Sunday has become my day for tidying things up. I take care of the work I've been avoiding during the rest of the weekend, I change the sheets and wash my clothes, I take down or put up decorations (Haloween comes down today; Thanksgiving goes up), and I clean the apartment. For the first time I live in a space small enough and mine enough (Jamie's and mine, that is) that I feel both motivated and able to clean it really thoroughly. This may seem like a particularly stupid milestone, but in fact it's given me enormous pleasure so far. This is our space, and we can take care of it. It's still rented, of course, but it's so new and clean -- though not without character -- that it seems understandable on a level that I haven't experienced for a long time. I suppose maybe what I'm getting at is that, while you can straighten a space you don't understand, you can put to rights only a space you really do understand. There it is again -- that favorite confluence of property and proper: the qualities belonging to a place, a thing, a person. Cleanliness -- the kind I go about on Sundays here -- is proper to this place.
(And I'm not suggesting, by the way, that I won't fall off at some point in the future. Though I suddenly converted from a messy person to a neat person sometime in early adolescence, there's no true dichotomy, and there are things I ignore just as much as the next person.)
But anyway. That's a long lead-up to aligning writing here, today, with the other tasks of propriety this Sunday. I haven't written in a long time! I have excuses, as always: I'm busy. I'm using my leisure time for other pursuits (talking online, playing uke, watching t.v.). I'm working three mornings a week at the childcare. Last Saturday, Jamie and I got a cat, Ernest, who, predictably, obsesses me. (He's awesome. Though he did go behind the washing machine twice this morning.) But really I just fell out of touch with this little corner of what's proper to me.
I need to keep it up, though. For one thing because it makes me write. Even blogging, I think, is a start at exercising one's writing skills, and since I'm at the point in my degree where I don't have to be producing any written work just now, it's possible for me to get very lazy and not write at all. I may start posting here some of my impressions from the works I'm reading for my orals (which I will take in February).
Anyway. It's time to clean up here -- to make this space proper to myself again; to square and fit its corners. Especially since a blog is little else, in most of its forms, than a box for the self, or for explorations of self. Very few people manage to keep blogs about anything else. I can regret that on the level that regrets all my lazy regressions to Romanticism, but I can also recognize it as entirely normal. So. Time, I guess, to dust off the self-shelf, if I want to end with a lame rhyming metaphor.
Which, apparently, I do.
(And I'm not suggesting, by the way, that I won't fall off at some point in the future. Though I suddenly converted from a messy person to a neat person sometime in early adolescence, there's no true dichotomy, and there are things I ignore just as much as the next person.)
But anyway. That's a long lead-up to aligning writing here, today, with the other tasks of propriety this Sunday. I haven't written in a long time! I have excuses, as always: I'm busy. I'm using my leisure time for other pursuits (talking online, playing uke, watching t.v.). I'm working three mornings a week at the childcare. Last Saturday, Jamie and I got a cat, Ernest, who, predictably, obsesses me. (He's awesome. Though he did go behind the washing machine twice this morning.) But really I just fell out of touch with this little corner of what's proper to me.
I need to keep it up, though. For one thing because it makes me write. Even blogging, I think, is a start at exercising one's writing skills, and since I'm at the point in my degree where I don't have to be producing any written work just now, it's possible for me to get very lazy and not write at all. I may start posting here some of my impressions from the works I'm reading for my orals (which I will take in February).
Anyway. It's time to clean up here -- to make this space proper to myself again; to square and fit its corners. Especially since a blog is little else, in most of its forms, than a box for the self, or for explorations of self. Very few people manage to keep blogs about anything else. I can regret that on the level that regrets all my lazy regressions to Romanticism, but I can also recognize it as entirely normal. So. Time, I guess, to dust off the self-shelf, if I want to end with a lame rhyming metaphor.
Which, apparently, I do.
three days on, fifteen days off. Most things come in cycles, particularly writing - JOtD