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24
Mar
A nice person who commented on my last post left a link to a site called Fly Lady, where you can follow their daily cleaning and organizational suggestions and get your life in order. So that sounded good — my god, you should see my desk — so I went on over and read the first Fly Lady tip, which was to polish your sink. Even though the Fly Lady site looks like it was designed about fifteen years ago with a box of crayons and a copy of Pong, polishing your sink is not a bad tip. It forces you to actually get all the dishes out of there, though where you put them is your business — if you’re like me, your oven is already full of old newspapers, but the bathtub. . . .
So I busted out the Comet and took about 60 seconds to get almost four years of whatever, coffee stains off the so-called “stainless” steel in our kitchen sink. Hey! According to the Fly Lady philosophy, smiling into your shining sink “. . . is how I get to hug you each day! That shiny sink is a reflection of the love that you have for yourself. ” Fly Lady wants to keep distracting me with small successes in order to keep me from speculating about the carnage she may or may not have inflicted to earn her Butcher of Lyons-ish nickname, and the distinct shaming vibe I’m starting to feel every time I look at her tutu, her concerned expression, and her index finger, poised to shun me back to my cluttered web 2.0 hell.
Fortunately, the second day tip stopped me cold. Much like the time a grammatically impenetrable translation of The Communist Manifesto kept me from further enjoying the works of Karl Marx and Co., Fly Lady’s tip #2 made me realize that she is actually insane.
Day Two: “Get dressed to lace up shoes.”
Here are some possible interpretations I have come up with for this mysterious phrase:
- Get dressed and then put on some lace-up shoes.
- Put on your finery and then sit down and put some new shoelaces in your shoes that have old, broken shoelaces in them so that you can enjoy wearing them again.
- While you’re getting dressed, put the song “Lace Up Shoes” on your Victrola and gaily prance about, delighting in the possibilities of gleaming small appliances.
- Get dressed up, all the way down to your lace-up shoes.
- God help me, I keep picturing Judy Garland in “Meet Me in St. Louis.”
Fly Lady herself offers no further illumination, she just says, “Today I want you get up and get dressed to lace up shoes when you first get up in the morning. This means fix your hair and face too.”
Needless to say, our kitchen sink is developing a familiar patina of neglect and the clothes in the washer smell like compost.
- Published by Eden M. Kennedy in: Main
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53 Responses to “Parse This, Batman”
I’m too lazy to google the meaning (or use the handy non-links in the comments here) – but I’ll take a guess. Maybe it’s like “dressed to the nines” or “with bells on”. Things that make no sense but apparently mean “dress up nice”. While those have some kind of cultural reference, that no one knows anymore, I’m going to go all out and guess that she just made hers up. : )
“familiar patina of neglect”
That right there is why I keep comin’ ’round to Fussy.
Oh thank you, THANK YOU, for your review of that site! Someone sent me that link, or I happened on it, a year or two ago and I was similarly horrified. If I am working at home, or (as I am presently) NOT working, what on EARTH am I going to get up and do my hair and makeup for?!
And, sorry, but I get ZERO pleasure or satisfaction from seeing my gleaming sink before me. Nope, just doesn’t do it for me. Empty? Sure! I LOVE that. But scrubbed shiny clean? Eh, whatever!
I felt like most of the inspirational-yet-dripping-with-sentimentality-ness of the messages within the site were just not my bag. Like those really annoying mass e-mails that contain pictures of kittens that you get from the admin friend at work. They make me want to stab my eyes out.
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