Chaos Thoery

Suddenly realised it’s been over a month since I last worked out. I’ve been winging it the last few months, munching my way through all manner of naughty things, not seeing a difference on the scale and therefore thinking that somehow my body has miraculously found a way to process chocolate in the same way as salad. I am by no means fat, but I fall in the slim but squidgy category and if left to it’s own devices for too long my body starts to look like it’s wearing skin that’s two sizes too big. So with Halloween looming and a potentially revealing costume on the dressmakers dummy, I need to firm up after my weeks of decadence, and need to find a way of getting my ass back up to where it should be without having to suffer the indignity of ass bra pants. But although I have previously had spells of high energy, getting up at 6am to work out now that the mornings are getting colder and darker is not something I feel I can do with any enthusiasm.

So I need to find a way of working exercise into my day to day life. And I’m not just talking about walking more. I need to get the equivalent intensity of one of my Turbofire or Insanity workouts into my day (because frankly, any less than that and I’ll have to order the ass bra). So I have started doing bursts of running on the walk to and from school (tried this a couple of times, weird how the Son’s love to run away from me, but as soon as I do it to them they start crying and complaining of having no energy), lunges at the washing machine, butt clenches at the kitchen sink, pelvic floors in the car and plenty of arm workouts while I’m working at the bookshop. And there’s no reason why this won’t work. Generations of people managed to keep in shape without lycra, workout DVD’s and hideously expensive gym memberships.

Then it got me thinking. I could do this with lots of things I never get around to. Little and often gets the job done apparently. Housework could be the next thing on my list. If I managed to spread all these jobs across the day I would soon have a very calm and ordered existence. And there lies the problem.

I have come to the conclusion that I am happiest when under pressure. This might sound weird coming from someone who hates exams, had weeks of sleepless nights before her driving test and has hideously disorganised cupboards (not to mention drawers constantly spewing clothing like a drunken tramp after a bottle of meth). But I have spent many, many, many years beating myself up about how chaotic I am, desperately trying to become the calm and unruffled person with the organised and ordered home that I long to be. But I have learned that trying to fit yourself into a hole that is the wrong shape is hard. And although I maybe flappy and dizzy and messy and living in a perpetual state of chaos, it suits me because living this way makes me happy.

I have had a run of days where I just don’t see how I am going to fit everything in, and when that happens, as always the first thing to be left out (for me anyway), is the housework. It is far more important to me to get the kids to their play dates, get myself to work and my evening with friends and catch up with people who need a chat than it is to get the house tidy.

And it’s not just housework either. My whole life; my finances, yet another piece of household paper work through the door screaming “action me” and thrown carelessly atop the teetering mountain that is my filing system and mummy duties so often seem to end up feeling like a big tangle of necklaces that need to be unravelled. But like a tangled ball of necklaces and bracelets, when you sit down to attempt the impossible, with a bit of effort you manage it, bit by bit. And with the neat pile of necklaces laid out in front of you comes the biggest sense of satisfaction (no matter that they will get tangled again the minute you turn your back). And it’s that sense of achievement, satisfaction and adrenalin rush of getting something done that I am addicted to.

It must be bloody boring to have a really ordered life. Where is the satisfaction? Where are the adrenalin rushes? Without the struggles we can never really appreciate life. And that’s how I feel about my chaotic life. I love it feeling like a tangle because of the satisfaction I get from untangling things. I appreciate my home all the more when it’s clean and tidy because it means I have sorted it. I appreciate the moments when my to do list is a happy page of scribbled out notes because I can see that I have got things done. But if your home and your life are always neat and tidy, if you somehow manage to work a decent exercise routine into your day, every day, week after week, year after year, I don’t see how you could ever get a buzz from it.

I like my chaotic life. And I can’t imagine anything worse than having an ordered life. I like waking up in the morning and not really knowing who I’m going to be that day. Messy or neat, flappy or calm, you decide. But I have to be organised and get this exercise in for the next two weeks at least, because I really don’t want to have to wear an ass bra.

