The Dust Bunny Report

From end of December 2008:

Once again, I find myself spending the end of the year on household projects rather than going to the MLA, and the choice continues to be the right one. I’m living in a parallel universe where I can picture everyone running around those hotel lobbies while I’m free to ignore email (which has mercifully dwindled to a trickle) and indulge in what has now been dubbed a stay-cation. But rather than sit idle, I hear the dust bunny calling.

And I feel inclined to report because I’ve returned to some of the projects previously chronicled here. Although it’s true, as I wrote last summer (see Hitting or Touching Bottom), that I reached a good stopping point in organizing my home office, a cluster of boxes has remained in the hallway all fall waiting to be sorted, so I started there. Then I returned to the pod, where I left off a year and half ago (see Deep Cleaning), and went through a stack of boxes in the storage loft that had also been left to be sorted. (Is there a pattern here? As part of my inability to let go, am I one of those people who leaves the last little bit of a project undone?)

Having built some momentum, I finally tackled a set of boxes on the ground floor of the pod that Gretchen has been asking me to move. Most of those were books and papers from two previous leaves, when I packed stuff up to clear space for subletters and then never really unpacked it. This time, I made a commitment to toss as much as possible rather than carefully filing things never to look at them again. I think something has clicked into place over these last couple of years of dust bunny reports, and I am better able to heed the advice of all the de-cluttering experts who ask you to think hard about when you last looked at our used something and to get rid of it if you haven’t.

In tandem with the pod-clearing was a round of maintenance on the Expedit (see Expedit(e)), which has been working well both aesthetically and practically for keeping my financial and household records in order. I can now purge some of the files that I stored when I set up that system and figure out new systems for keeping only the most necessary records. I was able to move across all of these areas – pod, home office, financial records – only because there’s been significant movement in all of them. One of the next giant tasks is my office at school – although I’ve done some major pruning there in recent years, I’ve also let things pile up while on leave including the boxes of books that I moved there during the summer. I’d like to restore order before I return to full-time service.

Now that real progress has been made, I can see that I might reach a point where I could just do periodic maintenance rather than having to tackle years of accumulation. I’m not sure whether all this activity confirms my sense that the dust bunny project is over or not. I’m heartened to think that there could be permanent change in my ways of doing things, but part of that change consists in a conversion from the binge and purge model to more habitual forms of regular attention to the world of the dust bunny. So the work continues… especially since I’m resisting both sides of the before and after dichotomy that pathologizes my past and makes my current habits a sign of good discipline and normalcy.

Here are some of the things I was able to get rid of:

1. Posters of fine art reproductions – Manet, Kandinsky, Rothko – that were on my walls when I was an undergrad.
2. Old mixed and duped cassette tapes from the height of rap and hip hop’s crossover appeal in the 1980s – Run DMC, Eric B and Rakim, LL Cool J, Public Enemy, Beastie Boys, etc. (Well, I confess I kept some of them.)
3. Chapter drafts from my first book.
4. A collection of incredibly beat-up Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival wristbands, which I cut off each year in a ritual moment after I leave the land and then keep as fetishes.

So it might seem after such a protracted silence. I wasn’t quite intending to let things lapse so emphatically, but that’s so often the case with good habits – you have every intention of getting to that next post or that next pile and all of a sudden weeks have gone by. My best guess about the reason for this very extended hiatus is that I’ve been on leave and busy writing other things. Although it might seem like I’d have more time to write while on leave, it doesn’t necessarily work that way because my writing energies are consumed elsewhere. In fact, I do some of my best occasional writing when I’m so strapped for time that it’s the only genre possible.

But there are other reasons too. Two years down the line, it’s possible that the thinking behind the dust bunny has run its course. The doing of the work of the dust bunny, of course, has not – that’s a daily, weekly, monthly practice that must always continue. I don’t though have many big organizational projects to report on since that work too has been somewhat suspended while I focus on my writing. And I also fear that I’ve said what I need to say and that I will tax the patience, even of my very few and friendly readers here, if I keep reporting yet again on another pile of paper or cluttered closet.

