it bubbles and belches back grumbled curses at my single-handed onslaught in attempting to wash away the memories of ever being unclean, like bathing in my own unholy river Styx.
But I am merely setting the background context for the stakes of performing a load of laundry today. Wondering if somewhere in my plumbing, there will be an equal and opposite reaction to my decision to flood the drains for some clean sets of clothes and one set of sheets.
The sheets are always an interesting complication in doing a load of laundry, as the tangles and folds create mobius strip time warps to reduce the expected effect of cleansing and drying the other items involved. Rather than these folds having the effect of wringing the clothes to be cleaner and drier, it instead forms a series of protected pockets to create steamed dumplings of retained moisture. This is on defiance of classic American tradition in the art of deeply frying unnatural objects until they are homogenous, and likely homogenized for good measure.
Indeed, I heard light gurgling as my pipes were flushed and the washer completed its cycle, singing me a light song in triumph of its good service on the submarine wars waged in close quarters. It summoned me from my reading of "Buff Soul" by Moa Romanova, in order to transfer the contents to the aggressive spinning clothes oven. Alas, my efforts were in vain in deconstructing inedible dumplings and I had to extend the timeouts in the hotbox for the items who sought refuge in the black sails, torn from the rigging of my nocturnal vessel to the land of dreams.
Once these stages were completed, I got to transport the load back to my room to organize and compact for storage. It is a centering process to sort out this task, acknowledging the trials to which I put my adornment in shielding me from the elements, then repeating the process which exposed them to external contamination in reverse to cleanse them from that experience.
The small things in life are fascinating and enthralling wonders to ponder that anything happens at all. There is art from the children's comic "Moomins", where one character remarks to another "But you lead such an exciting life." To which a behatted figure with a pipe responds, "Well, I let little things happen to me and then I think they are tremendous." And that encapsulates the spirit I want to reflect in life.
In the secondary part of my title, I was going through my rooms and looking at my doorframes. I haven't had to hang a door for a while, and while some of the paint is scuffed and chipped at the framing of the hinge, each door closes true. And for that I am grateful. I have a secondary reminder of the counter-example of my rear fence's wooden gate, which is exposed to the elements and vacillates between being too loose and swinging in the wind and being swollen in cold and damp weather to be stubbornly stuck shut. I think I am more like the gate than the door, in having to adjust for my environment and season, but aspirationally I admire the consistency in my interior doors' unsung performance which I tend to take for granted. Roman Mars, host of the design podcast "99% Invisible", has a thesis statement that good design is often invisible, as it does not get your attention enough to convince you it needs to be changed to something else which would resolve a perceived problem.
"Blessed are the easily pleased, for they shall be often contented."
