Cleaning

Last weekend, I spent about ninety minutes cleaning the bathroom, and was startled by how much difference that time made in the appearance of the bathroom (which went from "how-can-you-live-like-this"-disgusting to merely "it could use cleaning"). So today, I decided to do some more cleaning in the hopes of continuing this trend.

This is, by the way, entirely "avoidance cleaning". Avoidance cleaning is when you should be finishing your doctoral thesis or something else important and on a deadline, but you really don't want to and you end up cleaning your room instead. I should be writing. I don't feel like writing. Let's clean! I would resist this impulse, but since I so rarely get the impulse to clean at all, I welcome even avoidance cleaning.

My house is very cluttered, and I have the idea in my head that the reason it's so cluttered is that all of the places for putting stuff -- closets, drawers, cabinets, etc. -- are too full and also too cluttered. So this morning I decided to take the giant empty wardrobe box out of Lut's closet and fold it up for storage, freeing up a bunch of space in his closet. This didn't take long. Then I decided to organize my closet.

...

Three and a half hours later, my closet is somewhat more orderly and I can see part of the floor in it again, which is nice. I got rid of a full trash bag of stuff -- mostly a very bulky massager/heating pad thing that neither Lut nor I ever really used. And a couple of grocery bags' worth of clothes that I never wear.

And kept rack upon rack of clothes that I also never wear but have convinced myself I might someday if they ever fit again. I should get rid of more, really. Especially the dress skirts that don't fit and that I wouldn't wear even if they do fit because I stopped wearing skirts to work the day the dress code changed to allow pants. Somehow, I am too much of a packrat to get rid of them, though. Cleaning out a closet must be much more satisfying for people who are less compulsive about keeping stuff. In my case, it was a lot of time and dust stirred up and I still feel like I have way too much junk I don't wear cluttering up my closet. *sigh*

And I still don't have signficantly more space to store the stuff cluttering up the rest of the house. Hmph.

"Yesterday Was a Lie"

This was a 2008 independent film; Lut turned it up on Netflix instant watch and we decided to give it a look.

It's a strikingly beautiful film, shot in black and white and in the style of a 40's noir film. "In the style of a 40's noir film" bears further explanation. The props, costumes, sets, and tropes are very much 40s-style. Men wear suits and fedoras. They drive 40s-style and dial telephones with actual rotary dials. One of the characters is a torch singer at a lounge. Yet the film is emphatically not set in the 40s: the characters carry cellphones (which sound just like to old-fashioned mechanical phones when they ring), do internet searches, and the gender dynamic is modern, not period. To call it "anachronistic" feels wrong; it's not an accident but a deliberate choice, and one that mirrors that film's central theme, so I thought it worked well.

Other things work less well. The plot is thin, the characters underdeveloped, their motivations unclear, and the acting is uneven. (By "uneven", I mean not so much that some actors were better than others, but that the actors did a better job in certain scenes than in others). The use of symbols is overdone, but at times clever*. It is a clever film in some ways, but it comes across as ultimately more pretentious than smart.

For all that, I'm glad we watched it. It had an interesting central premise that was difficult to carry off at all, and to a certain degree it succeeded. So I'm impressed by that.

* OK, the use of Dali's "The Persistence of Memory"? That was a really good choice.

( Spoilerish details on the premise )

Overall, it's not a movie I can recommend unreservedly, but I think it's worth seeing. It's also quite short at 80 minutes long. (IMDB puts it at 87 minutes, but the last 7 are credits).