Do you think Marie Kondo drinks her own Kool-Aid? How literally does she take the ‘spark joy’ advice she’s so famous for? How does she apply it to her own life? Her clothes? Yeah, I’d buy that she’s got a wardrobe that’s slick, small, and tight. But what about fruit? If this banana does not spark joy in every cell of your body, give it to the homeless: they might find more joy for it. Or a little brat child? If your daughter is being a manic twister of pain, thank her for the memories she brought you, and drop her off at your local fire station. Arigato!
I’ve been trying to tidy up my own life. Yesterday, I threw out the 100-pound plastic bin of college notes I’ve lugged around for two years and I didn’t once look at it. Honestly, it hurt me to throw those notes away. When I told my friend, she made me second guess it all. What if you need those for grad school? Well, I guess I’ll crack open a book—I’ve got quite a few of those. Five boxes of books and counting right now. I’m packing right now. A box a day. A life hack I heard about second-hand from Reddit says that you can always get your rental insurance claims if you have a list of your possessions—it’s just not worth the insurer’s time to fight you if you have documentation of literally everything you own: the model of your Samsung TV, the edition(s) of Jackson’s Classical Electrodynamics, etc. So as I’m packing, I’m documenting my stuff in an egregiously long excel sheet, starting with my books, working my way through my textbooks, then my computer, kitchen knives, desks, my c. 1912 Underwood No. 5 Typewriter that I “restored”1 (If you conveniently ignore the fact the shift key still gets stuck, but hush now.) with a David Foster Wallace quote2 Yes, I do know how basic I sound. promptly displayed on its carriage, and all the rest.
But I don’t think documenting my possessions will tidy up my life. I think I need something more drastic. More dramatic. Like moving to Corvallis, Oreg. or Knoxville, Tenn. with no job prospects because an author sparked joy in my life during one of my darkest moments, a moment where I didn’t believe there was enough oxygen around me that sparks could still ignite.
Ignite. I think about that word a lot now. I wanted to move out to Oregon for a while.3For more or less self-destructive reasons I don’t really want to get into right now. But it’s burning harder and faster every year. Climate anxiety, blah, blah, I know. But at the same time, I don’t want to watch my home and my friends’ childhood memories burn. Maybe if we ignore it, it won’t just happen, you know? That seems to be the standard operating procedure these days: Willful Ignorance. Fuck me. What are we doing to our children? And why is it so easy for us to just sit here and watch?
Maybe we can tidy it all up after all—the planet that is. We just have to find the things that spark joy in us on, like, a planetary level. So what sparks joy? It sure as shit isn’t Instagram.