Ruminations

We had a clean-out-the-garage fest on Monday at the Cook household. It was predictable.

The amazing thing about living in one place for a long time is that you seem to accumulate a lot of stuff. And this stuff just kind of sits in various places until you need it. Then you use it and it sometimes returns to its place and sometimes it finds a new place and more often than not it gets misplaced. Then you decide to reorganize and somehow the stuff gets put back in its place and then you feel good about having cleaned up the stuff.

The amazing thing about living with my family is that I get to watch all this stuff move from place to place in the process of "reorganizing" and yet somehow it never gets "cleaned up"...or, God-forbid, reduced.

My mother in particular has an incredible knack for taking piles of stuff, reorganizing them into different piles of stuff, and then realizing after 5 hours of "cleaning" that there are still too many piles of stuff. For example:
On Monday, in an effort to clean up all the paperwork lounging around our family room, she successfully moved the five piles of stuff on the coffee table to the floor, and reorganized them into six piles. The two piles from the kitchen table were moved into three and a half piles by the fireplace, and somehow, there was a pile of other stuff from another room in the recycling bag. When prompted to throw it away (the verbal equivalent of "f@$#!" in our household) she first looked horrified, then insulted, and then started yelling about how no one helps her get stuff done. I can't bear to tell her that getting stuff done means actually doing something with the stuff other than moving it from place to place.

Monday was predictable in that my father got up early and proclaimed that we were "Cleaning Out the Garage!" - he wanted his home gym back. The garage used to be a destination for supreme workouts and full-fledged gym goings-on, until stuff happened. Over the course of 9 months, stuff from my brother's room and stuff from the guest closet and more stuff from the family room had been slowly migrating into the garage.
So out we trudged on Monday morning, and started misplacing the stuff. First, we moved all the stuff into the driveway. Then we dusted and vacuumed the clean space in the garage. By mid-afternoon, my mom looked around and said "What are we going to do with all this stuff?"

That's when I made the prediction.

"Well Mom," said I, "All this stuff is going to be in the driveway and Dad's going to realize that he will have to put it somewhere. Then he's going to want to throw it out. Then you're going to get upset and say 'No, no, we have to save it! No one helps me go through this stuff, and there are a million pictures we might need next year!' And then Dad will give you a big sigh and resign himself to the fact that we will have to move the stuff somewhere else. Loathe to mess up his now empty gym, he will suggest the side yard. Then next week you two will complain to each other than you need to clean out the side yard before anything gets ruined. And then you will end up doing next weekend exactly the same thing you did today, only the stuff might end up in the tool shed next Sunday."
"Scary." said my mom.

And lo and behold, I watched my prediction play out.

We looked at the piles of stuff in the driveway and my dad had a revelation. He whispered to me "You know, we haven't used any of this stuff in 9 months. We should just..." - he smiled, because my mother was nearby and God forbid we start swearing in front of her. I nodded vigorously. So then we got the Suburban and moved some stuff into the backseat. This was the giveaway pile, and we diminished the pile of stuff by 1/10 for this charitable deed. Then, my dad moved the remaining stuff in the driveway to the side yard. But first, we had to move the stuff in the side yard out of the way to make room for the other stuff. Then, in a futile attempt to pretend we had cleaned up, we covered the stuff in the side yard with three large tarps.

Here is a visual of the day's activities:



So, by 5:30pm that day, we had successfully cleaned out the garage by moving the stuff from the garage to the side yard...where it will remain until we move it to the tool shed next weekend. However, we're going to have to move the stuff in the tool shed somewhere.

I think the garage might be free.

And a little bit of This

Sometimes, after a full-night's rest, I wake up feeling as though I've lived the past 7-10 hours in a parallel universe. The feeling is so overwhelming that I'm undoubtedly certain of the existence of a Parallel Me. (Hah, P.M. Get it?)

It's supposed (by brain scientists) that your subconscious plays out all the daily items of unfiltered substance during your snooze time. The details of your life that go unnoticed to the naked eye are vacuumed up by your involuntary senses every 30 seconds of your day. Between morning rush hour, incessant admin meetings, and the perils of family life, your brain simply tucks the little bits of phone calls, familiar faces, and extra cups of coffee away for another time. The next day, you wonder why you were dreaming about your dead aunt calling you from a phone booth in Mumbai, berating you for making her cappuccino without enough pepper spray.

Easy to speculate then that your dreams are just the mumblings of your prefrontal cortex on laughing gas.

But what about the dreams that aren't quite clear? The ones that shadow over the beginning of your day, as you rub your eyes and yawn, and swear you were just there in a boat with a purple octopus? There is something so unclear about their manifestation, something eerily familiar; you are convinced that your Parallel Me was up to her usual travels in the Land of Lucidity.

I suppose that belief in PMs are also a way of keeping our sanity. All those witty retorts you had stored up for infuriating moments? The moments of incredulity over what seemed to be a two-hour long meeting on the effectiveness of the refrigerator in the staff lounge? The aggravation you felt when informed by your best friend that she's canceling on your birthday party (again)...? All these inner monologues are delightfully splayed across the vast sky of your dreamscapes - bright, colorful things that shock and inspire your Ambivalent Me to live the life she dreams about. Blinking off the shady cloud of another PM adventure, you swear that you can still see these striking subconscious images behind your tired little eyelids, and that one thought stays with you until about 11 am on Thursday, at which time you become too absorbed in another day's work to filter it's relevance.