Sometimes I have to turn away from the screen, I’m too squeamish for the diapers with human waste stacked up in the bathrooms with no working plumbing, the cat feces and dog vomit crusted in ankle-deep layers on the linoleum, the maggots crawling through the green slime left in the vegetable drawers in the dying refrigerators.

It’s not the disgusting parts I’m drawn to. What i’m really obsessed with is why we see this form of what we consider mental illness in our culture.

And the class implications. That’s the really fascinating part. Let me walk you through it.

Pretty near all the people featured on these shows are low income. In many cases, very low income. Some have become homeless because their hoard has taken all the room in their home. In more than a few cases, the hoard has actually destroyed their houses as it has rotted or broken supports, beams and even foundations. Usually, their hoard endangers their health and even lives, either because the air quality is made hazardous by mold, fungus, ammonia, etc. or by the fact that there’s no way they could escape in case of fire. Or that some of their hoard could just flat out topple over and crush them.

Often their families put up with the smell and the uninhabitable conditions to a stunning degree. Even when there’s not even enough space left to sleep in a prone position. Or a single chair left to sit in. One guy with extreme scoliosis had to sleep in the car every night because his wife had utterly filled the house. As soon as they can, the children often escape and keep their distance, not knowing what to do, feeling helpless and resentful that their parent cares more about their stuff than their family members.

The psychologists on the shows diagnose hoarders with obsessive-compulsive disorder and trace it back to some traumatic event in their lives…often some kind of loss. Their failure to deal with the emotional trauma of the loss drives them to acquire stuff they use to wall off the rest of the world. With that protective layer around them, they don’t have to feel, so they can’t get hurt again. Their attachment to their stuff becomes a substitute for relationships with people. Or something like that.

But here’s the deal. There’s also a show called Extreme Couponing, where usually women spend hours of their days collecting coupons from circulars, newspapers, magazines, web sites, etc. etc. They take their collected clipped coupons in complex portable organization systems to supermarkets where they buy multiples upon multiples of an assortment of random crap, often more than a medium sized metropolis could possibly use in a lifetime, and store them on rows and rows of shelves in what looks like a supermarket in their basements.

But these people are not diagnosed as hoarders. Rather, they are celebrated as thrifty housewives and attract a crowd of admirers at the checkstand where the poor checker has to process $897.64 worth of goods for a grand total of 27 cents while all the other customers unlucky enough to choose that day to buy their weekly groceries wait for hours.

I don’t hear anybody diagnosing them with OCD. But in some ways, these couponers seem more obsessive compulsive to me – the way their hoard is all lined up in straight rows, they way they spend the better part of their lives looking for coupons, setting up their coupon organization systems, reorganizing their organization systems, planning their shopping excursions, nervously checking the readout when the items get scanned, etc. People labeled hoarders are pretty much slackers after they get their stuff home, and it stays piled up exactly where they dropped it.

Then the other night there was this show Selling Spelling Manor. When Widow Spelling decided to downsize from her mansion of something like 80,000 square feet with I-am-not-making-this-up 27 bathrooms to a paltry 20,000 sq ft or so, she had to part with some stuff. And I promise you, it was way way way more stuff than all the hoarders on all the hoarder shows put together. There were Beanie Babies, dolls, and so many other forms of tasteful crap, it’s all a bloated blur.  Pretty much more than one of everything ever made. Way way more than she could ever use, I’m guessing even she couldn’t remember most of it. So much stuff, in fact, she had to hire people to inventory it. In the most OCD way possible: you should have seen how much time and effort went into photographing each item, researching its value, creating pages and pages and notebooks and notebooks and catalogs and catalogs of the stuff… it just went on and on and on…

Why isn’t this labelled obsessive compulsive behavior? Why wasn’t Widow Spelling featured on Hoarders? Why isn’t she charged with Hoarding: Buried Alive? Because her hoard is clean and she has such a ginormous house that it fits without blocking the exits?

So who can explain why all these things aren’t considered hoarding. Why only the ones with poor people?

And I want to know if hoarding exists in other cultures? Are there hoarders on other continents? In Mongolia? Chinese villages? Among the Kalahari Bushmen? Inside the Inuit? Or is it a particular manifestation of our culture of consumption? Is it some kind of twisted consequence of the constant barrage of advertising we are subjected to throughout most of our lives, that we pretty much measure our worth through acquisition?

