Due to some stuff brought up in recent posts I believe it is time to once again extol the virtues of Ms-Demeanor’s Patented Where Did I Put That Fucking Paper Organizational Binder.
Hello! I am a disorganized adult! This is the system by which I manage my important shit like pink slips for my car and medical records and tax information.
You’re going to need:
A 3-Ring Binder
Transparent Sheet Protectors
Notebook dividers (optional but VERY useful)
A backpack (optional)
So the way this system works is you put the sheet protectors into the binder. You can either use the dividers to divide the binder into sections or you can label some of the sheet protectors to make different sections but what you are generally going to do is make sections of the binder labeled things like “taxes” or “vet” or “doctor” and put a few sheet protectors in each section.
Then all of your papers with important information get crammed in that folder. You don’t organize them, you don’t sort them by date, you don’t alphabetize. You put things vaguely relating to taxes into the sheet protectors in the taxes section. You put things relating to cars in the cars section. You don’t even attempt to make this readable - you’re not using sheet protectors so that you can read each page and keep it legible, you’re using sheet protectors because it’s a cheap plastic bag that will sit nicely in a binder.
You CAN put stuff into the individual sheet protectors when you get it, but let’s be realistic you probably WON’T do that, so just tuck individual papers into the front of the binder until you get to a critical mass of paperwork then take an hour to sit down and sort into categories and put it in the binder once every six months to three years (depending on how frequently you get paperwork). Sometimes these sections will outgrow their original allotted space - since my spouse had a transplant surgery the medical section has had to become its own folder - and that’s okay. If you end up with multiple folders just keep them together (this is why the backpack is an option, and one I strongly recommend).
Because yeah, if my organization system relies on opening up a drawer and putting something where it belongs as soon as I get the paper, I will simply not be organized. It’s not going to happen. But I can handle a messy stack of paper that sits in one place and grows until it is time to shove it into a binder. I can’t organize things for thirty seconds a day every day but I can organize things for an hour once every year or so (maybe two hours every five years when I sort out stuff I don’t need like copies of warranties for parts on a car I don’t own anymore).
When my mom died she had about fifty pounds of paper files in her office that were neatly organized in a system that didn’t make any sense to my dad, my sister, and I. I ended up sorting through those files for twenty hours, tossing out copies of paid invoices from ten years ago and student handbooks from my junior high school. I reduced one filing cabinet, two desk file drawers, and a foot-high stack to a six inch binder that I gave to my dad. My mom died five years ago; two months ago my dad asked me about a medical document and I was able to tell him to go look for it in the medical section of the binder. It was there, because ALL IMPORTANT SHIT GOES IN THE BINDER.
Where is my birth certificate? In the binder. Where is my tax return from 2017? In the binder. Where is the record of my dog’s last rabies shot? In the binder. Where are the records for my life insurance? In the binder.
A lot of what people consider “being organized” breaks down to whether or not you can find the specific things that you’re looking for. Does my binder look nice? Is it aesthetic? Does it have color-coded tabs and papers all laid out neatly? Absolutely fucking not. But if you ask me where to find a paper I know that I can do so within about five minutes of shuffling through the pile of letter-folded sheets that I pulled out of the appropriate section of the binder.
I’ve discussed the Where Did I Put that Fucking Paper Binder before, but now it is time to expand that concept to the Backpack of Important Shit.
You likely have Important Shit that does not fit in a binder. Some of my Important Shit that does not fit in a binder is stuff like jewelry and the spare key for my car. Other stuff - the reason I decided to bring this up at all - includes my backup hard drive and packaging (including product key codes) for pretty much all of the software that I own. This is also where I store printed out copies of the recovery codes for most of the online accounts that I have.
There’s a lot of weird fiddly shit that we have to have that we might not access all that often. This is the kind of stuff that might end up in junk drawers or under sinks or in disused laptop bags or kicking around under a bunch of papers in a desk drawer.
