The Lesbian Tea Problem
Oct. 18th, 2009 09:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snousleBeen getting very much into organization and cleaning these past few days. Having been here about 18 months, I finally feel calm and secure enough to make actual decisions. Which is what has been holding things up all along.
It's amazing how emotional baggage can hold you back. I don't know what it is that creates so much self-sabotage in managing everyday affairs, but it's a bitch. One problem I've identified is something I like to call the "Lesbian Tea Problem". While it is not unique to either lesbians or tea, I'd wager that there are a whole lot of lesbians out there with cupboards full of tea. Anyway, it goes like this:
Tea seems like a good idea. And it is! Shops are full of intriguing teas from all over the world, and so many of them are delicious. Unfortunately, some are not. Over the years, you buy a lot of different teas, and drink most of them. But not all of them.
Over time, you deplete the teas you like, but each time you buy a new kind of tea there's always a chance it's one of the ones you don't like, and they accumulate with amazing speed. The result is a cupboard that isn't just full of tea, but full of tea that tastes awful. It doesn't get better with age, either. In time, you realize you've wasted quite a chunk of change on undesirable teas, so throwing them away seems horribly wasteful. But your tea-cupboard has become essentially dysfunctional, because you never clear it out.
The first step in overcoming this is understanding that cupboard space is lavishly expensive - hundreds of dollars per square foot. Storing that tea is costing lots of money. So imagine that every time you throw away a 3" x 3" box of tea, someone is handing you a ten dollar bill.
The other mindset is the ancient, favored principle of "shit or get off the pot". I recently looked at a beautiful little bamboo cylinder full of tea John brought back from Korea in... oh, 1993 or thereabouts. Heh. I knew what was going to happen. I put it on the counter and decided to either drink it or throw it away. It turned out, rather soon, that throwing it away was the more desirable option. By setting this decision in opposition to it's only reasonable alternative, I gained another tenth of a square foot. Yay! One simply has to do this every time one has tea, and before long, the cupboard is - blissfully - bare.
This, alas, is one of the easier probems. I also have the Book Problem. The books are not something I'm going to discard - not more than a quarter of them, anyway. But they remain in boxes, because they await a set of bookshelves that is not built, and it is difficult to accept that they are not going to get built on a reasonable schedule. So it's time to look for alternatives, like prefab bookshelves that are not completely obnoxious. This is a case where the task is being held back by an unreasonable ambition - the perfect is the enemy of the good. If I want to have books, I must accept housing them in less-than-perfect shelving, because even bad shelving is better than boxes.
There are so many more issues to tackle. I have a book about them, which is ironically buried in the stack of boxes behind my desk. I'm sure reading the book is easier than figuring out all this on my own...
One thing for sure, though: organization is not a task, it is a way of life. As a task, it is depressing and never-ending. As a way of life, it is really not that big of a burden. Minutes a day, hardly more difficult than brushing your teeth. Once you acquire the habit, that is - considering it's something so simple, getting there is amazingly difficult.
It's amazing how emotional baggage can hold you back. I don't know what it is that creates so much self-sabotage in managing everyday affairs, but it's a bitch. One problem I've identified is something I like to call the "Lesbian Tea Problem". While it is not unique to either lesbians or tea, I'd wager that there are a whole lot of lesbians out there with cupboards full of tea. Anyway, it goes like this:
Tea seems like a good idea. And it is! Shops are full of intriguing teas from all over the world, and so many of them are delicious. Unfortunately, some are not. Over the years, you buy a lot of different teas, and drink most of them. But not all of them.
Over time, you deplete the teas you like, but each time you buy a new kind of tea there's always a chance it's one of the ones you don't like, and they accumulate with amazing speed. The result is a cupboard that isn't just full of tea, but full of tea that tastes awful. It doesn't get better with age, either. In time, you realize you've wasted quite a chunk of change on undesirable teas, so throwing them away seems horribly wasteful. But your tea-cupboard has become essentially dysfunctional, because you never clear it out.
The first step in overcoming this is understanding that cupboard space is lavishly expensive - hundreds of dollars per square foot. Storing that tea is costing lots of money. So imagine that every time you throw away a 3" x 3" box of tea, someone is handing you a ten dollar bill.
The other mindset is the ancient, favored principle of "shit or get off the pot". I recently looked at a beautiful little bamboo cylinder full of tea John brought back from Korea in... oh, 1993 or thereabouts. Heh. I knew what was going to happen. I put it on the counter and decided to either drink it or throw it away. It turned out, rather soon, that throwing it away was the more desirable option. By setting this decision in opposition to it's only reasonable alternative, I gained another tenth of a square foot. Yay! One simply has to do this every time one has tea, and before long, the cupboard is - blissfully - bare.
This, alas, is one of the easier probems. I also have the Book Problem. The books are not something I'm going to discard - not more than a quarter of them, anyway. But they remain in boxes, because they await a set of bookshelves that is not built, and it is difficult to accept that they are not going to get built on a reasonable schedule. So it's time to look for alternatives, like prefab bookshelves that are not completely obnoxious. This is a case where the task is being held back by an unreasonable ambition - the perfect is the enemy of the good. If I want to have books, I must accept housing them in less-than-perfect shelving, because even bad shelving is better than boxes.
There are so many more issues to tackle. I have a book about them, which is ironically buried in the stack of boxes behind my desk. I'm sure reading the book is easier than figuring out all this on my own...
One thing for sure, though: organization is not a task, it is a way of life. As a task, it is depressing and never-ending. As a way of life, it is really not that big of a burden. Minutes a day, hardly more difficult than brushing your teeth. Once you acquire the habit, that is - considering it's something so simple, getting there is amazingly difficult.
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no subject
Date: 2009-10-24 03:51 pm (UTC)Recommended (probably used): Making Peace with the Things in Your Life: Why Your Papers, Books, Clothes, and Other Possessions Keep Overwhelming You and What to Do About It (Paperback)
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Date: 2009-10-24 04:12 pm (UTC)