My inquiring mind really wants to know. Won’t someone please tell me?

I used Kona’s zucchini color for the solid to set the exuberant strip pieces against. As I flew around Portland one morning taking the last photos of quilts two days before my show, when I passed one of the Facing the Crowd bronze face sculptures by Michael Stutz outside Jeld Wen Field, I had a sudden inspiration that this quilt just wanted to have fun sticking out its tongue. I knew Gyleen would appreciate this choice.

An interesting side note is that I finished this quilt during the week of vacation we were supposed to spend at Prineville Reservoir last June, but Blaine’s sudden illness and hospitalization derailed that plan. Making the quilt was my way of healing from my fear and worry that surfaced during that episode. I guess you could say the quilt represents the celebration of healing in our whole family.

Quilters Just Want to Have Fun Facing the Crowd

I more or less improvised the border fabrics, with the primary one a geranium print with wonderfully rich greens and reds.

I started this quilt when my mom and I worked on sewing projects while we spent a week or so at the River House in Bandon by the Sea a few years back. That’s why it has a special place in my heart.

A floral quilt in a floral yard. With dog.

There is a sorta interesting backstory about this bike shelter. The Hawthorne Bridge was closed for repairs for a seriously lllloooooonnnnnngggggg time a few years ago, seems to me it was closed for a year and a half or maybe even two years. Soon after we got our bridge back, however, a movie crew took it over for a few months to film a number of scenes from the movie The Hunted. Our patience had worn very thin so there were a number of complaints from the Portland citizenry. To placate the public, the movie company promised to build a covered bike shelter on Hawthorne Blvd. as a kind of “thank you” gift.

This is that very bike rack.

I used several prints from the periwinkle blue and green Pretty Bird fabric from Michael Miller. I think this would look especially fine on a tweenager’s bed.

Share the Rack: Quilts AND Bikes

I named this one Swaddle Me, a hashtag that @BravoAndy uses to very humorous effect. I dunno, maybe you had to be there.

I had a lot of trouble getting into a rhythm making this quilt. For some reason, I didn’t grasp the fact that it mattered what order the little pieces are when attaching the strip blocks to the larger whole block. If you look closely, you’ll notice that the two strip blocks on each side of the larger blocks are the reverse of one another. Unfortunately, I didn’t notice that when I started and had sewn quite a few together before it dawned on me.

I didn’t buy any fabric for this project, using only what I had in my stash. Which wasn’t really a problem because I had collected a number of blue and purple and teal fabrics over time for a ridiculously complex idea I had that involved peacocks. Fortunately, I came to my senses before I embarked on that project, hence I have a plethora of blue/teal/purples tones. I’m not sure you can tell from this image, but some of the fabrics in this quilt are prints of peacock feathers.

This is not a hard quilt to make, especially if you are aware of what I overlooked. Cutting the small pieces is a little tedious, as is sewing them together, but it’s not difficult.

Quiltlandia in Portlandia: Swaddle Me

I had a lot of false starts, but somewhere along the line I noticed that I never quite found the time to make a new way of living and being a habit. Yes, it’s true, I have a lot going on in my life and this almost always ended up on that back burner I never quite got to at far corner of the stove. So I hoped having several weeks in a row off from work in my sabbatical would give me the opportunity to make changes and keep doing them long enough to reset my life.

I’m happy to report I have made progress, at long last. Here are the four things I’ve done so far (and plan to keep doing):

1. Get a coach.

A dear friend once told me he found it interesting that elite athletes already at the top of their game rely on coaches to keep them going forward, but the rest of us don’t really think about doing that…and we probably need it way more than the top jocks do.

Finding such a person to help you lose weight and get back in shape can be really intimidating, because you are so vulnerable. One snarky comment or not quite disguised eye roll could set us back for months. I was afraid such a person would take one look at me and say, “Uh, sorry, you are way too far gone for my program.”

This is a case where relying on a referral from a friend who has been there too is really useful. A friend from work gave me Lea‘s phone number and I worked up the courage to call her. My first attempts to meet with her were hijacked by other realities in my  life, but I have to give myself credit here for not giving up when I faced those all too frequent stresses that can easily derail progress in my life.

I met with her, she assured me I was not a hopeless case after all, she designed an exercise program for me that is both gradual enough for me to achieve it but challenging enough to kick my butt. And she was kind about it. After the second session, I began to feel stronger and more in control of my destiny.

