housekeeping

20 Jul, 2025

Right around exactly 7 months ago, someone ruefully said to me, "oh, Jennifer Middlename, clean your own house." This was an interesting way to exhort me to begin working on extricating the log from my eye.

I really believed I'd gotten the log out, but then I kept finding more logs. I guess I'll be finding logs for the rest of my life? I have enough here to build a log cabin, perhaps a whole log village.

As we pack up my little home, I can sense that it's nearly time to pop any unprocessed shadows back into their original packaging and send them to storage. Or, as I told my best friend recently, "IT'S BERRY-PICKING SEASON." I am so amped about picking berries it's unreal. I'm gonna be in a field and shit. It's so dope.

But I didn't finish all my blog entries, so I'm gonna stash some odds and ends right here—some miscellaneous observations that never found a proper home but are too useful to toss, so they're getting relegated to the rubber-band drawer.

obligatory

The first four DVDs I owned as a teen were, in order, Pi, Rushmore, Ghost in the Shell, and Blade Runner. I think the fifth was actually Run Lola Run. Anyway, the two movies about androids are meditations on how humans, when sleepwalking, are little more than 'program loops' of behavior, with reactions as predictable as a dialogue tree.

Having my own persistent drive for autonomy, I appreciate that this self-preservation loop is a sane, righteous response to an early—often emotionally invalidating or authoritarian—biosocial environment. But bringing that same PDA to a cooperative or non-competitive community actually 'wipes out' 'biodiversity'. It can present as fighting to be heard when no one else is fighting, seeking to dominate where others are looking to collaborate instead.

You see this behavior writ large in every-man-for-himself work environments. The office becomes hyper-competitive due to perceived "resource scarcity" and, pretty soon, everyone has apparent PDA. Each employee tries to prove their indispensability because layoffs are coming. In actuality, the system is crumbling; there is no safety in it. People are trying to climb to the prow of the Titanic as it sinks: king shit of fuck mountain.

In an environment like this, everyone tears one another apart, pointing fingers, stealing credit—as if the corporate office were paying any attention! Layoffs are totally arbitrary, having nothing to do with contributions or performance. Often, the business itself is slowly being scrapped for eventual sale.

When confronted with these aggressive social dynamics, I almost always yield. My real instinct is to turn and run; as a counterweight, I dig in my heels and stay where I am, a demonstration of my resolve, mettle, faith, "integrity." But I struggle when others are fighting to win, as I find it taxing, exhausting, to play along and try to 'win' healthily. I think saying poisonous things comes too easily to me; in a 'fight to win' dynamic, the biggest adversary is myself, because I am constantly on the ropes talking myself out of a cheap button-mashing maneuver. Other people might tend to believe I'm a pushover, not realizing how much bile has their name on it.

Ultimately, one's sense of integrity is weaponized by the harmful system itself. Obligation is what keeps us trapped in toxic invisible structures, eroding trust, vitality, self-respect, the soul. It is the opposite of "opting in." It’s insecure.

projected expenses

• 12ft moving truck
• unlimited miles for 5 days
• insurance/waiver
• taxes and fees

self editing

"I think she's hoping I'll read Patricia Highsmith's... On Writing. Sorry, I don't know what Highsmith's book is actually called."

"I liked Stephen King's!"

"I feel that Stephen King has been hard done by. He could be our greatest living writer, if someone would just edit him. Alas, he prints money, so no one will."

"Who's gonna do it!"

"Nobody! And you can self-edit. You can decide to not be precious about your words, you can come back in six months and look at your draft again with new clarity. OR!"

"You can just have someone else do it for you."

"Faster! Effortlessly!"

"And then there's the benefit of having someone else to direct your animosity toward."

"Oh, sure. 'I didn't change this. You changed it.' Okay, fine. I'll bear your resentment. I'll bear this burden for you. Because it's better now."

"You can give me credit anytime. Read your sentence, and then read what I changed it to."

looks theory

My friend was getting dressed to pick up the rental truck. He was narrating what he was doing, having deliberately chosen clothing that would serve "safe" "dad" energy—to convey to others, he explained, the qualities, the competence, that he already knows he has.

"Trying to pass yourself off as yourself," I said to him wryly.

As he was getting himself put together, I finally checked my email and noticed a message from a friend, which she'd actually sent a couple days earlier. She was carefully and thoughtfully responding to my blog entry about vanity, gracefully challenging my conclusions. "Appearance is one way to signal/claim status," she wrote. "And caring about status is not a bad thing; having no status is very dangerous."

This was true. I turned and eyed my competent-dad friend, who was adjusting his collar. It dawned on me that two different friends who do not know each other were simultaneously attempting to communicate the exact same point to me.

Later, I would share with my competent-dad friend how much I've been struggling with my own appearance. As a thin person, I'd used clothing as a type of authentic self-expression. As a fat person, however, I was no longer able to "opt in" to being noticeable or unnoticeable, and I'd possibly overcorrected in the opposite direction. This had created problems for me, specifically in West Hollywood.