So I’ve been wondering if it’s time to morph the blog writing into other topics. I’ve got some ideas about what that might be – art, culture, and the creative process is one likely area of concern that would, of course, not be far from the spirit of the dust bunny. In this new era of the Obama presidency, a lot of people are also blogging about politics, but I’m not sure I have anything original to add to that mix. For the moment, I’m thinking it might be good to take advantage of the to-the-moment nature of the blog post and just talk about what’s going on right now. I’m somewhat ambivalent about this genre because it seems to generate so much prose from so many, but I’m willing to experiment. And I’ve been reading about the so-called “slow blogging” phenomenon, which seems to endorse the occasional and more thoughtful post. So let’s see what happens…

This will have to be a very brief report from the woods of Michigan where I am once again camped for the annual womyn’s music festival. I have spent the last 3 days working in the kitchen, making food for lots women. Entire work shifts can be taken up with a single task, like making salad for 300, or assembling the dry mix ingredients for cheese-dill biscuits. Not to mention all the cleaning tasks – I love the repetition of washing silverware after each meal. And the system for washing the pots and pans is quite remarkable – a scrunge sink for hosing them down to get the crap off, then 3 sinks for “wash, rinse, bleach” and then a “drying rack” that looks like a metal sculpture, and garden carts to haul it all back and from the kitchen to the dish pit. You can definitely spend the entire day washing dishes.

I will hope to have more time to talk about the OCD tendencies induced by the repetitive labor – but I am about to run out of battery power on my laptop and also need to get back to the land before dark. So I must sign off…

I’ve finally made it to the end of the piles. I’m not quite sure what the right metaphor is especially since I’m struck by how metaphorical everything is in the world of the dust bunny – every layer of dirt or pile of old stuff stands for something else, often the material version of something more emotional or spiritual or intangible. Although the addict’s concept of “hitting bottom” might seem a little off, it’s not totally inappropriate since going through all that paper and the histories associated with it has been a pretty harrowing descent that involves facing the past and facing the effects of the urge to accumulate and/or postpone. But if we’re in the zone of addiction and/or compulsion, it’s one that I would insist requires some rethinking that is a little less harsh in its judgments about what gets people into and out of trouble; change is not always a function of a conversion experience or a heroic act of will or self-abnegation. So I vote for “touching bottom” with its slightly homoerotic undertones, as well as its resonances of water and forms of descent both literal and figurative (a la Adrienne Rich’s “Diving Into the Wreck”).

Yesterday, I touched bottom, that is, I reached the point where everything in my office has been sorted, organized, and, yes, literally touched. It’s not completely done – there are still a lot of leftovers outside in the staging area. But everything I look at in the office is now current, rather than some nagging reminder of a long-dead intellectual past. I never thought I’d get here, never imagined I could remove the accumulation of the past 5 years, much less the last 10. There are still some huge projects ahead – my office at school and the boxes stored in the pod -- and I already need more shelf space for the new books for my expanding writing project, but since this is the space I use every day, it’s a major accomplishment. One of the things that made for the final push was that, in addition to having enough time to chip away at the piles over the last few weeks, I gave myself the gift this week of some days in which to work on them full time. At this point, it really just took one long day but having permission to focus on that alone was a tremendous lift.

I was hoping to spare you the tedious details of yet another sorting session, but it was an action-packed day of feelings so I have to mention a few highlights. I finished the piles from each of the courses I taught last year, which was a major breakthrough and got me thinking about my teaching past and future, which I can do in a different way right now because for the first time in eight years I don’t have to teach in the fall. Without planning to, I pulled all the stuff out of one of the filing-cabinet drawers and threw most of it away, which involved some tough decisions about whether to keep the records of writing projects from the 1990s and also reminded me of how much work I’ve done over the years! I organized my trauma books, which are still sitting in the shelves closest to me, and thought about whether and why that bibliography remains important to me. And I went through a shelf of periodical boxes filled with old magazines and let a lot of things go, but I decided I had to keep some of the valuable queer periodicals especially the ones for my research on lesbian chic, fashion, and visual icons (like my collection of magazines with Madonna on the cover).

So now I can sit here and think about what comes next both spatially and intellectually. I think things may still be a bit too full-up, in which case I will have to do another round of stripping down, but at least there isn’t the haunting sense of things being dramatically out of date. And there aren’t mystery piles in every corner. So I’m happy to hang out at the bottom and take the time to touch what’s there.

From Thursday, July 10:

I’m at my mother’s house in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains of southwestern Alberta. She moved here in the 1980s to build a house with her partner on his family’s ranch land. It’s part of a cluster of buildings that make up the family compound, one of my favorite concepts for housing development. The house is a modest wood-frame structure, but it’s spectacular – tons of windows and an amazing view of the garden and the bird houses (and fountain!) in the foreground and beyond that the mountains to the south and west and the Alberta prairie to the east. There are acres of wilderness right outside the door, and the entrance to Waterton National Park is just a few miles away.

It’s a good place for a semi-retreat. I’m doing some reading during the first part of the day, and we walk or hike in the late afternoon and into the early evening since it’s light until 10 here. I’ve been working and sleeping in the loft house, the little cabin that my mother and John built to live in while they were working on the main house. It has a concrete slab foundation and is high enough to have lofts on either end of the almost two-story structure. The interior is unfinished so the framing and exterior plywood are exposed, but there are lots of windows both high and low, and it’s nestled in the trees behind the house so it feels secluded. In the morning, I enjoy waking up for the short walk along the grassy path to the outhouse, which faces out to the east and is private enough that it doesn’t need to have a door. There’s a lovely view from the throne (even more so in the winter when the leaves on the trees aren't in the way).