I had actually been afraid to try a lot of things since my encounter with herniated disks and pinched nerves that robbed me of the use of my left hand and arm and knocked me on my butt in summer 2009. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to do them, and I would rather not know I had lost that ability. So I just kept putting off trying them.

Working with Lea, I am discovering I am stronger than I thought. My physical confidence has grown markedly, I have way more energy to do other things and I’ve only had five sessions with her so far. Two days ago, she introduced me to the elliptical machine. My conclusion? #hehateme

I will be going twice a week for the next several weeks and am really excited about the prospect. Even though my ass is totally dragging after enduring a 60 minute whipping from her. It’s a good hurt!

One down, more to go.

2. Identify a daily cardio program I can keep up even when it’s pouring rain. And do it.

Years ago, I loved to run. I mean LOVED to run. I am nowhere near running shape, so I’ve been walking. The weather has been so nice in Portland over the past few weeks (until yesterday!), but I know the rains are coming, if they have not already settled in for another long visit. I am not so much thrilled about walking in the rain. I need to do something indoors when it’s that wet out.

It has to be something nearly logistic- and equipment-free. I am so easily derailed by things taking too much work before you can even start. I need something than can fit fairly seamlessly into my day every day. I don’t have to drive anywhere, change clothes, get a bunch of tools, etc.

So what else do I love to do? Dance. I LOVE to dance. You know, the kind without rules, you can do whatever you want and just move your body to the music. So this is what I’ve come up with for the wetter months, that I can do even at work. I’m making a specific playlist of music I love to dance to and during lunch hour I’m going to find a secret dark hideaway corner no one in the office is using and dance like nobody’s watching (which, hopefully, they won’t be). But I really don’t care if I look like a dork. This is my life at stake here. I need to do this.

I may only get through a few songs at this point, but I’ll work up to keeping at it for 45 minutes. Then an hour.

Check this one off the list!

3. Figure out if I’m the kind of person who can join a gym, and if I am, find a gym I’m compatible with.

OMG, I cannot even fathom going to one of those gyms where the pretty people go to watch themselves in the mirror and try out their pickup lines. Just. can. not.

It’s also more than hard for a former farm girl to get her head around having to go to a special place and do programmed movements to get exercise, because a big part of me thinks that’s pretty darned funny because your daily life should include working hard enough to break a sweat. I remember being so struck by a particular passage in Nicholas Gage’s book about his mother’s life, Eleni. The Greek villagers would bring out their chairs to sit and watch the British soldiers run up and down the hill above the village to get exercise, which provided no end of merriment for the villagers watching them scamper up and down for no apparent reason.

Inside, I’m kinda one of those villagers. Intellectually, I know I need to get over this because I have become the fat villager who is about to break her chair and better get off her butt and join the army scrambling up the hill.

But I digress.

I went looking for a gym that seemed short on narcissism and long on forgiveness. And that had other people shaped like me. And did not seem to be part of the self indulgent superficial youth-obsessed sex-sells part of our culture. A gym that was more a part of the let-it-all-hang-out anything goes different-strokes-for-different-folks part of our culture. In other words, a very Portlandia gym.

I actually found it. Get this: there is a Green MicroGym near my home where the cardio machines are somehow hooked up to the grid and generate electricity for the gym. (Hmm, maybe that explains why the lighting was so tastefully low when I took the tour ) The manager was oh-so-nice and assured me I would not break the machines when I sat on them and that it’s not a gym where the oil-slicked animal-grunting body builders flock but it attracts regular inner southeast Portland kind of people. Like me.

And get this! You don’t have to sign a contract!!! Can you believe it? A gym that doesn’t feel like a pyramid scheme scam. Wow! How could I resist???

I calculated that I probably won’t be ready to use the machines until November and can keep working with Lea and doing stuff outside until then, so November 1 is my start date.

But another mission accomplished!! Check.

4. No More Garbage In, Garbage Out

A funny thing happened when I started working out with Lea. It hurt so much and was so hard, I wasn’t about to sabotage any however small forward progress by eating too much high caloric food. You know, the kind I love so much.

So I’ve been keeping a log of my food intake. And, of course, when you actually note it down, you notice more. Like when your danger periods are so you can make a plan to overcome them. (Mine are in the evening, apparently I need to be handcuffed around 7 pm every day.)

