Tag: weird habits

The Last Drops (A Meditation on Letting Go)

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I have this soap that my wife got me. It’s good-smelling soap, clean but also smelling distinctly *of* a thing (vanilla, for one, which I’m a sucker for), not that vague “clean” scent that goes with a lot of soaps. I like this soap.

And in the shower yesterday, I reached past it to use another soap, one I didn’t like as much. Why? Because the “good soap” was down to its last couple of uses, and I didn’t feel like burning them up.

On a certain level, this makes sense. Certain things are for special occasions, not for everyday use. That wasn’t how I felt about this soap for 90% of its lifespan, mind you. Up until it was almost gone, whether to use this soap or not was a decision to which I gave as much thought as which pencil I’ll use to jot this note. (The one closest to hand, please and thank you.) But toward the end, something changed and the soap became SPECIAL, it became Not To Be Wasted.

The problem, of course — and if you’re a weirdo, probably-carrying-undiagnosed-ADHD-but-coping forty-something like me, maybe you’ve already anticipated it — is that *I then fail to use it up*.

The problem becomes worse when I try not to buy boring soaps, but rather try different kinds in hopes of finding one I’ll like (and usually succeeding) — then another soap becomes The Soap Not To Be Wasted, and oh snap — now I have TWO bottles of almost-spent soap in the shower, and I *can’t* use either one TODAY, let me reach for this other one instead and SAVE THE GOOD ONES …

In other words, the bathroom is a disaster of nearly-spent bottles of soap. As it turns out, a problem like this doesn’t present in a vacuum. I do this in the kitchen too (how old is YOUR oldest jar of spices? Hmmm? Mine still has a 19 in the year, and I don’t mean 2019). And with pens. (Yeah, it’s almost out, but it’s got a LITTLE juice left.) And clothes. (Yeah, this shirt has a hole in it and I can only wear it for sleeping, but what, like THAT’S a reason to throw it out?) And …. I’ll stop there, but you can use your imagination.

Which, on a certain level, makes me a hoarder. But it’s not that I have an aversion to throwing things away generally. I LOVE throwing things away. Saying goodbye to a silly piece of junk is one among a dwindling set of Things Which Bring Joy To My Life. I SHOULD be bursting to throw these things away.

Yet I want to save them.

Upon reflection, it’s an issue of comfort, and attachment. That almost-spent thing is a tiny source of comfort. “Hey, this thing was nice, let’s keep it around just a little bit longer,” it seems to say. And after all, why not? Why not hold onto it for a little bit longer? Savor it. Keep it. For that special moment.

Then I realized I’ve done this with books I was reading, and writing projects, as well. I’ve raced through 350 pages of a 400-page novel only to slow to a crawl for the last few pages, wanting to prolong the experience even though I desperately want to know what happens. Because I don’t want to leave these characters, this story, this *experience* behind. I’ve drafted a story, done editing passes, then faltered on finishing final edits because, well, when I finish those, it’s *done*, and I can’t justify dinking around with this story anymore, I have to move on to the next thing.

In a bigger, scarier-to-think-about way, it’s a tiny way to live in the past, rather than moving on toward the future. Which is probably not a great way to live. (It’s certainly no way to keep your shower.)

In Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Kylo Ren had something to say about this. (Yes, I’m quoting TLJ on purpose because it infuriates a certain type of Star Wars fan. If this upsets you, please tell me all about it.) Rey was consumed with trying to find her parents, she had no sense of self because she had been abandoned and been waiting on them to return for so long. But Ren says, “Let the past die. Kill it, if you have to.”

Nobody’s going to use that soap up for me, and my wife won’t trash it on my behalf, either. (It’s man-soap. She’s scared to touch it, lest she immediately sprout a very gruff beard, develop an interest in smoking meats, and start daydreaming about Ancient Rome.) It will sit there, on the soapy shower ledge, staring at me, judging me, as long as I let it. The only way it’s going away is if I put it out of its misery.

So will that book I’m putting off reading.

So will that story I don’t want to finish writing.

So will that (thing) I don’t want to move on from.

When we look too much backward, we cannot move forward.

I used the last of the soap this morning.

It was no big deal.

What’s Your Weird? (Or: Coffee Snobs, I Hate You)

Pavowski2 Comments

We all want our stuff a certain way.

Well, let me back up.

We all want certain things a certain way.

For example, somehow, some way, I’ve come up against this thing several times in the past few months:

This is a Chemex, and if you haven’t heard about it, BOY OH BOY it’s time to buckle up. A Chemex is a coffee pot. But it’s not your ordinary coffee pot. Well, yeah, it’s an ordinary coffee pot, but it also has MAGICAL POWERS. The power to transform an otherwise ordinary human being into an absolutely insufferable coffee snob. The power to infuse said human’s vocabulary with nonsensical coffee jargon like “brewology.” The ability to cause friends and acquaintances of that person to, in tiny, almost unnoticeable ways, hate that person.

