if you could take a gander into the recesses of my brain these days, you would see something like this:

yes, this is my kitchen. yes, that is a floaty. yes, it’s january. that about sums it up.

the disarray that once marked only my physical world has elbowed its way into my head. i find myself in awe of mothers who are still able to form and share coherent, insightful ideas. when i rummage around underneath the bibs and soccer trophies from two years ago, all i can come up with is a long-winded, ever-growing, increasingly hostile, feminist rant.

i see friends in restaurants and get random emails from folks who are wondering what happened to my regular posts. i tell them about the not-so-nice rant that i am not-so-eager to share. they all tell me to share it. “your blog is all about honesty, they say.” “aren’t you the one who preaches that it’s our generation’s job to tell the truth?”

yes. dammit.

it’s just that i fear that my writing skills aren’t sophisticated enough to temper and organize the fire that could be unleashed on the internet of all places. for example, this is just a small portion of the mess that has exploded into my thoughts.

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observation: a husband arriving home from work with eleven grocery items in tow should not be mistaken for jesus christ.

if you are at my house when this happens, there is no need to make a fuss about this display of ordinary responsibility. it is true that grocery shopping has traditionally been “woman’s work,” and i am thrilled to have a progressive husband. but nobody falls all over themselves when i go to my part time job outside of the home, which greatly resembles what has traditionally been called “man’s work.”

furthermore, when i carry on with all of my work, both inside the home and outside the home, i do so with the constant feeling that i am falling short. there are always mountains of laundry on the couch in my bedroom. there are always dirty dishes in the sink. there are always deeper relationships to forge with the college students i encounter at work. my part-time ministry, though it is gaining momentum, looks meager next to the full-time ministries happening all around me.

my progressive husband (who really is a good one!) experiences the opposite phenomenon. he’s good at his job, and he is able to dedicate the proper time and energy to it. he’s involved in the kids’ lives, and he even folds laundry. in all of his work, inside and outside the home, he blows the expectations out of the water. in fact, he walks on water, some would say.

the problem is not that other wives elevate my spouse to divine status. rather, the issue is that in the south, where i live, the sight of a dad pushing a grocery cart is (apparently) still a shocking display. women working outside of the home? that’s ordinary. but men folding laundry? what a miracle!

and here is my profound conclusion, folks. are you ready for it? okay. here it comes: THIS IS NOT FAIR.

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end of rant #1. more to come. consider yourself warned.

p.s. you’re welcome, anna.

hello, my name is mary allison, and i am a delinquent blogger. i know you are all attributing my silence to one of the following things:

1. i joined the witness protection program and am now living in boise, working at subway, and breeding cocker spaniels.

2. my children have finally driven me past the point of insanity and i have taken off on an impromptu cross-country drive with no definite plans of return.

3. a pillow fort has blocked access to my computer:

alas, if my life held the drama and intrigue of items 1 & 2, i would have written a memoir by now, and i walk through pillow forts every day. no big deal.

all i know is that since my last post on august 30th, the following things have happened:

1. my children started back to school after labor day and then had a five-day fall break two seconds later.

2. i turned 35.

3. i started re-reading eckhart tolle’s a new earth:

4. my job at the university of memphis stopped resembling the tv show apprentice and morphed into relational ministry. in other words, my makeshift marketing campaign has given way to face-to-face contact with actual students! i believe in miracles.

5. the monkey started taking suzuki violin, and i rented myself a fiddle too. we make terrible, fantastic music together. remember this post about great expectations?

6. i made good on my promise to mask the bird’s wall doodlings with wild designs. if you stand still in my house for too long, there is a good chance that you will be stenciled.

new obsession: www.oliveleafstencils.com

p.s. did you know you can stencil fabric and flat-weave rugs? good times.

7. i discovered that i can download books via the audible app on my phone and wash dishes and fold clothes to the riveting saga of the hunger games trilogy. i actually look forward to household chores now. for the love of clean dishes and laundered clothes and all that is holy, suzanne collins needs to write some more books.

