decluttering – Page 6 – Deborah Makarios

October 2, 2015

Decluttering My Eyeballs

Warning: if you have a phobia about eyeballs, you probably shouldn’t read this post. Have a complimentary kitten picture, and move along, nothing to see here.

Still with me? On we go.

I didn’t do terribly well with my decluttering in August, and I was hoping things would improve in September. Well, yes and no.

Here’s my list:
one small spray-can of glasses-cleaner
one glasses-cleaning cloth
one glasses case (when I find it, although I may have inadvertently decluttered, i.e. lost, it already)
one pair of glasses
and, if I have all this terminology right:
fourteen and a half dioptres of myopia (eight from my right eye and six and a half from my left)
and six and a half dioptres of astigmatism (five and a quarter from my right eye and one and a quarter from my left)

This was not accomplished, you will doubtless be happy to hear, with secateurs. No; all I had to do was lie on a table and let my eyeballs be carved by lasers: first a flap on the front of each eyeball, and then a divot out of the underlayer of each cornea. Of the hooky metal tool used to lift the flap, I shall say nothing. Nor of the rather unpleasant smell, heavily reminiscent of the drilling of teeth.

The experience, I freely admit, was not a pleasant one, although I did get a barley-sugar for my pains (or more likely my trembles) afterwards. Nonetheless, I think it well worth enduring for the results. From being slightly less blind than a bat (and not even equipped with sonar) I am now possessed of excellent sight in one eye and passable sight in the other, which will improve as it comes to terms with being the shape of a football, instead of, er, a football.

The discomfort was over in hours, and aside from eye-drops and eye-shields (which I shall declutter in due course), I am free to resume my life. An interdiction on reading for the first 24-48 hours was easily surmounted by the acquisition of a stack of audio books (yay for libraries); and a month-long ban on eye makeup doesn’t affect me as I don’t wear makeup anyway. Swimming is also verboten for a month, and I am looking forward to resuming this fun-filled form of exercise – all the more so as I will now be able to find my way from changing-room to pool unaided.

It is really quite a novelty, this clearness of sight. I’m not sure quite when my eyes started to need spectacular assistance (sorry! sorry…) but it must be nearly a quarter of a century now. I could not remember what it was like to wake up and see clearly, instead of waking up and fumbling for glasses or lens case. It really takes some getting used to. I keep finding myself staring at things, not because I’ve never seen them before, but because now I can’t not see. The leaves on the tree across the yard. The edge of the curtain outlined against the street light. Remarkable.

September 4, 2015

The Thing Itself

It’s one of the great mysteries of the universe: has anyone, ever, managed to get a rubber ducky to float the right way up? Apart from Florentijn Hofman, obviously, and even he’s had trouble, what with deflations, explosions, and midnight vandals. (Another of the great mysteries of the universe: what kind of person stabs a giant rubber ducky forty-two times?)

I can’t even remember the last time my rubber ducky floated the right way up. Obviously, it must be a specialist Diving Duck.

It’s got a recess at the bottom into which, the ancestral wisdom informed me, one could glue a fifty-cent coin and thus ballasted, the ducky would float the right way up. I have been carting a fifty-cent coin around lo these many years – long after the coins were changed to smaller editions – but correctly floating ducky there has been none.

The glue was too weak, or the coin wasn’t heavy enough, or the glue gave way in the bath – or, more unnervingly, when the duck was just sitting on the shelf. You’d hear this “clonk” and put your head into the bathroom to find no one there, just a ducky staring blankly at you out of it’s rat-chewed face. (Rats have remarkably experimental tastes, considering their inability to vomit.)

But it was my ducky. Even though I seldom had baths, and even when I did they’d only be graced by the ducky for about as long as it took for it to keel over on its face and start taking on water: i.e. about two seconds, and then I’d fish it out with a sigh, put it to drain on the side of the bath, and replace it on the windowsill until the next time came to dust it off.

I don’t need to do this any more. It suddenly came to me one day. I don’t need the duck. The duck doesn’t need me. And even without it I wouldn’t be leading a duck-free life, as the Caped Gooseberry still has five ducks (which we also don’t use as there isn’t really room in the bath).

I decided to let the duck go, along with the religiously transported 50c coin (once I find it). While I was decluttering the bathroom, I decided to get rid of an old white comb while I was at it. The comb used to live at my grandmother’s house, along with several matching ones in different colours for her assorted granddaughters.

I picked it up, and I could suddenly see the ceramic bowl on the dressing table that they used to sit in; and turning in my mind’s eye, I looked out the window into my grandmother’s back yard, past the washing-line and the swing set to the fence that marked off her resplendent kitchen garden (now, alas, underneath a new house). I remembered the sights, the scents, the voices.

But I’m still getting rid of the comb. Because I don’t actually need the comb to recall those memories. For one thing, imagining the comb is sufficient, and for another I already have a ‘madeleine’ for remembering my grandmother’s house: a bar of the coal-tar soap she always had in the bathroom.

Ah, the memories.

My purging list for August isn’t very impressive:
one rubber duck (with munted face, therefore unsuitable for donation)
one old fifty-cent coin (probably no longer legal tender)
and one plastic comb.

These things tend to be cyclical, mind you, and I’m hoping September will prove more fruitful on the purging front. How was your August purge-wise?

June 12, 2015

Making Cuts

I’ve been posting a lot lately about purging, decluttering, getting rid of things, seeking the essentials and hacking back everything else.

I don’t want to be one of those irritating people who give everyone else good advice but never follow it themselves; and I think what I’ve been trying to do with all these posts is to shift the balance of my thinking. It is not easy, as I’m sure you know. Mental habits are ruts that are hard to break out of.

The good is often the enemy of the best, I wrote. This is a lovely aphoristic saying, full of insight and meaning. But it isn’t anything more unless you apply it, put it into practice.

There are a number of elements I consider as essential to my life: the love of God, my husband, family and friends. Writing, reading, and handwork. Those are my core activities and priorities. Then there are the necessary ancillary activities like cleaning, eating etc.

There are a lot of other things I would like to do – often, being all excited about a new shiny idea, I start doing them straight away – which there isn’t room for in my life, not without filching time from the more important activities.

Where this really lands me in trouble is with the sunk cost fallacy – having enthusiastically launched into a project or activity, I feel I can’t call it quits, because that would be wasting the resources I have put into it.

Does anyone else know the dragging guilt and wearying heaviness induced by too many unfinished projects? Are you in over your head too?

Here’s the truth I have to face: if it wasn’t a good idea to start giving your time to something, it isn’t a good idea to keep giving your time to it.

The sensible thing – nay, the wise thing to do is to admit that there isn’t room in your life for this right now, and let it go.

That being the case, I am regretfully withdrawing from the Historical Sew Monthly. I made a shift and a balaclava, both of which are useful, and I am pleased that I did.

I also made half of an Edwardian maid’s apron – my first attempt at pleating – which I may use as a half apron, or finish with bib, straps etc in the fullness of time, either with the frou-frou Edwardian bib, or with a fuller, more practical one.

But as much as I enjoy historical sewing (or at least, the results thereof), it isn’t a high enough priority in my life for me to be devoting as much time to it as the HSM’15 requires. So, I shall take my final bow (that’s me in the back row) and retire to the audience where I can sit and applaud the efforts of others.

I do feel disappointed, I admit. But the disappointment is tinged with relief, knowing this was the right decision to make, and nervousness, knowing that this is very likely only the first of many such decisions.