There are odd reminders of past houses in the loft house; the blue wall-to-wall carpeting from our apartment in Toronto covers the cement floor; an orange Mexican blanket that also used to be in the living room is thrown over the railing of the loft; up there, I can see my childhood mouse collection on the wall; beside the bed are other familiar trinkets, like the stone carved whale and bird that were marketed as “Eskimo” art; a vanity chair with a yellow and white striped slipcover is from the upstairs bedroom at my grandmother’s house and sits in front of a chest of drawers painted in the bright green and blue inspired by 1960s pop art. I feel at home.

The hiking has also been good for the retreat experience – a three- or four-hour hike can be quite an expedition especially if you’re walking up a steep trail to arrive at one of the many hanging lakes in these mountains. We also went on an all-day hike of 12 miles that led up to a spectacular view of the BC mountains to the west and the Alberta prairies to the east and passed by several lakes along the way. Walking is another form of meditation, requiring that you give yourself over to just moving once you get tired enough that you can’t think about anything else but what’s in front of you. It was good inspiration for the spiritual journey salon I have planned for my birthday, about which I’m sure you will be hearing more.

It’s been busy, but I have lots of drafts and will hope to post all of them soon.

From June 26, 2008:

I’ve returned to California for another writing retreat, and once again I have all the amenities a writer could want – a great work space, lots of healthy food, the Pacific Ocean nearby, and walking trails right out the front door. It’s summer solstice season so the days are long and the weather is much cooler than in Texas, and we’re far enough inland that we don’t get the worst of the summer fog that rolls in off the ocean.

This time around, though, the schedule is much more intensive and rigorous than last winter. My friend Helen has a major writing deadline and is working 6 days a week from 9 to 5, and I’ve decided to fall in with her and see what it’s like. There’s a big difference between writing from 9-2 and writing from 9-5, and I’m only just starting to get the hang of it on day 5. The general aim is to take a break at some point and have a second afternoon session rather than working straight through and being done for the day, but I have a hard time being productive during that second session even with a break. I think with practice it would come but for now I find myself getting very slow and distracted by the end of the day, and I’m not sure I’m really getting more work done. The best strategy I’ve found so far is to start something new but not too difficult during the second part of the day so that I have a clear sense of accomplishing something with the extra writing time.

The other challenge is downtime, especially since there’s not much of it. By the time we walk, eat, and clean up, it’s time to go to bed. We’ve gone to one movie (Sex and the City, definitely a good distraction) and I’ve watched some snippets of TV and done a little reading, but mostly I’ve tried not to do anything in order to keep my head clear. Helen likens her brain as a Faberge egg – even the slightest of distractions or overstimulation can throw her off, and since she has to keep up this pace for six months solid, she doesn’t try do anything besides self maintenance in the evenings. Checking my email the other day was excruciating because other worlds suddenly flooded my consciousness, and I was painfully aware of how much energy it takes to keep my concentration focused on my writing. I’m getting a new appreciation for the concept of retreat because giving myself over to the labor involved in resting the mind in order to be ready for the next long writing day means that I am very present to myself and very still. Sometimes I want to escape and sometimes it’s very exciting for that to be my only task.

I have definitely gotten a lot done – in fact, I will probably have a rough draft of my manuscript by the end of the week, which is more than I dared to hope for. With nothing else claiming my attention, my focus is far more powerful than usual, and I’ve probably gotten two weeks of work done in one, not only because of the extra writing time in each day but because I’m able to think clearly about the larger structure of the project.

For the most part, I have also felt very calm. I had one slight meltdown yesterday because my shoulder got sore from so much sitting and typing. My mind seems to have greater stamina than my body – it’s like meditation practice where you have to train the body to sit still because the mind is actually capable of focusing. Writing retreat also reminds me of the experience of really long yoga meditations in which you have to lose yourself in the moment and stop counting the amount of time you have left. The idea is to have the time seem so endless that all you can do is focus on the present.

It’s very odd to be on retreat while writing about some of the first ascetics, the early Christian monks who withdrew into the desert in order to devote themselves to God. Those who struggled with their spiritual commitment were said to suffer from acedia, also known as the deadly sin of sloth, but better understood, in my view, as a form of spiritual despair. Acedia makes the monks want to fall asleep or run away from the cell – I can understand the feeling but have been doing my best to resist it and stay focused on the task at hand -- the sentence that needs to be fixed and the book to which it will belong.

