![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
news from the domestic front
Jan. 11th, 2005 05:29 pmI have joined an absurd thing called Flylady. I first heard about this from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
natasha1805. It is a yahoo group with a website attached, run by two American women who send out loads of emails every day, reminding you to do some household work, such as making your bed, decluttering your kitchen shelf and, most importantly, SHINING YOUR SINK. It is basically an electronic nagging device, and I am totally addicted!!
I have not been ficcing, I have not been LJing, I have been cleaning the house. Mainly, and rather obessively, I have been SHINING THE SINK. (This, it seems, is what Americans call 'polishing the sink' and what Germans call 'die Spüle auf Hochglanz bringen'.)
Some notes on my Life With Flylady:
1. First, may I note that this is a ridiculous and absurd name for a group and I feel embarrassed at leaving their print-outs around the house. But as I am reading the print-outs obsessively, this cannot be helped. The logo on the homepage is an equally absurd fat pink matron with fairy wings.
2. The whole tone and ideology of the thing is redolent of 1950s housewifery. It's Mrs Brady meets Wilma Firestone. I feel like hopping across the carpet dressed in a frilly waist-length apron and nothing else besides. Plus I should really have a perm. Still, this does not stop my addiction.
3. The ideology is also relentlessly heterosexual and nuclear family. Apparently, women who are lesbian or single or childless do not have a problem with clutter. Still, this does not stop my addiction.
4.lazlet said 'Sink? What sink? Who cares?' Eek, but I do! Pathetically, I do! I have lived with clutter-induced guilt for years and years. This all goes back to my mother who is the Housewife of Your Dreams and a Wonderful Homemaker, and I, in my Depressed State, tied myself into knots of domestic denial. Anything remotely to do with housework was out of bounds for me because it threatened to turn me into my mother! Yet, I feel depressed by the wave of untidy and slovenly house surrounding me. All that stuff! Overwhelming. But now, hey: I am SHINING MY SINK. *falls over, dishrag in hand* I have even SPRAYED MY SINK WITH WINDOW CLEANER!
5. I started out in the obsessive online world with subversive feminine porn and where have I ended up? With the housewives. Betty Friedman, you will blanch. However, here is why I love it: Because the house has been getting me down since 1997, and before that, our previous houses got me down. There is the psycho-guilt of it all, and there are the practicalities: everything takes forever because I can never find a child's underwear in time for school, any sock that matches any other sock in time for work, any food that is not mouldy at 7.30 pm when I'm near-fainting with hunger.
6. The reason the house is a pigsty mess is that I am a great SHIRKER. I have shirked by writing fic, and then I have shirked writing fic by doing some other shit. And now I am shirking writing my book and marking 80 essays by SHINING MY SINK. I realise this. Cleaning has become a mode of shirking. This is new. As a scorpio (*pathetically digs up long-left-behind superstitions left over from teenage non-rationality*), I am prone to sudden enthusiasms. I throw myself into something top to tail, and then, a few weeks (nay, days!) later, I have lost all interest. SHINING THE SINK may well go the way of setting up a research project, writing a book, writing an HP opus, writing a DP epic and painting the loft staircase. But then I will no doubt be nagged back to the SINK by those relentlessly cheery emails.
7. Americans are odd. They all seem to have at least three bathrooms, including something called a 'master bathroom' (kinky or what? 'Yes, master. Throw me over that bathtub rim one more time.'). They have kitchens that you can live in. They have front porches. They have to leave the house to collect their mail rather than have it plopping it onto their doormat through a slot in the door. (Hah, in Germany, too, you have to leave the house if you live in a flat on a higher floor. But then you don't have a porch.)
They call the toilet bathroom, and the actual toilet bowl commode. This reminds me of King Louis XIV. They have something called Windex and something else called Comet. They have dish rags, dish cloths and dish towels, whatever the differences may be. They eat weird things. They also condone gang rape in their prisons but this is not something I learned on Flylady.
8. The absurd Flypeople want you to get dressed down to your lace-up shoes. Again, this conjures up Mrs Brady. Lace-up shoes! I only own one pair to begin with. I am, however and humbly, starting to see the point. Wearing shoes means that there is no barrier to taking out the garbage when the outside is wet. Still, my slippers are my workshoes. I need to wear them when writing my book. And it's unhealthy for feet to be in shoes in the home. It causes Foot-in-Shoe syndrome.
9. There is something very nice called Take A Break in the whole absurd programme. Yes, I am pathetic enough to need to be reminded (to take a break from stressing and obsessing). It is very nice to be told what to do, and very nice to be told to Take A Break. The recommendation was to Take A Bubble Bath. However, this is just too impossibly housewifishly twee (although maybe I missed the suggestion of Wanking While Taking A Bubble Bath?) so instead I ate some marzipan and drank some madeira. I shall progress to shameless drinking while fantasising about Harry disciplining Draco with a bridle and bit.
