Tidying Up with Marie Kondo: Ep 1

[nanila]

Tidying Up with Marie Kondo

Summary: Netflix series in which a disarmingly tiny Japanese woman goes into people’s homes, ostensibly to help them declutter their homes, but mostly to provide stealth relationship counseling.

Apparently this KonMari method of tidying is (was?) a bit of a craze, which naturally I have entirely missed. However, I got really into watching this, am presently alone in the evenings, and decided to live-blog it the way ankaret does with “The Bachelor/ette” series. (She’s much better at it than I am.) Anyway, if you’ve watched it or are watching it, please add in your own observations in the comments.

Ep 1: The Friend Family

Couple with two young children. The kids have normal-sounding names with weird spellings. It reminds me of LA Story’s SanDeE☆ (“Big S Small A Small n Big D Small e Big E and there’s a little star at the end”). They are big on sharing everything they’re feeling all the time. I find it overwhelming.

Husband works full time, very long hours. Seems good-natured, but definitely getting a frat boy vibe. Wife works part-time and loathes housekeeping. She rubs me up the wrong way. Very star-struck with MK but also seems to think that the best way to learn is by asking unnecessarily personal questions about MK’s home and life. Uncool. (This struck me later, when I saw Ep 3, and contrasted her against the woman in that family, who understood how to ask questions about how to improve her processes without being unpleasantly intrusive.)

MK: “American kitchens are so large!” Her: “They are? This is large?” Yes, yes this about sums up the extent of your privilege-blindness. :/

The house-greeting ritual. Husband is like, “hey, chance for a thirty-second nap! zzzzz” Too mystical for me. I tune out. Then the oversharing commences (Oh, Californians). Wife is weepy but can’t actually cry properly because it might screw up her eye makeup.

Wife piles up her clothes. It is a mountain. “This is embarrassing, I’m not sure why it’s embarrassing...I, like, started feeling guilty.” MASSIVE EYEROLL

Unsupervised child drinks coffee out of massive Starbucks cup, then pours it over himself. “Daddy, I need a napkin.” “I don’t think a napkin’s gonna cut it, buddy.” LULZ

Lots of low-level bickering.

Separate tidying seems to go better.

In the kitchen, we achieve a full bingo card on “Thank you, I’m excited.” You do not have to be excited about everything all the time. Especially vertically stacked Tupperware. Please stop.

“Babe, you were super hot on our wedding day.” Highly amused at husband going full Neanderthal. Suspect this is fairly indicative of his world view. Frat boy status: confirmed.

“We finished, with two young kids, it’s crazy!” That might be overstating things a bit. I mean, good job making your large and beautifully furnished home look like a catalogue and all, but I think it’s not unprecedented in the history of ever. /dry

Comments

[cmcmck]

I suspect this would just drive me nuts.

I had too many people early in life telling me how to lead it and now I just lead it- my way!

[nanila]

Oh yeah, I definitely don't think the KonMari method is for everybody. If I were to go through this process (and what I wouldn't give for a month to devote purely to decluttering), I would pick and choose the elements I found useful.

[sfred]

I had been sort of wanting to know the content of these shows without having time to watch them: thank you for this solution!

[nanila]

Ha, you're most welcome! I feel that way about The Bachelor/ette. I don't want to watch them, but ankaret's recaps are hilarious.

[annofowlshire]

I like KonMari's general philosophy, not sure I could watch a show on it, though!

MK: “American kitchens are so large!” Her: “They are? This is large?” I'm getting future flashes to my mother coming to visit me in England this spring, and how our house will seem tiny compared to the big American-style house she thinks I should have :P

(And, frankly, by "inner London middle class standards", our house is practically a mansion. It was a pre-gentrification investment that went well and we're enormously lucky to have it.)

[nanila]

The show is only nominally about the philosophy; it's really about the relationships between the people she's counselling, er, I mean, teaching to de-clutter their homes.

Yeah, my parents did a bad job of concealing their dismay at the size of our home when they visited, haha. Fortunately they were very excited about the fantastic location and impressed by its age.

Excellent work on playing the real estate market well; maybe you can impress that upon her!

[annofowlshire]

I keep telling her how ITTY BITTY our house is, so I'm hoping she'll start to think it's like a closet-sized flat and will be impressed that it's not XD We don't even have age or character to impress upon--it's an 80s build :P (Also, I don't think she's be impressed by age anyway. When I lived in the States, I bought a well-cared for 40 year old house and her immediate response was "it's too old. You need to sell it and buy a newer house.")

My partner is all credit for this excellent investment. He bought it a long, long before he and I were together, and has let it out over the years while his career took him other places and the gentrification did it's work. The hope is to eventually sell it and use the money to buy a really nice place in a far less overheated market in the UK. But... we'll see given the instability that is Britain right now >_< At least we have an affordable place to live if it all crashes.

[slemslempike]

Oh, I really liked the wife! She was funny and highly strung, and I warmed to her very much when they were talking about being Friends and being Family. Also I took her side against her husband when she was saying she wanted help becasue she couldn't find the time, and he was ignoring the issue about the time and saying they should be able to do it.

[nanila]

I have a strong aversion to overly expressive Americans. I find it particularly grating and embarrassing to watch. This is, I believe, entirely down to me and the enormous amount of effort I have put into channelling/suppressing my own expressive tendencies into acceptably British ones.

[marymac]

I liked the show enough to mainline it over the Christmas break when I was waking up hours before the rest of the house, but I'm sadly convinced that her solution to our house would be gently say "do you think you might need more bookshelves?" Which we do, but in creating our lovely big airy living room the then owner somehow managed to obliterate all the places you could put them.

First episode lady aggravated me too, dear god girl, would you chill.

[nanila]

Yeah, she was very wound up/highly strung! Not that their family situation wasn't stressful, with the two madly energetic kids, but I felt like she didn't do a lot to help herself.

[liseuse]

I was very wary queueing up the second episode in case it involved as much emotion sharing as the first one. There was just so much! And it gave me a lot of secondhand embarrassment! And I never ever managed over all the episodes to not find the house greeting a little bit ack inducing. I'm glad it works for Marie Kondo! But it just made me recoil a bit.

[nanila]

I was glad at least a few of the families were like ....okay.... about the house-greeting ritual. We're not dead inside! :P

[liseuse]

I liked the ones who respectfully stepped back and let it happen whilst not participating. I was very proud of them all for not letting their faces show horror! I mostly hid my face behind a wine glass because even at the remove of being on a TV screen it was ... A Bit Much.

[lorigami]

it's been kind of funny watching how this ruffles American lifestyles. Less funny how so much of her philosophy is lost in translation.

[nanila]

I want to read the book(s) now to see how it's meant to be applied.

[annofowlshire]

When I read the book, I kept thinking "she's probably Shinto, and in Shinto this all makes a lot more sense."

[askygoneonfire]

I did not like this couple. The woman especially seemed well into the idea that Marie Kondo is some sort of mystical Other with magicial knowledge - which admittedly the show as a whole does turn into but MAN.

I fear their relationship will not be fixed with tidying.

[nanila]

They set my teeth on edge. And yes, I agree, there was a powerful sense that their problems ran a lot deeper than arguments about laundry.

[emelbe]

With the house hunt progressing, we started watching tonight and didn't make it very far into this episode. About the time they started talking about the laundry service and the husband asserted that it was something they should just be able to do (where he didn't seem to be including himself in the "we"), we all decided skipping to the retirees was going to be the way to go.

I mean, on the upside, S and HidKid were sensitive enough to the dynamic playing out in screen that they got uncomfortable with it before I did?