the fish epic

GIR (formerly Minsc) is a terrier mix of about a year old. He loves to run around the couch, dig, and chew on things. He came from Korea to teach me about minimalism and keeping tidy.

After the initial 72 hours of his arrival passed, it was clear that he wasn’t house-trained. The fun surprises we came home to stopped being fun pretty quickly. (Although it was a good excuse to burn yummy-smelling incense.) For the next two months, when we’re at work during the day, it’s the kitchen for the bugger.

So he’s come to hate the kitchen, which is no surprise and really sort of cute. His reactions, whether to something pleasurable or disgusting, are hilariously exaggerated, especially if you consider the awful futility of his predicament: no matter how hard he wriggles, he’s going to be in the kitchen. I mean, we’re bigger, so we get to boss him around. That is the way of the world.

We could never get used to the whining — it’s such a sad, pitiful sound — or the noise of his feeble little claws clashing on tile, wood and recycled plastic as he scrambles to jump over or dig under the baby gate we erect between him and us. Even his favourite toys do not amuse him. We don’t know for certain what he does during his time in the kitchen, but gauging from his bleary eyes and untouched water dish, he seems to simply sleep it out. Once upon a time he would search through the recycling bin for toys, but he’s since stopped doing that.

Lately, though, we decided that he could stay in the living room instead. It seems to relieve a great deal of anxiety, judging solely by the greatly reduced amount of whining emitted when we put up the gate. That is usually a good thing.

I was quite careful about not leaving wires accessible, since they are a well-known puppy-attractor — something about the soft gooshy black plastic brings these natural chewers no small amount of joy. And since we knew he was big into shredding paper, we hid away our notebooks and post-its on higher shelves or on the other side of the gate. But I was not prepared for the destruction of at least two tape dispensers (we don’t know from where he got the second one), a few plants, a jewel case and its inserts, a CD (not the one contained in the previously destroyed jewel case), a wireless mouse, an old telephone charger I left on the side table for all of ten minutes, the plums and coasters I left on the dining table, or the walls themselves.

It was after GIR put a few holes in my mouse that I realised how attached I was to certain belongings. The sleek, slim gadget has set me back a good $40 not a year ago. At the time, all I could think about was that I was, in a way, $40 in the hole. Which wasn’t entirely correct: the mouse still works fine; I just had to remove two chunks of plastic which were bent out of shape, and sand down the bottom so that it would once again slide around a surface smoothly as a mouse is wont to do. The clicking doesn’t work a hundred-percent of the time and the cover falls off quite frequently, but it’s still a perfectly usable pointing device.

As I reflected on my own anger, I realised its futility and irrationality. Quite frankly, it was my own fault for leaving him with super awesome fun chewables; how could I blame him for being what he is — a dog in heart and soul and mind and body? How could I even fathom changing his very canine nature and scold him for the one thing that brings him pleasure when he so misses his beloved humans? And what’s $40 to me, anyway? I’ve already dumped fifty times as much into the dog’s well-being to-date, and much more on myself over the years. And it’s not like I can’t replace it if it was really broken… some might even say that’s cheap for a mouse!

So I meticulously smeared bitter apple on the wall corners and table legs and basically any part of the piano I thought GIR could reach. (I’m not sure what I would do if he chewed on one of my musical instruments, so I’m doing everything I can to prevent it.) Everyday after breakfast, I make sure to place the plants on the dining table and tuck in the chairs so that he can’t jump onto the chairs to get at the plants. I put away in boxes all my arts and crafts things, which, being in rolls of paper or tubes of plastic, are sure to make awesome doggy chew toys.

All of which actually keeps my living room fairly neat.

If I concentrate on not looking at the horrifying stains in the carpet, I can almost enjoy my stay there. I have ideas for ditching my ottoman, getting a smaller couch and two minimal or modern chairs, which should help the spacing issues greatly, but for now, it’s really not bad.

Since getting my first e-mail address in, oh, seventh grade, my e-mail-checking habit has seen a slow but steady escalation.

From once-daily (during my designated dial-up time after school) to casual-camper (having the email window open at all times in the high speed era), recently I have graduated further to completely-neurotic (having my browser/phone notify me whenever a new piece of mail arrives). Part of that, I rationalised, was my job as a web developer and a student politician before that. The other part was just a reflexive, unthinking drive to install gadgets that “increase” my “productivity.”

Since my workflow was wide open to interruptions, I found that I produced some of the best work late at night — when no one else was around to offer friendly interruptions. This was in third and fourth years in university when I pulled all-nighters to finish term papers. In fifth year, I had to pull all-nighters just to finish regularly assigned readings and homework.

