I forget, are you listening to Welcome to Night Vale? I was cleaning the kitchen tonight to a couple of episodes of that, and one of the bits was something I wanted to share, if you haven't already heard it.

But here is the truth of nostalgia: We don’t feel it for who we were, but who we weren’t. We feel it for all the possibilites that were open to us but that we didn’t take. Time is like wax, dripping from a candle flame. In the moment it is molten and falling, with the capability to transform into any shape, then the moment passes and the wax hits the tabletop and solidifies into the shape it will always be. It becomes the past, a solid single record, of what happened, still holding in its wild curves and contours the potential of every shape it could have held.

...

But then you remember, I remember, that we are even now in another bit of molten wax. We are in a moment that is still falling, still volatile, and we will never be anywhere else. We will always be in that most dangerous, most exciting, most possible time of all...

-Welcome to Night Vale, Episode 21: A Memory of Europe

I was cleaning the kitchen for a couple of reasons. One was that the Excel spreadsheet has been so far working out for me pretty well. I've kept it up every day (except on days when none of the actions I perform fit into either earning or spending minutes) and I've made myself shove through the inevitable moments when my brain says oh don't record that it's already late and you should just go to bed, or that's not really wasting time or I don't even know how many minutes that was it probably wasn't very many. It's interesting that it has way more excuses for doing things that spend minutes than it has excuses for not doing things that earn minutes. I wonder what that means.

I'm earning minutes now, by the way. Writing is one of the ways to earn minutes. A couple of days ago I earned 127 minutes writing. That's like a whole movie.

Anyway. The second reason I was cleaning the kitchen was that The Bear* and I went to a potluck last night at his goalie's house. Goalie was very nice, and his house was also very nice, and it got me thinking about living space. This may not be any kind of grand revelation for you, but I don't know that I've ever actually thought of my living space as a reflection of me. I started thinking about how I always credit Pretty Frippy Frog with teaching me how to dress like a person who cared about how they dressed. I wondered if maybe I should start thinking about living space the way I think (now) about clothing. I didn't used to think about clothing this way. I used to pull on a t-shirt that was usually three or four sizes too bit, some sweatpants (I'm pretty sure they were neon orange) some socks and shoes and go off into the world. Maybe it's not so surprising that the world wasn't thrilled about welcoming me with open arms at that point... But PFF started the process of teaching me that clothing could be a method of self-expression, of pride. I have an overabundance of pride, and I could use to let a little of it off in self-expression before it turns into stubborn I-work-alone hermitage. Living with my grandmother continued that process, and living in Taiwan pushed it a little further. I learned to appreciate the color pink. I have more purple in my closet than I thought was possible.

So I wonder if I shouldn't start approaching my living space in the same way. It might make cleaning less of a chore and more of an art. It's not cleaning, it's arranging. This is artisinal tidying.

UfYH has been pretty helpful that way, too.

So that's at least a couple of new directions we could fly off in. The now. Self-expression via chores. Changing perspective to get things done.

Thoughts?

*One of my co-workers is under the inexplicable impression that I live in a tree and my husband is a bear.