Another local person on the weight loss fitness journey is an uber geek, and he generously shared a list of FREE apps he is using to document his progress. I’ve downloaded Lose It!, RunKeeper (not just for running) and Daytum and begun to use them. They are so darned handy, doing things like calculating how many calories in the food you just ate, how many you have left to consume that day given your weight loss goals, how many calories you’ve burned, etc. These tools make it so much easier to figure out what is really going on.

I feel I am really BEGINNING to get a handle on the eating too much thing. Emphasis on the beginning part, naturally. But even beginning makes me feel more in control of my destiny. And stronger. And that I can do this.

Yes, I think I’ll check this one off too!

More to come!

My quilt show flyer

I’m somewhat known for having big ideas. Many would call them outsized. Unreasonably proportioned.

I have tried and tried to reign them in. I really have. And actually, I have learned to keep more and more of them to myself. So as not to drive everyone around me crazy. In fact, I have publicly promised my co-workers to propose no more new ideas. I have clearly outstayed my welcome on that score.

But sometimes my ideas can be so rewarding. They actually work. Which makes it so hard to give them up entirely.

One of my latest ideas was spurred by our office’s recent adoption of four-week sabbaticals for those of us who have worked there for seven years. Since I’ve put in 15 years, I was one of the first (if not the very first) to sign up.

We had to submit a plan for the goals – both professional and personal – for our month away. True to my nature, I promised to pursue three rather ambitious and lofty goals. And my plan to achieve those three ginormous things was approved by my boss.

That’s when my trouble began.

One of my goals was to plan and produce a show of my quilts.

Mind you, I’m kind of self conscious about showing anyone except close friends and family my quilts. Most people I know have never seen them. I am very afraid of the quilt police. What was I thinking, pledging to put on a show? In public and all?!?

Even if I overcame that apparent contradiction, how was I to pull this off? Where on earth would I do it? My quilt habit is costly enough just buying fabric, I can’t afford to rent a space that has a lot of blank walls and good lighting… like a gallery or something. I fretted over this for several weeks before the solution presented itself to me. Here’s how it happened.

One day in late July while pondering my dilemma, I walked past the mattress store across the street from my office building and noticed a “We’re open for First Thursday tonight” sign on the door. Suddenly I had it:  I should have my quilt show at a mattress store, I can lay my quilts out on the beds!!! No walls needed!

And what if I did it at the mattress store on a First Thursday, the evening all the galleries in the Pearl District (my office neighborhood) open their doors for art shows, inviting people to come in and have conversations with beverages while looking at the art, etc.  BedMart would provide a place to show my quilts, my quilts could bring people in so more potential customers are mingling among mattresses. A total win-win, am I right?!

A few days later, I went in and described my idea to the manager. I figure, what’s the worst that can happen, she says no, right? I tell her about my sabbatical and what I promised to do and how I need a place to show my quilts and I’m thinking it might be challenging to lure First Thursday goers into a mattress store without an artistic attraction so maybe it would be a great collaboration.

She immediately grasped the opportunity in my idea and said, “That’s a wonderful idea, we would love to do that, you want to do it in August? Like next Thursday?”

Well, I won’t really be ready in August, that’s when my sabbatical is, how about First Thursday in October?

“That would be great, here’s my card, let’s keep in touch.”

I’m acting all calm but inside I’m screaming in a very high pitched tone: “A-W-E-S-O-M-E !!!!!!!!!!!!!”  I’m so not used to things being this easy.

So it’s actually happening. Twenty-five of my quilts. And some other quilted thingies I’ve done. And some cool and fun activities to engage you.

First Thursday in October! October 6th. 6 p.m. to whenever it ends. BedMart at NW11th Ave and Glisan St. in Portland’s Pearl District. It turns out to be the very night of the 25th Anniversary of First Thursday!

I would be really really thrilled and excited if you came.

And I’m thinking I need to make this idea go viral. Bed stores can be awfully boring looking…. like acres of, lets face it, fairly butt-ugly mattresses. What if the quilters of the world talked to the managers of the bed stores in their towns and arranged events like First Thursday.

Or maybe the events could be ongoing, like a week long or something. Or maybe permanent installations… quilters could show and sell their works, quilt lovers and art appreciators and everybody everywhere would be inspired to make their mattress and bed purchases at those stores.

Lots of details to work out, yes, but we can make it happen, am I right? You know I am.

Let’s do this.

No wonder I keep getting new ideas. They’re so much fun!!!