"When some men see me coming, they think 'oh, God, look, this woman has given up,'" I said to him, "and that feeling puts them in touch with their own mortality." My friend chuckled. "But I eventually realized," I explained, "that in reality, because I looked so boring and dressed-down, those people did not feel safe around me. 'Why is she here? I moved here to get away from people like her.' You actually do have to dress like yourself—individualistically. Then others are like, oh, okay, I guess I'll probably be safe around them." I sighed. "It might be a complete reversal from the way the rest of the country works. I don't know."

appetites

"The Lyft had a fragrance," I was telling my spouse. "I can't say for sure what it was, but it reminded me of a solid perfume, like jasmine or gardenia."

I didn't know how to explain this properly, but it had something to do with the Global Village Coffeehouse aesthetic of the 1990s. "I remember the first time I left my hometown for a summer program in a college town," I explained, "and the bookstore had this fragrance. And I remember thinking ah! That's what poetry smells like."

"Ahhhh," my spouse said, an articulated sharp inhale.

"And every time I left my hometown, I'd find it again, this scent." But it wasn't just one scent; it was a heady mix of incense, patchouli, gardenia, not from any one location or any one culture, all mixed up together. "It's like the sensory experience held this special significance. Instead of just being content to happen upon it organically, I wanted to have this experience, to make it, to keep it. I'd developed an appetite for it." My high school bedroom had become a smoky little den, to my adoptive mother's distress.

"And I think that's how I eventually became an alcoholic. I'm sorry," I said flatly.

drop culture

I heard recently that just five minutes with a "narcissist" "changes your brain." This new information was not shocking to me. I think that when just one person is playing 'every man for himself', it swiftly turns into the Prisoner's Dilemma, and pretty soon everyone is playing to win—to survive. (This is why I find reality TV, especially reality competition television, unbearable.)

I think some people might have lower distress tolerances than others, and it's easy to convince those people that resources are scarce—that they need to torment other people in the office, for example, in order to have their rightful piece of pie.

This behavior is fear-based, and it's also based on artificial scarcity. I used to work in retail, selling vinyl collectible toys, and I have seen people line up for a limited-edition "drop"—a special release of an item at an appointed time, an event—which is a concept borrowed from sneaker and streetwear culture. But now it feels like everything is a limited-edition drop. Even artisanal slimes are a limited-edition drop. Healthcare is a limited-edition drop. Groceries are a limited-edition drop. A house is a limited-edition drop.

disintegration point

Two people have, separately, mentioned enneagrams to me this week—volunteering their own ‘types’, wondering aloud what mine might be. After the second mention, I finally took a quiz, and I received my results. “This doesn’t sound like me at all,” I grumbled. “Actually, it sounds like my adoptive mom. It sounds like everything wrong with me.”

My friend pointed out that I might identify more with a different persona, the type exhibited by my 'stress point'. I looked at the chart.

“Okay, this does sound like me,” I sighed. I looked again at the original enneagram result. “I don’t like this,” I told my friend. “There are a lot of strings of words in this description that have also appeared on my blog in the exact same order.”

The stress point is also called the disintegration point. In times of insecurity you take on the darker characteristics of a different enneagram type—basically turning into a pile of poor coping mechanisms.

Later that same day, my neighbor visited my friend and me; she had stayed up all night the night before, she said, trying to deduce what my enneagram type was. She was not kidding. I laughed and told her I'd actually taken a test. I shared my result with her.

"All my life I have claimed to have none of these qualities," I said. "I think I really believed, for most of my adult life, that my disintegrated personality was my real personality. I think a lot of other people have believed that about me, too."

This is not the first time I've wondered who other people fell in love with. It wasn't me. It makes me very sad.

solution

Two years ago, a close friend walked into my new apartment and looked around in awe. "A solution to every problem!" she exclaimed.

"Thank you," I said, "that is the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me." It was true that I had sourced a number of clever little organizational tools and gadgets. I am very good at seeking out the exact right tool for a task. Sometimes I even like to say "good taste is a moral virtue"—a sly, silly joke.

Then, in January, a completely different person, a friend of friends, walked into my space for the first time, and she uttered almost the exact same words: "Wow, a solution for every problem!" she said. This time, instead of glorying in my own resourcefulness, I gasped and burst into tears. She was surprised, but she expressed that she was glad her words had hit me with such force.

Recently I saw, somewhere on WooWooTok, a video claiming that there is a single perfect universal mantra, a constant refrain, an expression of gratitude that goes both forward and backward in time: Thank You for showing me that every problem is already solved.

uncertainty

"Oh, like nuance?" my friend joked.

"Oh no," I said. "How will I ever effectively codify my philosophy and worldview?"

My friend laughed.

home

My door was open, and my apartment was empty. It was 2am, and I was sitting on the floor. My 21-year-old neighbor, who is now my 22-year-old neighbor, ran in. He was in his jammies. He handed me a copy of his favorite book to gift-give, The Wisdom of Uncertainty.

Now he offered his hope for me: "Keep moving," he said. He saw the look of sadness cross my face. "Around," he added. "Travel. See people." He said something else, which I will keep a secret. Then he paused. "You feel like home," he concluded.

I gasped. "I never lost home!" I said to him. "That was a typo I made recently, a very unlikely typo, twice in a row." Then I squeezed his hand and told him how much I love him.