10. The oddest thing about this whole insanity is that there is no mention of Orlando Bloom, naked and feather-dusting the bric-a-brac. There must be something remiss with my server.
natasha1805. It is a yahoo group with a website attached, run by two American women who send out loads of emails every day, reminding you to do some household work, such as making your bed, decluttering your kitchen shelf and, most importantly, SHINING YOUR SINK. It is basically an electronic nagging device, and I am totally addicted!! I have not been ficcing, I have not been LJing, I have been cleaning the house. Mainly, and rather obessively, I have been SHINING THE SINK. (This, it seems, is what Americans call 'polishing the sink' and what Germans call 'die Spüle auf Hochglanz bringen'.)
Some notes on my Life With Flylady:
1. First, may I note that this is a ridiculous and absurd name for a group and I feel embarrassed at leaving their print-outs around the house. But as I am reading the print-outs obsessively, this cannot be helped. The logo on the homepage is an equally absurd fat pink matron with fairy wings.
2. The whole tone and ideology of the thing is redolent of 1950s housewifery. It's Mrs Brady meets Wilma Firestone. I feel like hopping across the carpet dressed in a frilly waist-length apron and nothing else besides. Plus I should really have a perm. Still, this does not stop my addiction.
3. The ideology is also relentlessly heterosexual and nuclear family. Apparently, women who are lesbian or single or childless do not have a problem with clutter. Still, this does not stop my addiction.
4.
lazlet said 'Sink? What sink? Who cares?' Eek, but I do! Pathetically, I do! I have lived with clutter-induced guilt for years and years. This all goes back to my mother who is the Housewife of Your Dreams and a Wonderful Homemaker, and I, in my Depressed State, tied myself into knots of domestic denial. Anything remotely to do with housework was out of bounds for me because it threatened to turn me into my mother! Yet, I feel depressed by the wave of untidy and slovenly house surrounding me. All that stuff! Overwhelming. But now, hey: I am SHINING MY SINK. *falls over, dishrag in hand* I have even SPRAYED MY SINK WITH WINDOW CLEANER!5. I started out in the obsessive online world with subversive feminine porn and where have I ended up? With the housewives. Betty Friedman, you will blanch. However, here is why I love it: Because the house has been getting me down since 1997, and before that, our previous houses got me down. There is the psycho-guilt of it all, and there are the practicalities: everything takes forever because I can never find a child's underwear in time for school, any sock that matches any other sock in time for work, any food that is not mouldy at 7.30 pm when I'm near-fainting with hunger.
6. The reason the house is a pigsty mess is that I am a great SHIRKER. I have shirked by writing fic, and then I have shirked writing fic by doing some other shit. And now I am shirking writing my book and marking 80 essays by SHINING MY SINK. I realise this. Cleaning has become a mode of shirking. This is new. As a scorpio (*pathetically digs up long-left-behind superstitions left over from teenage non-rationality*), I am prone to sudden enthusiasms. I throw myself into something top to tail, and then, a few weeks (nay, days!) later, I have lost all interest. SHINING THE SINK may well go the way of setting up a research project, writing a book, writing an HP opus, writing a DP epic and painting the loft staircase. But then I will no doubt be nagged back to the SINK by those relentlessly cheery emails.
7. Americans are odd. They all seem to have at least three bathrooms, including something called a 'master bathroom' (kinky or what? 'Yes, master. Throw me over that bathtub rim one more time.'). They have kitchens that you can live in. They have front porches. They have to leave the house to collect their mail rather than have it plopping it onto their doormat through a slot in the door. (Hah, in Germany, too, you have to leave the house if you live in a flat on a higher floor. But then you don't have a porch.)
They call the toilet bathroom, and the actual toilet bowl commode. This reminds me of King Louis XIV. They have something called Windex and something else called Comet. They have dish rags, dish cloths and dish towels, whatever the differences may be. They eat weird things. They also condone gang rape in their prisons but this is not something I learned on Flylady.
8. The absurd Flypeople want you to get dressed down to your lace-up shoes. Again, this conjures up Mrs Brady. Lace-up shoes! I only own one pair to begin with. I am, however and humbly, starting to see the point. Wearing shoes means that there is no barrier to taking out the garbage when the outside is wet. Still, my slippers are my workshoes. I need to wear them when writing my book. And it's unhealthy for feet to be in shoes in the home. It causes Foot-in-Shoe syndrome.
9. There is something very nice called Take A Break in the whole absurd programme. Yes, I am pathetic enough to need to be reminded (to take a break from stressing and obsessing). It is very nice to be told what to do, and very nice to be told to Take A Break. The recommendation was to Take A Bubble Bath. However, this is just too impossibly housewifishly twee (although maybe I missed the suggestion of Wanking While Taking A Bubble Bath?) so instead I ate some marzipan and drank some madeira. I shall progress to shameless drinking while fantasising about Harry disciplining Draco with a bridle and bit.
10. The oddest thing about this whole insanity is that there is no mention of Orlando Bloom, naked and feather-dusting the bric-a-brac. There must be something remiss with my server.