Last week, I posted “How I Imagined My Ideal Lifestyle for My Tidying Process”. Why did I post that? Because, in retrospect, it was possibly the most helpful part of the KonMari method for me, I wanted to compare notes with other people, to see how other people went about creating a vision of their ideal lifestyles. And since everything Marie Kondo has been super-popular in 2019, surely it would be easy to find many examples and commentaries, right?
Wrong. Continue reading
I’ll start by quoting this previous blog post:
The part of the method I actually have done is visualizing my ideal life – in my bedroom. I did not try to visualize my ideal life overall, but I tried to think about how I would ideally like to spend my time in my bedroom, and what my bedroom would be like to best accommodate that.
What is your ideal life in your bedroom?
If I blog about it, which I may not, I will do so in a separate blog post. The point is that I did it. I have an idea of how I would ideally like it to be.
Guess what? This is the ‘separate blog post’ where I discuss how I imagined my ideal lifestyle for my KonMari process.
I focused my vision for my ideal lifestyle on my bedroom. Why? It is where I spend the majority of my time at home. More importantly, I was intimidated by the prospect of imagining my ideal lifestyle in all aspects. I needed to break it down just to make it seem manageable.
So, what do I want to do in my bedroom? Sleep. Drink tea. Blog. Do other things with the computer. Read. Engage in reverie. Work on crafts, such as sewing.
Continue reading
This poem by Chara C. is a submission to the December 2019 Carnival of Aros with the theme ‘Love’.
“Obsessed With Love:” by Chara C.
The story of true love
Has been told time and time again
The kiss, the kids, the happily ever after
The not understanding why they can’t be “just” friends Continue reading
This is for the December 2019 Carnival of Aros: Love.
I often use the word ‘love’ in a casual way. For example, in my everyday life I might say something like ‘I love persimmons’ in the sense that I strongly like eating persimmons. However, when the concept of love is being discussed at a less casual level than ‘I love [to eat] persimmons’ I might not automatically roll my eyes, but I will be wary. My default expectation that either such discussions will not be meaningful (and thus a waste of time), or that it will conflate romance and love and/or ignore the lived experiences of aromantic people and/or shame people for ‘failing’ to feel/express certain emotions, and thus be a net negative. Sometimes discussions of ‘love’ do not fall into these pitfalls, but until proven otherwise, I expect that they will. Maybe that explains why I cringed a bit when I chose the blog post title ‘I Ramble About Love’.
Given all of this, why did I choose the theme ‘love’ for this month’s Carnival of Aros? I chose the theme because I do think ‘love’ is very worthy of discussion, and if there is one group I expect to (mostly) avoid those pitfalls and discuss love in a way that is meaningful to people with my lived experiences, it’s people who, like me, are under the aro umbrella. Well, I suppose aro people also sometimes say meaningless (to me) things about love too, but I think the odds that they will something that is meaningful (to me) are much higher. Continue reading
So I wrote more posts than I expected about the book If Walls Could Talk. Why do I find the topic so compelling?
Honestly, I find the topics of the book compelling for many of the same reasons the writer, Lucy Worsley, does.
Most history education does not focus on how people lived their lives in their homes, so most of us lack a historical context for much that we find and do in our homes. Thus, we sometimes underestimate or overestimate how unusual our home habits are. Take, for example, the ‘trend’ of people eating alone, or at least in very small groups. Most of what I read/hear about eating alone in contemporary media, whether it’s a lamentation that people are eating alone so often, or a defence of eating alone, saying it’s not such a bad thing, assumes that this is a new behavior. By contrast, Worsley says:
The beginning of the end of the communal meal can be seen much earlier than the seventeenth-century handover of the cooking from men to women in the grandest houses. It can be placed right back in the fourteenth century. (Or at least that’s when the rhetoric began. It’s amazing that people are still complaining about this to this very day: when they criticise families for eating in front of the television, they’re echoing sentiments which have been heard for six hundred years.)
I imagine that if it were common knowledge that these arguments about eating alone / in privacy were so old, the way people discuss it today would probably be different (and more interesting).
And near the very end of the book, Lucy Worsley says “Throughout all the periods of history, people have thought their own age wildly novel, deeply violent and to be sinking into the utmost depravity; likely, in short, to herald the end of the world.” I can feel this sometimes when I read Victorian novels, especially when they refer to the ‘nineteenth century’ as being an ultra-modern era where the appearance of anything ‘old-fashioned’ would be shocking while society was more depraved than ever before. Continue reading
The Carnival of Aros is an aromantic / aro-spectrum blogging festival. This is my first time hosting the carnival, and I chose the theme “Love”.
Submissions do not need to be in response to any particular prompt, but here are some prompts for people who want a little inspiration:
– you may react to the misconception that ‘aromantic people cannot feel love’
– you may comment on the conflation of romance with love from an aro perspective
– how does you position under the aro umbrella (quoiromantic/greyromantic/aromantic/etc.) affect the way you experience love?
– are there any specifically ‘aro’ forms of love?
– does your position under the aro umbrella affect the way you react to generalized comments about love, such as ‘the world needs more love’ even when those comments are not specifically pointing to romance?
If you do not have your own platform, or if you wish to be anonymous, I can accept guest posts and host them on this blog. You may send submissions by commenting on this post or sending them to DecemberCarnivalofAros@thenotes.e4ward.com (this email address has been deactivated because the December 2019 carnival is over). If you comment or send me an email, and I do not respond within three days, assume that I did not receive the comment/email and try again.
I will post the roundup post on January 2, 2020. I will accept submissions until January 7, and retroactively add them to the roundup post.
I look forward to your submissions!
UPDATE: The round-up is here!
The Notes Which Do Not Fit 