TimWoolery.net Documenting the Journey and the Learning Curve

#81 – Clutter

#81 - Clutter

Every Sunday afternoon, Nicole and I have our unofficial “clean-the-house” period. We spend 1-4 hours cleaning the house of all the mung that has accumulated over a six or seven day period. I don’t know how I reached the point where Sunday afternoon/evening was our time to clean, except that it was the most effective tonic to the ennui that built over me come sundown, when I was looking at another 5 day stretch in the salt mines.

My weekends are never as fun as I hope they would be. When I was younger, we packed enough activity in one day to keep my grandmother exhausted for a month. Some of the best days, the days that I look back on as “perfect” were frenetic, paced like the Pamplona running of the bulls. You go and go and go and you do not stop until you’re sunburned, exhausted and burned to a warm and comfortable glow at your friend’s parents house in the late evening. It’s hard to schedule something like that these days. The friends that I did that with when I was 20 or 21 moved or drifted off into parts unknown. I can’t even scare up a good soccer game these days.

And so, I find myself looking at Sunday afternoon with the grim knowledge that whatever fun I was planning to have was nowhere near enough to combat the battles that I will now face Monday through Friday. It wasn’t something I was planning on feeling when Nicole and I married. I wasn’t planning on my feelings being any more complicated than “We’re-married-and-life-is-perfect”. I wasn’t prepared for all the self-doubt and angst to come creeping back in once the glow of the honeymoon wore off and the very real problems of being a bill-paying adult in the Bay Area began to present themselves. I found myself with a hot, twisted feeling in my stomach like I had swallowed a ball of steel wool and no way to cope with it. I’d walk up and down the street, keyed up and freaked out at 9:30 on a Sunday night.

All the typical adult solutions were no help; sex, TV and alcohol only take you so far. I still found myself keyed up at the prospect of going through another week of work with the knowledge that I wasn’t having all the life-fulfilling experiences I thought I’d have. I found myself twisted up and unable to breathe – the slightest thing would send me off into a loud, angry lecture about the importance of folding underwear and socks correctly.

I’m still not 100% on all of this – I’m getting better, just ask Nicole. I’ve taken a lot of time to look at myself and my responses to various stimuli and ask some very basic questions. Is this worth getting angry about? Why is this bothering you as much as it does? What can you do ahead of time to prevent this from blowing up? Sounds easy, but it’s taken me the majority of five years to get in the habit of managing myself and that’s starting from a point where I didn’t even know I needed managing.

So…clutter. I hate it. Let it build up over time and it really starts bringing me down. I didn’t even know that a pile of laundry could affect me emotionally but hey, life is full of all kinds of surprises. After a lot of bad noise stretched out over months of time, I started doing the Sunday afternoon/evening thing and I found that it went a long way in helping me to mentally prepare for another week of the grind.

I realize that saying clutter bothers me sounds pretty illogical, especially if you’ve come to my place recently. Even when it’s spotless, Nicole and I have decorated the place until it resembles an explosion at the kitsch-and-antique shop. It doesn’t take much for the place to look like a hobo nest but the good news is that it cleans up pretty quickly when both of us are working on it.

I’ve been noticing the itchy-cotton feeling in my chest a lot more lately. Not as pronounced but to put it simply, it’s been harder to catch my breath. I finally gave voice to all of this on Saturday morning to Nicole after I caught myself shifting into harangue mode over something stupid, I can’t even remember what it is now (3 days later). My life sometimes begins to resemble our house in that the clutter of my life is beginning to take on epic proportions and some mental garbage dumping is necessary to get back on track.

You know what it’s like living in a cluttered house. Getting up to use the John at 3 aye-em is a fun-filled adventure. Stub your toes on shoes, trip over plastic bags of clothes that need to be dropped off at the Salvation Army. It takes longer and longer for you to go from point A to point B and it’s because you have a lot of little things standing in your way. Life gets to be like that after a while, too, if you are not careful. You have a lot of little, niggling things that stand in the way of you getting through your day. Enough figurative stubbed toes and barked shins and you find yourself getting pissed off at a barista because they can’t figure out that you want 1% low-fat milk, not 2%. I’m not at that point yet, Nicole has had to be patient with me on a number of occasions. I’m doing this to mentally dump some garbage that otherwise would be a symbolic Achilles heel for me.

Most of my mental garbage has to do with the fact that I can no longer dump my mental garbage in a public forum like this. It’s too public, the possibilities for something I say to be taken out of context are just endless and in the end it has the potential to cause more problems than solve. I’ve set some high bars for myself and most (if not all of them) entail me not sliding back into the role that I’ve held for way too long. Of course, even if I can break out of those roles, the stress comes in all the people who aren’t quite convinced that I’m taking a new tack and insist on working with the old material. This probably fits in with what I was complaining about when I was talking about planetary physics a while back.