8. andy and i took a little trip to lake oconee, outside of atlanta. the kids stayed with my folks. we each slept for 12 hours, three nights in a row. i wore my vintage polyester house dress around the hotel like a crazy person. what’s the point in changing clothes just to wander down the hall for a glass of wine?

9. i got to serve communion to my children at our church’s family camp in middle tennessee. the ritual of communion is mysterious and multifaceted, and i will never fully understand it. but this i know: it was bread from heaven. also, the bird spit his portion of bread into the cup.

http://www.nacome.org/

i promise not to wait a month and a half to post again. off to polish the silver, iron my underwear, and plant bulbs in the front beds before the kids awake.

just kidding. i’m still not martha stewart. some things never change.

the feedback i’ve received about the reality project falls into two categories. the first resonates most with me and goes something like,

“i love the reality project! it makes me feel better about the domestic disorder that hacks away at my sense of well-being.”

the second category of folks confess,

“i truly do not have alcoves in my home that are messy. messes make me crazy. i have to clean them. i have always been this way.”

today’s submission is from kathi, who seems to somehow fit into both of the above categories. she explains,

i do not function well in disorder. that  does not mean the disorder does not exist – it just merely gets moved around a lot.

who knows what separates those who put things away from those of us who simply step over the crap on the way to something else.  i cannot ponder this right now though because i am debating what is funnier — kathi’s picture below, or her cooresponding narrative.

kathi writes,

there is one corner of my house that doesn’t get moved around a lot. it truly is a “still life.” it contains:

• loose screws
• a vac steam machine that i fell in love with for two weeks and now never use
• a mannequin with a smart tote bag over her shoulder ready to go to town, except she lost her hair
• in the mannequin’s tote bag is a knitting project that i entirely forgot that i had started
• a clean air machine that never gets plugged in (we live in the los angeles area so we certainly could use this)
• a dustbuster that i have never used but it is plugged in and draining electricity
• a tool bag that i never returned to the garage after a project completed in november of 2010
• each of the four black attache cases (on the shelf above the floor) is from a different stage in my career. i will not be returning to any of these stages, so it’s silly to save the bags
• a magazine organizer (next to the attache cases) holding nine issues of architectural digest from 2008, all dog-eared with ideas i intended to recreate in my home – as if i (a) had time to read them a second time or (b) there were a chance in hell that these ideas could actually work in this life as we know it
• and last but not least, a hot glue gun, because i am always trying to keep things “together” despite the gravitational pull toward chaos

that poor mannequin! she has ideas, she’s creative, she’s handy, she has old identities tucked into little cases, she simply cannot finish all of the projects she’s started, she’s losing her hair, and despite her craftiest hot-glue-gun attempts, she can’t seem to fix those loose screws!

i love her. she is me.

the reality project  is coming to a close (just a few days remaining), even though reality goes on forever and the clutter never ends.

personally, i like the approach that courtney has taken with her ever-propagating toiletry items: 

i think the boxes have something to do with a bathroom renovation, but just think! if you ever want to pawn your wedding ring to pay for an impromptu two-day hotel nap (a la vivi abbot walker in the divine secrets of the ya-ya sisterhood), your toiletries would already be packed and ready to go!

my husband and i once considered buying a house with such an open floor plan that the kitchen could be seen from almost every room of the downstairs. we both loved this house (as long as we were not the ones living in it).

we know ourselves. making kitchen messes is a skill we’ve been honing for almost 12 years now. cleaning them up is not. but, as evidenced by today’s reality project  submission from tiffany, we are not alone.

tiffany writes:

what you see below is proof that we cook a lot but that we get in and out of the kitchen as quickly as humanly possible. that means that you’ll find food debris pretty much everywhere. we make the food and almost always neglect the clean up part. we can’t even be bothered to close the pantry doors!

tiffany continues:

this scene had about 36 hours more of a mess added to it before it got cleaned. that’s our reality. for us, there’s no time or energy left to clean after cooking. i imagine the kitchen cleaner at the front of the shot saying, “not dirty enough to challenge me. pile some more on before you call for my services!”