The gospel I’m about to sing comes as no surprise (especially given the awful, double-quotation foreshadowing). Yeah. I’ve “quit” e-mail for the last month or so and I’m quite glad I didn’t wait any longer.

But what do I mean by “quitting e-mail”?

This is what it means:

I’ve also turned off the notifiers on my phone. Unless I’m desperate for some response, I check my e-mail only a few times throughout the day (personal e-mail: twice; work e-mail: four or six times). In essence, I initiate the action of checking e-mails, not the other way around.

Relatedly, I unsubscribe to a ton of mailing lists which were fast becoming a burden. Anything I haven’t read in detail or even opened the last three times I received it got an automatic boot, and some stuff which I felt were interesting but still a waste of my time were vetted out as well. My inbox now feels very minimalist.

Without even looking at my place right now, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a very good minimalist.

This weekend we purchased a sofabed, both in preparation for hosting some guests and to use up a difficult space in our flat. The floor plan shows that this was originally intended as a closet, complete with accordion doors and built-in shelves. The previous tenant correctly surmised that having such a large closet is useless, ripped everything out, and turned it into a home office. We have kept the same arrangement largely because that’s how it was when we got the place. Then we realised that it gets no natural light in the day, which makes it quite awful to be cooped up in there for more than several hours. With laptops it’s become much easier to work in other, better-lit areas of the flat. So the area devolved back into a closet where we stashed junk and paperwork that we promised we would do tomorrow.

Now it’s a guest room, with a bed and the future promises of shelves and place for our guests to hang up some clothes.

However, we still have the challenge of throwing out or selling several pieces of furniture, some of which I purchased as recently as last year. That “awesome” green chair will probably go at the next round of purging. I gave away books I’d never read again, realising that I bought them just for the sake of collecting the series. My mother’s drafting desk will be photographed, documented, and then put in the alley with a note explaining its history and a hope that it goes to someone who will love it as much as we did.

The desk is probably the most difficult item because I’ve grown attached to it. But with the understanding that I’m not attached to the object but rather the feeling of having it, it’s much easier to let go — the sentiment can be replicated using a simple photograph. The actual object, unused and unloved, can and should go to a better place. If nothing else, the desk deserves it.

In this exercise, I’ve found that minimalism is a mindset and a feeling that translates into deliberate acts. Once the mind has changed, the rest follows easily because the actions are all within my abilities. Throwing things out was never my forte, but I can do it in the face of, well, a desk sitting in the hallway and several boxes filled with unused junk. And I can keep doing it even if I had enough space to accumulate junk.

The resources I’ve found most useful are the Zen Habits blog, mnmlist, The Very Small Closet, and an article on self-reliance at the Art of Manliness.

When I upgraded my phone to the HTC Dream with Android and I was constantly checking email, facebook, identica/twitter, SMS, gtalk and so on as frequently as I fidget, I realised I’d hit rock-bottom.

When I’m at work, at home, or even on the road, I have lots of distractions. I think about things that I did in the day, about things I have still to do. I got to know this as a good thing, called “multi-tasking.” I learnt that the feeling of being in multiple places at a time is a good thing, because I was “getting more done.”

Folks over at Zen Habits refer to this as “mind clutter.” Like post-its on my monitor and blinking LEDs on my phone, mind clutter distracts and gets in the way of the really important things, like getting work done.

The first thing I dropped were Facebook games. I’m actually pretty embarrassed about how much time I wasted in those horribly simple, yet time-consuming flash games. The awful feeling of withdrawal for a few days afterward made it clear that it was an addiction. It wasn’t easy but it was an easy choice.

From that vantage point, the next step was pretty clear.

Already I wasn’t checking facebook too often. I ignore most requests and check events only infrequently. Most of the content in my profile come from my identi.ca hookup and this selfsame blog. Why duplicate all this information, even if it is automatic? That just seems not very… minimalist of me.

My decision to axe facebook from my life came a few days after I started organising my most recent dinner party as a facebook event. I ground my teeth and bore with it for a couple more weeks but TODAY. I. AM. FREE.

I realised that feeling torn apart by everything I “have” to do wasn’t really a good thing at all — I rarely did all those things, so for each incomplete item I feel a little guilty, and yet my life remains quite good and wholesome. Clearly, I didn’t need to do them and I certainly don’t need to feel guilty about anything. My expectations for what I can do were just unnecessarily high, so I should lower them, and just… do less. But what I do do, I ensure it is the best I can do. That has implications on my work of course, but most importantly it means I will offer only the best to my personal relationships. And that precludes the cheap, crass, impersonal facebook. That means that, though my facebook account remains active, I will no longer be checking it unless someone is trying to get in touch with me.

