back to

... commitment and routine, but not back to stress and confusion.
back to schedules and timelines, but not back to loathsome mundanities.

we in the oregon university system are back to school. the term structure (weird, i know) has got us doing ten weeks of condensed lectures, excerpted readings and value-packed discussion sections.

this summer:
i traveled as a homeless wanderer across the states, observing the mad realities of my culture. seriously, i thought to myself. this is depressing.

shoving those italics aside, i rushed and stumbled back to oregon equipped with a cursory knowledge of the specifics of survivalist dumpster-diving and excited for the possibilities that home-ful-ness would afford me.

maybe i can live in a way that's not so arbitrarily wasteful and lonely... maybe we all can.

smallish steps 

(tiny little miniscule footfalls toward living in a way that actually makes sense)


#1 hanging out the laundry.

in ithaca, where my silly little barefoot self realized the
benefits of more efficient laundrification
(and not in the urban dictionary sense of the word).

there was a super obvious discrepancy between the way i thought about laundry and the way i was actually cleaning my clothes. but it took a change of circumstance to motivate me to be creative in this area.  the circumstatntial shift occurred when i was dirt-poor and homeless in ithaca, n.y.

i realized upon entering a local laundrypalce that i had loads of time on my hands, and very little money. it didn't any longer make sense in this situation for me to pay a time-saving machine to clean my laundry for me.

i borrowed some laundry soap, and set to it, cleaning my clothes in the utility sink, before wringing them out to the best of my ability. in this specific situation, it was expedient for me to use the dryers, making sure to conserve quarters for coffee money as i went.

another common sense thing that hadn't occurred to me was a strategy for dealing with the time i spent waiting for my clothes to dry. i pulled out a couple magazines, and started to read about the struggle for social justice (inefficiency diminished).

since coming back to eugene, i've found that it makes more sense to dry my clothes under the eaves of my house. it saves me a couple dollars a week (plus a lot of previously wasted energy), and, contrary to popular opinion, the hobos don't steal them while they're drying. as an added bonus, my clothes smell like the autumn air. they even dry when it's raining out, so long as they don't blow out from under the eaves.

step number one? do smart(er) laundry.