thank you , tiffany. and are those hubcaps above your stove? very cool.

elise was completely unimpressed last week with my reality project submission entitled bowl of big-boy-pants .

i have to admit that it pales in comparison with her composition of a similar nature:

what with the pez dispenser, the pin cushion, the golf glove, the classic novel, and the dog shit bag, there is really no contest. and hey — is that crystal?

perhaps i can redeem myself in the kitchen avalanche category. we moved into our current home in september of 2008, and by early october, this stalagmite had formed from concentrated amounts of bibs, dish towels, and compact disks, as well as common kitchen items such as floaties, soccer trophies, and elastic.

i will be devastated if anyone attempts to straighten this area. i know exactly where everything is right now.

keep ’em coming folks!

what do the following items have in common?

• sunscreen
• vision board
• coat hangers
• electric mixer
• bruce pearl bobble head
• diorama of john craig’s fort
• bug spray
• race car
• basket of lavender

they all live in the above-pictured laundry room of andrea and evoke the following questions:

1. where is the laundry in this supposed laundry room?
2. did your vision board include the firing of bruce pearl?
3. do you make your own lavender-scented bugspray and sunscreen using your upright mixer? if not, you should (in all of your spare time).

happy weekend, folks! make many messes. take pictures of them. then leave them behind and have fun. the reality project is depending on you.

the reality project continues, thanks to these pics from sharon in PA. the first introduces a prime breeding ground for chaos and shame: putting one’s house on the market to sell. let’s get a show of hands for all of those who have shoved a dress-up-purse full of baby bottle attachments and kids’ shoes into the oven right as the realtor and prospective buyers were pulling into the driveway. don’t look so smug. those of you who filled the trunks of your cars with this stuff are not much better. but i digress.

sharon writes,

when we were getting ready to move, we cleaned all the clutter off the fridge. i really liked how it looked and decided to keep the fridge in the new house clutter free. right.

of course, the upside about moving (once you finally trick a buyer into purchasing your old digs) is that packing presents a wonderful opportunity to purge your life of things including but not limited to:

• the heart-shaped crystal plate received 12 years ago as a wedding gift
• the baja hoodie you wore in eighth grade
• the dead battery collection accumulating in the sideboard drawer

but oh, how quickly the crap re-accumulates in the new house! behold this disaster atop the dresser of sharon’s ten-year-old.

sharon wants us to know that “the dresser knob on the left has not been hit by an engorgement charm. it just has a scrunchy wrapped around it, as do four of the five other knobs.”

thanks, sharon, for reminding me that i never want to move again. and p.s. i would give five scrunchies for a fridge that looks as orderly as yours does!

if you are reading this on break from ironing your underwear and fine-cleaning your bathroom tile grout, chances are, you could benefit from a lesson about the evolution and breeding habits of clutter.

thanks to gretchen‘s sophisticated time-lapse photography (read: two passing smart-phone shots), today’s reality project  post features two images of the same space.

kitchen -- SUNDAY

kitchen -- MONDAY

gretchen writes,

you know how sometimes you look around your house and think, “wow!  this place is a disaster – could it BE any more disgusting? i have to clean it up TODAY.” but then life gets in the way. let’s face it, when is cleaning up the constantly recurring mess more fun than spending time with your child, going to a concert, or just sitting down with a glass of wine because you are only one woman and you are tired at the end of the day? then when you look again 12 hours later (or so) you think, “hmm, apparently yes it COULD be more of a disaster.”

that is what this picture shows.

thank you, gretchen, for reminding us that just as rome wasn’t built in a day, neither are our colossal messes. you did the right thing in this situation. i hope you played with your kid, went to a concert, and had threeglasses of wine, all while sitting down! plus, as evidenced by monday’s shot, cleaning products can actually contribute to the clutter. we could all learn a lesson from you about priorities. 

speaking of priorities, read here about my friend susan, whose commitment to order involves a card catalog in her living room. but since she became a mother 19 months ago, her “chaos has quintupled.” we might all do well to take her advice:

nobody ever died from a messy coffee table.