There are videos dedicated to the Chemex and how to best use it. There are detailed, multi-step guides with entire nested webpages devoted to it. In particular, one of my favorite authors of late and one of my favorite youtube channels have both written and explained in great and grating detail how much they love their Chemex.

The secret behind it (apparently, if you buy into all that neo-hippie coffee-infatuada nonsense) is: you like coffee, sure, but you’re not getting the most out of your coffee.

With that, you fall down the rabbit hole. You buy the thing. You have to get the right filters to go with the thing, filters made from recycled thousand-year-old rainforest wood. You have to get the right coffee beans for your particular demographic and unique taste. You have to hand grind the beans using stones purified in the bowels of goats. You have to boil your water in a kettle, preferably one consecrated by an aged, castrated bishop. The boiling must be done using a hand-torch crafted by the elders of unnamed tribes in the heart of Africa. The steam must not be allowed to escape; you must inhale every molecule to open up your nose for the taste explosion that’s about to happen.

And I hear about this, and I ponder on my life and the choices I’ve made, and I find myself starting to think, well, hot holy hell, maybe I should get one — I AM missing out on this vital part of the coffee experience. Except I don’t drink coffee. And I really find all this gobbledygook about filters and glass and grinding and inhaling to be utter nonsense. Not only nonsense, but wasteful and snobbish nonsense, the worst kind. If you want a cup of coffee, just make a cup of coffee and get on with your life — why do you need to devote twenty minutes of your morning to it?

So I prepare to make a scathing diatribe about exactly how foolish it is. An all-out attack, not just on users of this product, but on anybody who gets at all uptight about their coffee. IT’S JUST BEANS.

But when I pull back to let this stone fly, I pause, because I catch my own reflection in the walls of this glass house I live in.

Sure, I couldn’t give two randy Sharknados about coffee, but you’d better believe I’ve got my own series of oddities.

I could go on and on and on about the “right” running shoes and the “right” way to run. How your shoe needs to provide protection from the ground but not insulate your foot from feeling the bumps in the road. How you need to adjust your footstrike (and there I go using nonsensical jargon) to properly engage the musculature of the leg and the back. How the average runner should aim to run on trails from time to time rather than pounding pavement all the time because of the instability the body has to deal with.

I could ramble for ages about my writing process. The right music to help empty and focus my mind, the right programs to capture the draft and insulate myself from distractions. When writing longhand, I much, much, much prefer pencil to pen; the faint skritch of graphite on paper is soothing beyond words. Preferably, it’s a .7 gauge mechanical pencil: smaller and the lead breaks too easily, larger and I feel like I’m writing with a freaking crayon. But if it must be pen, then it’s got to be a Pilot g2. The ink slides out like a seal slathered in syrup, and there’s a crease in the grip that settles right into the grooves in my index finger, and let’s just leave it there before it starts getting uncomfortable in here.

Or shaving. I’ve become one of these guys about shaving recently (though not as bad as some); I use soap or cream from a tub, lather with a brush, shave with an old-school double-edged blade (1000 blades for $10, how could this not be for me?!?!).

For that matter, here’s a not-at-all-exhaustive, by-no-means-in-order-of-importance list of things I feel unnecessarily strongly about, that I have to have just so:

  • The angle at which papers should be stapled (Diagonal, about thirty degrees from horizontal)
  • The consistency of scrambled eggs (still moist but not runny)
  • The position of my hands on a steering wheel (either one resting on top while the other holds at about eight o’clock, or at 10:30 and 1:30)
  • The delay between when a traffic light changes and when I have a right to honk at you for not noticing the light has changed (three seconds; less is draconian, more and … well, we have places to be, don’t we?)
  • Shoes in general (the flatter the better, and I could very well give up on dress shoes altogether tomorrow and feel not a bit upset about it; in fact, I could almost give up on shoes as a whole altogether)

The amount of thought and mental distress I’ve experienced over these things is probably much more than I feel comfortable discussing, but suffice it to say, I have realized that humans, as a rule, are a weird bunch.

We gravitate toward others who are weird like us.

We are repelled, or at least puzzled, by others whose weird we don’t understand.

Point is, you can take your gross weird coffee snobbery and your gross weird birdwatching and your gross weird homemade macaroni replicas of famous renaissance monarchs and stay the hell away from me. Go over there. In the corner. Where it’s dark. And weird.

Of course, you can have all you like of my awesome, cool, somewhat-nerdy-but-ultimately-enviable weird.

But I’ll ask, just because I’m curious.

What’s your weird?