I’m sorry you can’t see the slices of apple tucked into this yummy Chicken & Apple Waffle Sandwich, but they’re in there.
My friend found a killer deal on Pacific Rose apples at our local Kroger, and made sure we all got a bag. Sliced thin and hidden somewhere between the melting cheese and the smoky ham, they added a sweet surprise to a Friday night dinner.
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But, on to other things.
Who here has read Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up?
Am I the only hold-out here?
Like a child watching an adult party from her perch high on the stairs, I have listened in on all this talk of tidying up, of whether our shirts, books and souvenirs “spark joy.” One of my friends winnowed her vast perfume collection down to her forty favorites. Some people in my house never read the book and yet I saw the garbage bags fill up and fly out the door.
As for me, I pretty much doubt I’ll ever get around to the book or the throwing out.
But with so many people talking about “sparking joy,” I can’t help looking at my possessions and hearing a schoolmarm voice in my head asking, “Why do you still have that thing?”
She believes if you have 80 rolls of toilet paper in your house, you are a hoarder instead of a Costco member.
— Laurie Notaro, a Goodreads reviewer
Should Ms. Kondo show up at my house, she and I might have our first clash over my rag-head doll.
The doll was a gift from Alice, a single mom who was in charge of girls’ camp one year. Myself, I have carefully cultivated an air of incompetence about all things camp-y. But I think I was Young Women President that year so I had to pack up my mess kit and go. What’s more, all the other women believed that camp included nightly presents for the girls, with clever puns attached. I had to show up at the present-manufacturing event. If not, I would have come off as Not a Team Player.
So there I was, at Alice’s house, facing a tableful of miniature straw hats, glue guns, pin hardware and pastel ribbon doo-dads.
Alice was a seamstress. She knew her way around all this craft-store frippery. They all did. Actually, it was not bad work, once I forgot that I had given up an afternoon of reading under the backyard tree. I mean, I felt silly the whole two hours, but I also felt some pride of workmanship. Well, look at that. Everything stayed where I glued it.
Somewhere in that two hours, Alice leaned my way and said, “That’s OK. I know this isn’t your thing” as she smiled down at the hat she was working on. To me, that smile said, You’re still my buddy.
And when the entire ordeal was over — and I mean the week at camp and everything — Alice presented each team member with a rag-head doll.
There’s really no good place to put my Alice doll. She might sit on a bedroom shelf, until the cat knocks her off. Then she stays squished in with the blankets on the bottom shelf. That is, until I bother to look down there.
But she will never go into a trash bag because she is evidence that I can hate crafting and still be loved.
I so agree that it is life-changing magic when everything has been tidied up. But I don’t need to read the book as I already have this magic. Her name is Cynthia and she comes every other Thursday morning. . . . .
I bet you with all the money the sales of this book engenders that the author will no longer be cleaning and tidying up her house herself but also get a magic Cynthia of her own.
— Petra X, a Goodreads reviewer
I’ll bet the spark-joy lady would point her authoritative finger at the smoke-bomb kit.
Oh, boy, but this one takes me back to the days when we’d get in the car, take one sniff and know that a certain child hadn’t given up her Marlboros after all. I wonder if this child knows that her lunch money paid for this pricey clean-up kit.
Just look at all this haz-mat get-up — the mask, the goggles, the special rags. If I remember right, we had to seal up the car for a day or so after treatment. Once the incubation period passed, we had ourselves a car that smelled like 120-proof Febreze. And sticky spray on every surface — the arm rests, the visors, the eye-holes around the speedometer and the radio.
Months later, we were still finding sticky spots.
We bought two of these kits, used one and saved the other. The way things were going at the time, we thought we’d need it.
Mr. Read-Fast found it a few weeks ago. “What do you want to do with this?”
Let it sit in the garage, of course. Maybe we can hand it off to a couple other parents as clueless as we were.
Let me first state that this is pretty much how I live my life anyway, so I am hugely annoyed I didn’t think to get rich from it.
— Karatepop, a Goodreads reviewer
I guess Ms. Kondo would raise a pointy brow when she saw my can sealer.
I bought it to solve my lettuce guilt.
We go for the bagged stuff at this house. It saves decisions about what other colorful things to throw in with the salad.
We just can’t seem to eat up the whole bag. It’s too much salad the first night. By the second, it looks like seaweed.
Bless the person who invented a way to seal up the leftover salad in a mason jar. I gladly paid for their invention.
What virtue I felt, hustling to the kitchen after dinner, stuffing the romaine and red cabbage into the jar and waiting for the faint pop of the sealed lid. Never mind that the sealer was such a touchy gadget. After eight seconds of labor, it required eight hours of recharging.
Then one day, not even the eight hours revived it.
It still sits in the spot where it died because I don’t think its injuries look all that bad. This thing saved — what? — less than a hundred salads? What business did it have dying so young? For all I care, it can lay there until it decides to wake up and get to work again.
I had no idea when I picked up this pretty little book that it was going to necessitate my search for a live-in psychiatrist. I had NO freaking idea that I was squashing the self-esteem of my possessions. . . . The other day my husband heard me thanking my underwear for staying up all day. I’m not sure how much longer I’ll be married.
— Diane Yannick, a Goodreads reviewer
No doubt, Ms. Sparks-Joy will call me to account for my hunk of foam.
Surely she can understand how blissful it is to lie on her side with her legs perfectly aligned, her knees not knocking together. Surely she can give me credit for all the other side-sleeper pillows I’ve already tossed out. Some of them had handy knee-shaped grooves but pressed down thinner than my bra padding. Others were too fat, spreading me like a wishbone.
She better give me credit for not spending $59.97 on the pillow that promised to perform better than all those other pretenders.
The pricey pillow people made one mistake: they posted the measurements on Amazon. Armed with that information, I bought a plain old foam mattress and cut my own knee pillow. Actually, it looks more like I ripped it; foam doesn’t cut all that easily.
But it is heaven. I feel like I’m packed in as perfectly as eggs in a carton.
A piece of foam. What else can I say?
It is also left me with a lot of leftover foam.
The cat took a liking to it, so I cut ripped a piece for him.
Now the remaining slab waits in the basement. Anymore side-sleepers out there who want that well-aligned feeling? I can help you out. Please give me a call.
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Armed with my hopeless illusions about the useful futures of my useless stuff, as well as the sassy opinions of a few wags on Goodreads, I’m prepared to defend my clutter and all the indecision on which it rests.
Unless, of course, I can hand off my junk to you. You can save me the trouble of a garage sale.
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