amusing minor household incompatibilities

[kaberett]

Okay so. You have a cupboard. The cupboard... needs organising.

If you are me: you spend up to a couple of weeks taking things out of the cupboard and then leaving them on the counter until the cupboard's about half-empty, at which point you gather the cope to Sort It Out. (The more full the cupboard is the more overwhelmed you are and the less you have cope for anything including getting things out of it when you need them.)

If you are A: you keep putting things back into the cupboard willy-nilly until you hit a convenient confluence of executive function and boredom, then take everything out and put it back in a way that makes sense. (The more cluttered the side is the more overwhelmed you are and the less you have cope for anything, especially putting things away neatly.)


These two approaches... are not super compatible, especially if you both keep getting low-grade (minorly! briefly! fleetingly, even!) exasperated with the other person for Not Doing The Obviously Sensible Thing.

IT IS OKAY WE SORTED IT OUT but the conversation was a solid ten minutes of staring at each other in mounting confusion and perplexity and bafflement while we tried to make the words go enough to fit the concept of the One True Way into each others' heads before we finally got it resolved. (I'd say "sorted out" but that... is a job for another day.)

Comments

[kaberett]

alright and now HAVING told the amusing anecdote I wish to clarify: that we actually had this conversation something like a week? two weeks? ago, and we still haven't actually sorted out The Cupboard Under Contention except insofar as I got all the cake-decorating stuff out and left it on the side having made vague noises about "probably this can go and live in the pantry instead of the Premium Kitchen Cupboard Space and then Things? might be Better?" whereupon Adam gathered it all up into a box (not quite by just sweeping it off the side with a crash but also) and... took it through to the pantry

because we are good at this

<3

[ironed_orchid]

<3

Cupboards take a lot of work!

I don't have another human, so my process is something like:
1. cupboard under the bench is a bit unwieldy and I should do something about it.
2. The floor is dirty, I should probably clean the floor before sitting there sorting cupboard and pulling things out.
3. Sweep and mop floor. Now the floor is wet, and I'm tired, have a nap or sit at computer.
4. About one week later: repeat from step 1.

[kaberett]

oh nooooooo <3

[alexwlchan]

*headtilt*

you are both good at domestic'ing, or something

have you considered fitting a rotating contraption to your cupboard? you both want to move objects from point X to point Y, you just disagree on the mapping between {X, Y} and {cupboard, side}. if you could rotate the two on an axis, you could change the mapping on a moment-by-moment basis.

<3

[cesy]

lol

[kaberett]

YOU JEST AND YET

[alexwlchan]

looking forward to my next visit, when i can admire the fancy rotating wall

[lunabee34]

<3

[aldabra]

I am in awe at your collective self-knowledge.

We got divorced. We *still* have incompatible approaches to my cupboards.

[kaberett]

I really do think we're doing remarkably well, yes. Which is convenient, given the whole "quarantined together" thing...

[jedusor]

this vaguely reminds me of a tweet I saw that went something like "whenever I grab the butter at the grocery store I get salted, whenever my wife grabs the butter she gets unsalted, we have been married for 17 years and we have never once had a conversation about this"

(when my partner and I were quarantining together for a few months in their very tightly packed 250-square-foot studio apartment, we kind of developed a system where I would say "is there a reason you do [household organizational thing] like this?" and usually they would be like "nope you can change that if you want" but once in a while it would just be "yes and the reason is I want it that way" XD)

[kaberett]

hee. yes. <3

That is a conversation we also often have!

[el_staplador]

countertony and I, who will have been married for eleven years on Saturday, discovered a few weeks ago that he'd been operating on the 'food in the fridge is fair game' principle while I was still working on university household 'if you didn't buy it, don't eat it' rules.

[jedusor]

but how? eleven years??

I hadn't really thought about it, but my roommate and I are fairly territorial with our food (we do share but we're explicit about what is to be shared) and my partner and I were much more lax about eating whatever was available, though I've done most of the cooking in both households. But that makes sense, since food is kind of part of the lifestyle D/s stuff I do with my partner (not that I tell them what to eat, but I get dommy about making them take a break for food or just putting it in front of them if they forget to eat too long). Roomie and I have a somewhat different relationship XD

[el_staplador]

Well, the systems we'd developed as university housemates worked pretty well - we have a rota for cooking the evening meal, and would to avoid things that had obviously been bought for those purposes, and things like bread, milk, and cheese were always understood to be communal.

Where it gets interesting is lunch. I've tended to buy lunch in the staff canteen at work, or, at weekends, make myself a cheese sandwich (so using communal supplies). countertony goes in more for ham, sausages, meat in general. I'd been assuming for years that he was buying ham for his own personal consumption, and not eating it, and never buying it myself. Until now, when we're both eating lunch at home seven days a week, and I fancied a change, and bought myself a packet of Spanish cold meats... and was rather upset when it disappeared.

[kaberett]

oh goodness I would be deeply irked by that

tbf we do operate on a system of mostly "if it's in the fridge it's fair game" but this is helped by (1) explicitly checking in with each other before actually finishing anything that's at all Special, and (2) mostly having completely non-intersecting ideas of what constitutes Treat Food...

[el_staplador]

We moved from YOU ATE MY HAM to Ah, we are operating under different assumptions (and I will buy you more ham) in fairly short order, and moved on to Please, do eat the olives!

[kaberett]

glad to hear it!

[ewt]

I mean, I tend to take some of the stuff out of the cupboard, put it somewhere that it's also in the way, get overwhelmed, and then someone else comes along and puts *something else* in the cupboard that I think doesn't even belong there.

This is... highly suboptimal, but not a problem that's going to go away until we have many many more cupboards or many many fewer things (or some combination of both that meets in the middle).

[kaberett]

... yeah <3

[sfred]

<3

[conuly]

Sounds frustrating.

[silveradept]

Excellence in communication and understanding.

I wish I had enough cupboard space to sort all the things and enough counter space to have all the appliances in the right places.

[kaberett]

One of the major draws of this flat was "enough counter space to have all the regularly-used appliances out all the time and be cooking two or more things at once", yes.

[ironed_orchid]

I dream of enough counter space and there is only one of me.

[inoru_no_hoshi]

The large advantage of having a brain that screeches about organization only insofar as things need to have a specific and explicit place if you want them Somewhere Precise (or for me to unfuck something bigger than, say, a small organizer or a grocery bag stuff with goodness knows what) is that I can usually slot shared space organizing so's it makes sense or is at least workable.

(I'm good at unfucking small, specific spaces. Large spaces? Um. Let's just say I'm working piecemeal at best. This is relevant because I am in fact in the process of a Large Unfuckening and it is made of Aaaaaaaa.)