Old Skool

I don’t often use this space to have a moan. And I do like to retain my positive, sunny disposition but having spent more time in recent weeks trying (and failing) to find a single children’s DVD in my house that isn’t cracked, scratched or covered in jam (or other unknown sticky substances) than doing housework and writing put together, I decided it was time.

Correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t the whole point of progress meant to be that things get better as time goes on? Why then, pray tell, do so many good things disappear while the new stuff is just crap? Take the good old VHS for instance. So you would have to stand around for all of five minutes waiting for it to rewind (instant is not necessarily better), and it made some clunky noises (noises which I find rather satisfying these days, electronic items have got so quiet that I am forever burning my ear on the side of the kettle trying to find out if the thing is actually working) but other than that, they did the job. And the best thing about VHS is that the cassettes are verging on indestructible. Even if a small child works out that if you stick a pen on the button on the side the tape is revealed and can be unwound, you can always wind it back up, the picture may go a bit fuzzy in parts but it’s still watchable. Not like DVD’s, one game of frizbee (sadly a common occurrence in my house, and there is no point putting them on a high shelf, this is just another opportunity for Son Two to practice scaling bookshelves) and the bloody thing won’t even play any more. If you get it to play at all you could be halfway into it when it suddenly decides it doesn’t like it anymore and skips a few times before giving up completely. The Dad and I did some sorting out in the loft of doom the other day and we found two DVD players, both less than two years old that were inexplicably broken. And I have two TV/DVD combi’s currently in use, which are now just telly’s with useless extra chunks of casing. I had a TV/VHS combi that was still working when I passed it on after ten years of faithful service.

I long for the old days when, apparently, you could pop along to your local shop with a basket over your arm and ask for half a pound of cheese (just “cheese” not a million different varieties), a dozen eggs (again, just “eggs”) and a pound of sausages (yep, just sausages), and the process of shopping took maybe half hour, tops. Apparently things were more expensive. But you did not walk out of the shop two hours later with an extra hundred pounds spent on a TV/DVD combi (that will break after two weeks), a dazzling array of different flavoured sausages and a Peppa Pig ball pool. If you were to go to the shop and ask for something exotic like say, pasta, you might have a choice between macaroni and spaghetti. The pasta aisle at the supermarket now is a perfect example of how ridiculously overwhelmed by choice we have become. Not only can you get pasta in a million different shapes and sizes, but you are also faced with those millions of shapes and sizes in many different brands and levels of “luxury”. I do not see this as a good thing at all. According to WRAP (Waste and Resources Action Programme) we throw away at least third of all the food we buy (that’s nearly half a ton per household per year). So, having access to all this choice does not mean that we are enjoying the lower prices of the supermarkets, any savings made are literally thrown away (or being spent on Peppa Pig ball pools).

A few years ago, in a fit of nostalgia, I put Guess Who? on my Christmas list. When I finally got it out of the box, excitedly rubbing my hands together, it was crap. The boards are flimsy, you have to spend half an hour putting it together before you can even play it, and the flip up faces are flimsy card pictures barely held in plastic frames, the cards get lost, the frames fall off and get sucked into the “missing things” vortex and it is frankly a shadow of what it once was. Son One does not understand why I think Guess Who is so good, he never experienced the glory days of Theo, Fran and Hans, when you could turn the board over and flip all the faces with one flick of the wrist (try that now and half of them fall off).

Thankfully, while in the loft, we also found a VHS player, still working, despite languishing up there for many years, and it now has a place in the Sons bedroom. There were some baffled looks from them. Son Two kept saying “Wha’s tha?” while pressing his scratched Wallace and Gromit DVD into my hands. “That is a piece of history. Just you try and destroy it.” I am waiting for them to ask for an Xbox in their bedroom. They’ll be getting an Atari and will be happy with it.