Goal “Quit Facebook” is complete!

In the very-bottom-basement of my building, past the parking stalls, is a storage area with individual lockers for tenants to stash their crap. The area is cool and dark and, barring the random flood, fairly secure. Measuring at roughly 36 cubic feet, it allows for stashing quite a bit of crap.

With M moving in slowly in the past month, being “cramped” is an understatement. The closet — the huge but damnably inefficient closet! — is full again in spite of massive purging. Two boxes of summer clothes await to go into storage, with several more piles of unwanted/unneeded clothes sitting in the hallway, waiting to be given away.

Up until recently I haven’t made much use of the basement locker; what I used to leave down there were so unused that I probably should have tossed them instead of storing them. A few months ago, when his moving-in was only some eventuality set some time in the future, M helped me put in shelves and organised/threw out a lot of junk. Which is incredible foresight for this weekend, because we managed to fill up half the locker. That’s 18 cubic feet of crap.

Even still, the influx of belongings took me a little by surprise — after all, M has been living out of this flat, practically speaking, for many months. It was a bit of wake-up call to the fact that M also owns things! Things such as some beautiful cups and bowls, tons of artwork, a full set of pots and pans and a whole lot of baking implements.

The quest to find a place for everything have not been easy. M’s driven by the need to put things away; I’m driven by the need to give them away. He wants more shelves, I want to make do with the existing shelves. I firmly believe that we can live without the things that we can’t fit into this apartment. It could mean that I have to give up the chance of having a wok, but when I already have a frying pan AND a grill pan (which I haven’t used since I reduced meat consumption), how often am I really going to use that wok?

So the purging continues. I’m considering putting some of my sweaters away until next year (or what I call “pseudo-purging”), since I have quite a few. That way, perhaps at the end of this season, some of them will be worn down enough to warrant tossing out. Did you know that I have never tossed out a single sweater, due to its condition? I have grown too large for some older sweaters, but I’ve never, until this week, tossed any out due to being too crummy. It wasn’t until I examined all of them with a more critical eye that I realised how pile-y some of them have become. Good-by, turtle-neck sweater dress! I wish I threw ye out last winter!

I’m glad that at least, from now on, our locker won’t be storing this sort of crap year after year. Anyway, back to purging so I can make room in my life for the things I do love.

For years I’ve kept a bunch of socks whose partner has gone missing or discarded. These singletons were for someday. Someday I might buy a pair of socks which are similar looking enough that I could wear this singleton again. Or someday I might need a lot of rags for stuff and I’ll be able to use these as scrap fabrics. Or someday I might come up with some neat craft project and I’ll need lots of socks.

I’ve always been a bit of a (read: a major) pack-rat, and I’ve excused that as a sort of resourcefulness I learnt from my mother. However, lately my mind keeps wandering back to simplicity and purity. From John Maeda’s TED talk to my folks’ stories on living frugally but happily, simplicity is in everything I see.

Jumping around the Zen Habits blog has become a very enjoyable past-time, and it wasn’t long before I found the articles about wardrobe planning. So it’s no surprise that last weekend I threw the singleton socks all into a bag and gave them away, along with about a third of my wardrobe which I no longer wear. The biggest key that turned itself in my head was the realisation that most of my wardrobe belongs in either the past or future: I have enough old band uniforms to fill up an entire shelf which I haven’t worn since I quit the bands, and I have some odd pieces which I told myself I would wear “when I find other pieces that would make it work.” Neither of those are conducive to having a stylish wardrobe for today.

Anyway, autumn is arrived in Vancouver, so I’m dedicating next weekend to switching seasons in. Vancouver is temperate enough that I can get away with wearing a t-shirt in combination with hoodies and sweaters and the nice! new! snow jacket I purchased last year — so it’s been very easy to not systematically review my wardrobe and purge outdated things at the end of each season. So, even though I’ll still have t-shirts for the winter, I’ll be packing away my bright summery ones (and in the process, throw out the ones I haven’t worn in two years).

Obviously there is no “end game” for a wardrobe, which will always evolve as I move through my life…. but this particular goal will be considered complete when I have pared my wardrobe down to a single armoire. Did I mention I hate my giant but unusable closet and plan to rip it out and put an armoire in its place? (Relatedly, who was the fucktard that came up with walk-in closets being the “standard” of North American homes? Much rather have a walk-in pantry.) With fewer belongings, my room will feel even bigger.