Kindness Porn

I’ve started watching the Tidying Up show with Marie Kondo, not because I’m actually planning to follow her method at the moment, but just because she’s such a delight to watch and listen to. I also loved her book, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and would highly recommend it as a very relaxing read. It’s an excellent bedtime book.

In spite of all the totally legitimate criticism of the minimalist movement, Marie is really nonjudgemental and seems to be purely motivated by a desire to help people make their own environments comfortable for themselves, not to make them fit into any particular image. If that box of Star Wars memorabilia makes you happy, she wants to help you display it, not guilt you into throwing it away. She really strikes me, above all else, as a person who has completely leaned into who she is, her own unique view of the world, and what matters to her. I think that’s pretty special.

I have a slowly growing little list of shows that are both positive and relaxing, and Tidying Up is going on it. The Great British Baking show and Queer Eye are also pretty high up there. I never realized how starved I was for just seeing basic kindness on TV until I first found myself watching a baking competition where the contestants would often stop work just to help each other. Even the comedians on GBBS give out hugs and encouragement in equal measure with their kindhearted teasing and jokes.

Queer Eye offers something even more rare, which is a group of men doing emotional labor for other men. Many straight men rely almost entirely on their female partners for that kind of emotional processing and support, and it can be terribly isolating. The men of Queer Eye are gentle and encouraging, and they provide a great image of non-toxic masculinity. Plus, the show offers a lot of body positivity for men, another rarity.

Side note: There was a great discussion I saw a while ago about how this heavy reliance on their female partners can encourage men to believe in the mythical Friend Zone. Men tend to view any kind of emotional labor as something you only exchange with a romantic partner, whereas women usually also give and receive that kind of support from friends. Thus, basic supportive friendship for a woman looks, to a straight man, like a relationship. This is not a good thing. It wears women out, trying to keep up with the needs of a person who isn’t getting emotional support from anyone else in their life, and is part of why older men tend to die soon after losing their partners. They have no emotional support networks to take up the strain, unlike most older women. Plus, it encourages men to ruin perfectly good friendships by putting their female friends in The Girlfriend Zone. Knock this off, dudes. Being friends isn’t a consolation prize, y’all just need to learn how to do it right.

Here are some of the shows on my kindness porn list:

• Great British Baking show
• Queer Eye This is the remake, not the original. I’ve just never watched the original show, so I can’t comment on its tone.
• Tidying up
• This one is not a TV show, but Jessica Kellgren-Fozard has a youtube channel, Jessica Out of the Closet, that is pretty much like distilled sunshine. She’s a disability activist, vintage beauty vlogger, and she shares stories about her life with her wife and their two dogs. Sometimes she also talks about her beliefs as a quaker, and about queer and disabled historical figures. She’s one of the most positive and intentionally kind people I’ve ever seen in my life.
• Big Dreams, Small Spaces is a British show about renovating small gardens so that they’re more functional and beautiful for the families who need them. They often feature disabled people, with a focus on accessibility and tailoring those spaces really well to the people who will use them.
• Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat is a short one, but very fun to watch. The host, Samin Nosrat, is incredibly passionate about good food, with none of the usual quibbling about calories or creepy talk about guilty pleasures. She enjoys herself, teaches about the important basic elements of flavor, and she goes out and talks to people who make amazing food around the world. She also has a book.

If anyone has any suggestions for more shows I should add to this list, I’d love to hear them.

I had to rescue this orchid from Safeway, because they had sprayed all the other orchids with glitter paint and it was sad.

This is my weird hairless dog in pajamas giving me a hug. Granted, she was doing this to stop me from working so I’d pay attention to her instead, but still.

Writing days this past week: 2

Today was Foggy, and so is my Head

I’m having one of those days where I sit down to work, get distracted by some interesting piece of information, spend an hour and a half researching that, and then realize that I am hungry or need to use the restroom, so I have to get up again. While I’m up, I typically try to get some household task done, which distracts me further. Then, I sit back down, and repeat the process.

It’s fun. It’s a fun time. I feel like my brain is full of mosquitos.

So, since this is a blog, here’s what’s on my mind: Today, I learned that all fuchsia flowers are edible, and they also produce edible berries. They’re named after some guy called Fuchs, which is why their name is spelled super weirdly. I don’t have any of them, because I couldn’t settle on a variety, but that’s pretty cool. I cannot order the kind that were specially bred to produce extra yummy berries, because they’re sold out and also only available in the UK. This makes me a little sad.

While I was watering the garden the other night, I found out that we have local slugs with adorable leopard markings. I hope they don’t go after my lettuce, because I love them.

 

My new home office is great, and I like my little pink office chair, but my hairless pup still insists on cuddles whenever I’m stationary for more than five seconds, so I’m writing this at a very awkward angle while she’s tightly curled up on my lap. She’s still grumbling loudly about my rudeness. My left foot is dead to the world.

I have a pretty folk song – played on a hurdy gurdy – stuck in my head. Pretty, but not helpful. In a little less than two hours, I really have to go to bed, because I’ve finally at least gotten that under control. I haven’t stayed up all night since we moved, and we’ve been here for almost exactly one month. We’re finally approaching a state of unpacked, but not quite there yet. As a result, we sleep in the guest room downstairs, and all our clothes and the non-scary bathroom are upstairs. It actually works pretty well, but I’m looking forward to moving up here the rest of the way.

I just picked up my phone to add those photos from Instagram, and opened Pokemon Go instead. Not promising.

Writing days this week: 1