A Short List Of Shit That Really Isn’t The Same (No, Really) As Making Your House Cleaner And More Functional

Chapter 24

This post is a chapter of the book It Ain’t Gonna Lick Itself: Housekeeping In Spite Of It All by Hanne Blank Boyd.

Click here for the full table of contents.

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Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

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Organizing your bookshelves by color: This comes under the heading of “decorating.” It also comes under the heading of ensuring that you’ll only be able to find that book you want if you remember that it’s was a sort of a turquoise, and therefore it could be either in the green section or the blue one. (Seriously though, there are reasons libraries use call numbers and alphabetical order.)

Shopping: In person or online, for absolutely anything at all, including but not limited to cleaning products, labeling products, and containers. Yes, sometimes we need to acquire things in order to clean or improve the function of our living space. But shopping is, categorically, not actually the same as doing those things. Get what you need. Just know which thing you’re doing when you do it.

Watching Videos: Even if you’re watching videos in order to learn how to do something household-related, ingesting information isn’t the same as doing the thing. A big part of learning how to do anything household-related is going to be hands-on learning. By all means, watch and learn, but don’t keep watching on the theory that if you just watch three more videos then you’ll know for sure, and don’t tell yourself that watching is actually the same as doing. It’s not. Go do it instead, and I guarantee you’ll learn at least as much and probably more, and you might even make some progress into the bargain.

Crying: Emotions are important and feelings are often telling us important things. Unfortunately they are nearly always telling us things about ourselves, and are not in fact alerting us to the fact that they have magically discovered a way to stop entropy from fucking up our shit so we don’t really have to do all this household labor. Crying, like all the other ways our bodies come up with to express emotion, is doing its job. It’s a meaningful job, and an important job. But it is not doing the job of getting the housework accomplished. It may help make you more functional, but it’s unlikely to be directly making household things more functional.