This weekend (June 14-15) I had to devote myself to the tedious task of sorting because the staging area in the hall was full up with boxes from both the office and the dining room. (See the two previous posts for more about these projects.) I dread the prospect of sorting but once I get into it I’m pretty good at it – some obsessive compulsive tendency sets in and I enjoy the process of touching every item and figuring out what to do with it.

But it’s also very slow work that first involves a lot of shuffling and rearranging of boxes in order to create a set of priorities – I pull out the easiest ones first and leave the hardest for last in hopes that by the time I get to them the incentive to empty the space will carry me through to completion. The easiest boxes are the ones with lots of big objects or with items that have a clearly designated home or can be thrown away. The hardest boxes are the ones full of old papers that have to be sorted individually.

I bring a batch of boxes into the sorting station (aka the living room) – not too big as to be overwhelming but big enough to make a major and motivating dent on the sorting station but not so big as to be overwhelming or too much to handle in one day. Everything comes out of the first box and gets distributed into categories by type or future location. Once the box is empty and everything has been laid out in piles, I try to not to freak out about the huge mess of stuff. It’s great when lots of things end up in the recycling, trash, or thrifts store piles. Then I pull out items that are easy to put away and find their spots. Then it starts to get harder – some piles have to be sorted again internally – it might be the pile for a particular class that now has to be pared down and organized if it’s going to be kept. Or it’s a group of similar objects (like old mystery keys) and I have to decide which ones are staying. Sometimes the circle method is the only way to keep going when every pile seems like a challenge – I just tackle one at a time until the chaos starts to disappear. Inevitably there is a stubbornly resistant set of objects at the end that don’t really have a place or that I can’t figure out what to do with. Then I have to tackle each one individually and make a decision about what to do with it.

This past weekend, I went through boxes of old school materials from my office and various random items that were stored in and under the front desk – the boxes for my camera and phone (just in case I needed them again!), umbrellas and tote bags, recycled envelopes. Most of it needs to be discarded so that there is less stored in the dining room.
Having sorted through that batch, I can move to the next phase of removing stuff from the bookshelves in the office to the staging area – there’s already a much lighter feeling in my office so I’m motivated to keep the flow going. But even writing about sorting is tedious and stretches the limit of my commitment to chronicling the dust bunny life in all of its banal details.

A momentous change has occurred in my dining room and in my financial life. A desk is gone. Ever since I arrived in Austin, I’ve had a second desk in the dining room where I keep all my school business and my financial records. It is a monster of clutter – every piece of paper from day to day life accumulates there – receipts, business cards, letters, brochures, souvenir programs, etc. Even though it’s all in one place and there are organizing systems, it’s still an eyesore.

For some time I’ve been wondering if the desk could be replaced by a bookshelf since I don’t actually work there, and not really because it’s too cluttered but because it’s tucked away in a corner and the dining room table feels more open. But I was a bit worried that I wouldn’t know what to do with all the stuff that is stored out of sight (relatively speaking) under the desk. I looked at roll top desks but most of them were ugly, and I looked at upscale storage units that seemed too risky an investment for a new version of a crucial function. So I settled on an old standard from Ikea, the Expedit, the shelving unit made of modular cubes in 2x4, 4x4, or 5x5 sizes. The big ones can be used as room dividers and are accessible from both sides and, in many ways, the Expedit is such generic modernist minimalism that it doesn’t scream Ikea. I’ve known many very stylish people who have incorporated them very usefully into their spaces: my girlfriend, the record collector, has an entire wall of records that look great, and I’ve read online testimonies about how the Expedit stacks up favorably not just in price point but in design with many more expensive versions of the same thing. There are even Ikea hackers who have resized and revamped the Expedit. I had thought to get the 2x4 model as a modest start but then discovered that the 4x4 would fit in the space and decided to go for it.

So now I have a place for everything… I’m still in the process of developing a new organization logic but I’m delighted that much of it is now behind closed doors because one of the charms of the Expedit’s generic success is that Ikea sells doors, drawers, and storage boxes that hide everything away, and I got versions of all of those to try out.

The only sad thing for me, the one for whom feelings are attached to every object, was getting rid of the desk. It’s the desk I wrote my dissertation on! I’ve had it since before I started grad school – a roommate passed it on (if any money was exchanged it was a token amount like $10) to my boyfriend, who gave it to me when he got a much bigger desk, and I moved it to Ithaca, where it served me for six years of graduate school, including my dissertation, and then to Austin, where I finally got a bigger desk for my writing projects. It’s a very modest metal office desk from the thrift store – it has a single pen and pencil drawer and open shelving on the side. At some point, my mother helped me paint it white so it would look less institutional. It has served me well for many many years. So well that I decided I could let it go – I put it in the front yard with a “free” sign on it, and within hours it was gone.