There, see it? I’m doing it again. I’m answering my own question before I start. That’s a product of all the new stuff I’m doing. I have to be in control of myself. The only way I can control myself is by solving my own problems before anyone else gets a chance to. I can’t let anyone else solve my problems for me anymore and even if that means I apply a solution to something that probably doesn’t fit, at least I’m handling the situation. All of this is very broad-stroke, very high level. I’d love to put some stuff out there that paints in a very specific way about what is bothering me. Then, I’d love to publish that and have you go “Wow, I know what you’re talking about”. If I could do that, I’d have about 90% of my problem licked because when you boil it down, my greatest fear is that of being rejected by other people. So, I’m constantly communicating how I feel about things and hoping that it’s understandable to everyone else.

Some of my saddle sores are because of one of the roles that I’ve either taken on or had thrust upon me (I’m still trying to figure this one out). Don’t laugh, but there’s a lot of times where I’m called upon to be the Sanest Guy in the Room. I can’t go into specifics without violating a lot of confidences, so some of my readers can get off of the edge of their seats. I’m “The Guy Who Listens” or “The Guy You Talk to When You Have Run Out of Other People”. This is a new one on me so don’t be surprised if the two monikers above get modified later on as I get new information. I started having to be this guy about the time that Grandpa had his stroke. As other situations seemed to call upon him, I started using him more and more. He’s the last guy to get angry, the first one to calm you down. I don’t even know where he came from but it seems like his time has come. So, he’s been working and growing at the same time, not unlike putting on a suit that’s a little too big for you and growing into it as time goes on.

The clutter in my house and the clutter in my life both seem to have the same end. They keep me from focusing and doing what I really want. In the end, I have to have a little house cleaning if I don’t want to be sandbagged into immobility. I feel like that hot air balloonist who needs to keep dumping his ballast overboard to stay aloft. The difference between me and a balloonist is that he has a limited supply of ballast and I haven’t seen the end of my mental sandbags yet. They drop from the sky into my basket and I have to toss them overboard as I get the opportunity. If I’m lucky, the sand is actually in the bags and this is a simple matter. Usually, though, the sand and the bags arrive at different times and I’m doing a little scoop-and-bag act before getting it all over the side. I’d really rather be enjoying the ride instead of working like a fool to stay aloft. I also get really peeved seeing other people who ride in gas bags that seem permanently ballast-free. They wave and talk casually about their accomplishments while I mentally poke holes in their balloon.

Actually, the clutter in my life has a very real consequence that can’t/shouldn’t be ignored. When you’re young, an infant, you have two or three needs that have to be satisfied before you can go from “Sad/Angry” to “Happy/Peaceful”. A dry diaper, fed and watered, a warm place to sleep and you’re copasetic. As you get older, your needs and your wants broaden and the amount of conditions that need to be satisfied grow exponentially. It’s not enough to have food, shelter and clothing. Hundreds, no, thousands of things need to work together before you can say “Yes, I am, in fact, happy”. Sergio the Plate Spinner doesn’t have 3 or 4 or even 11 plates to keep going, he’s working with enough china to fill the Mikasa outlet in Vacaville.

You begin to live in a world where you’re always trying to answer the question: What could go wrong next? You work to limit the possibilities or develop responses for all occasions. When you live in a world where you’re pessimistic but you tell everyone you are pragmatic, the latter shades off into the former more often than you’re prepared to admit. It’s rough to come up with a good response to “How was your weekend?” when all you’ve got to say is “I spent my off time trying to think of ways not to lose my job or my car or my house or my wife…you?” There isn’t much to say after that…you hear something like “Nice weather, huh?” as they totter back down the hall.

So, the clutter is something that you regularly need to dump because even Sergio the Plate Spinner got a night off. You can’t keep working that seven-shows-a-week-with-two-on-Sunday schedule. You need to relax, regroup and remember that no matter how much control you attempt to exert on anything, some things (okay, most things) are simply beyond your control. Every once in a while, your favorite TV station will go to test pattern and no amount of whacking the tube with a newspaper will change that.

Love how I jump from allegory to allegory? Yeah, me too. I feel like a cat with mittens that walks through a pan of raspberry jam. Maybe Beatrix Potter can illustrate that one if he ever wakes up from his dirt nap. For now, you can picture me madly cleaning my house while techno and jazz erupt from the sound system. The randomness of the sound is a mirror for my life. The smell of lemon-fresh Pine-sol (why don’t they call it Lemon-Sol? Oh yeah, because it sounds stupid) is a metaphor for how much cleaner I wish the ride was.

- Tim Woolery, 8/29/2005