Catching up

Been deadlining, but all caught up now.

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While I had my face buried in my latest BHM house-fixup article, the world outside was getting hammered with the kind of rain that makes even a seasoned Northwesterner wonder if there’s an umbrella (or perhaps a submarine) in the house.

Many in this part of the country consider it gauche to carry an umbrella — something only Californians and other cowardly foreigners do. But this week, oh my.

An atmospheric river came at us “like a fist” (said one of the weatherpersons). A fist is just what it looked like on the satellite images and what it felt like when it landed.

Still, I’d rather have our weather than what some of you got this week. But … ulp, even though it’s eased up a smidge, we haven’t seen the end of this and might not for quite a while.

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Four months ago I railed at illusions around global tidiness phenom Marie Kondo without having personally read her mega-bestselling book. I pledged to read her and not judge too harshly until I had.

At that moment I was something like 153rd in line at the library for Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.

The slender little book arrived this week. I started reading it this afternoon after submitting my article.

By page four I had begun to suspect that Kondo has an ego big enough to fill entire galaxies.

By page 24, I had concluded she’s an obsessive-compulsive moonbat.

However, that’s not to say she doesn’t have interesting observations. She does. Will probably have more on Kondo, the whole “tidiness will change your life” phenomenon, and where tools and preparedness fit into all this (short version: they don’t).

Later.

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I had an encounter with another True Believer this week. No point in going into the specific details, but it struck me (not for the first time) that when you fail to immediately agree with a TB, their typical first response is to assume there’s something wrong with you.

You can’t possibly have an honest disagreement for valid reasons of your own. No way can you ever simply find their positions or the arguments that support them unpersuasive. And under no circumstances can you possibly mean it when you say, “Really, I’m just not interested.”

No. If you don’t immediately adopt their viewpoint, join their club, or take up their hobby, you’re defective.

You may be stubborn, stupid, blind to reality, totally uncool, irrational, too frighted to face facts, a philistine, a bigot, too much a conformist to appreciate their original ideas, ill-bred, ill-informed, or possibly even a pawn of Satan sent to cast doubt upon Capital-T Truth. But in every case, this is the conclusion they’ll come to about your not after a heated argument, but as soon as they know you merely disagree with their opinion. Or don’t care about something that sends them into transports of ecstasy.

Then they’ll dig themselves a deeper hole, trying desperately to convince you of their rightness — by talking down to you because you are a priori such a moron.

I find that weird. Even weirder in this case because the subject wasn’t religion or politics or even fashion or music or one of the other things people get all clingy about. It was individual freedom. Apparently, there is only one way to achieve it. The TB’s way, of course. And anyone who differs one iota is a doomed fool.

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Okay, ’nuff for now. I’ll be back soon with more.

Meantime, have some nice, relaxing adult coloring books. And more of them. From Crayola!

Jed sent me these links saying he wasn’t quite sure what to think about them. I’m not sure, either, though I kind of lean toward thinking they’d be very relaxing and meditative.

Oh, and if you decide to try one out (or to buy Marie Kondo’s provocatively crazy little tome), you know where to buy it. 🙂