It doesn’t matter so much when that weird fiddly shit is a set of hex keys or a utility knife or a protractor or a copy of a student handbook but it DOES matter when it’s something that you might need to put your hands on in a hurry. If your computer crashes, you’re not going to want to track down the software in the back of a filing cabinet and the backup drive from somewhere in the bowels of your desk. If you lock your keys in your car you are not going to want to figure out if your spare is in a junk drawer or the old purse where you keep semi-important stuff or the tin on your desk that has buttons and pins and headphone covers. Just put it in the Backpack of Important Shit and when you need it you know where to look.
So anyway, if you are a person who is a minor disaster who has trouble finding important things when you need them please don’t think that you have to get your life together and have a nice organized filing cabinet or clear plastic bins full of documents or a neatly divided storage closet where everything from board games to backup drives has its own neatly labeled place. Just assign ONE LOCATION for important shit and start putting the important shit there. It doesn’t matter if you have a filing cabinet where you keep old copies of homework and printouts of online orders and family history records - you do not need to keep everything that is file-able in one place and depending on what level of catastrophe you are it might be detrimental to you if you try to do that. It doesn’t matter if you have a jewelry box where you keep your collection of gauges and wrist cuffs; if you are going to stress out about where grandma’s ring is when you’re digging through your collection of cheap earrings and silver pendants then *do not keep grandma’s ring or any other Important, Vital, Cannot Be Lost jewelry in with your day-to-day wear*.
I live someplace that has fires. My binder got upgraded to my Backpack of Important Shit when the fires were getting uncomfortably close to the house I was living in and I wanted to have one bag to grab if we had to get out fast. Once I did that, I never took the binder out of the backpack and the backpack has now made three moves with me and has meant that I’ve had my birth certificate handy when I needed it in the middle of a move between two states, I was able to provide a history of my cholesterol panel going back six years to a visiting nurse, and I was able to give the exact names and contact info of my spouse’s previous surgeon to the hospital when I had unexpectedly moved to a new state with three bags and my work computer at the beginning of the pandemic.
Get yourself a backpack of important shit and a folder of where the fuck did i put that paper. It is so much easier to search a backpack for important shit than to go through an entire house and it is so much easier to flip through a binder than it is to dig through a filing cabinet.
Anyway good luck and happy adulting.
Criteria for determining what is important shit:
Was the document difficult to get? Birth certificates, death certificates, deeds, pink slips for cars, etc. Falls into this category. If you had to spend more than an hour getting the document and if you would have to make at least one phone call to replace it, it is an important document.
Was the paper difficult to generate? If you had to sit down and fuck around with a program and look at three other sheets of paper to make the document, keep a copy of the document you generated. This might be a tax return, this might be a college financial aid application, this might be an application for a home loan.
Does it have an account number on it? You do not need to keep EVERY piece of paper with an account number on it, but it is a good idea to keep at least one piece of paper with an account number for accounts that send you paper. You should have one copy of a bank statement or a credit card statement or a life insurance policy number or your retirement savings number. A good way to determine what you should have is by asking “how many steps would I need to take to get this number if I was talking to someone on the phone about it.” Maybe I don’t need to keep a bank statement because it would be very easy for me to get a copy of my account number, but it would be difficult for me to track down my life insurance policy number online so a copy goes in the folder.
Does the paper represent a legally binding agreement? This means is it a lease agreement, an insurance policy, a financing agreement? The whole document goes in the folder because you want a place where you can reference the agreement in case you need to file a claim or something like that.
Is the paper current? It is good for me to have a record of my dog’s rabies vaccines, but I do not need to keep a copy of every vaccine she has ever had in her life; I can discard old copies. It is good for me to have a copy of the insurance for my current car. I do not need a copy of the insurance for a car I no longer own.
What would happen if someone asked for this document and I didn’t have it? If a mechanic asked you for a copy of a receipt for a repair done at a different shop five years ago and you didn’t have it, you would likely not have any problems. If you were asked to produce a copy of your birth certificate in order to get a marriage license and you didn’t have the document, there would be problems.
Keeping paperwork is not a matter of sparking joy, it is a matter of covering ass. If you had to move to a new state on the other side of the country and establish yourself there for everything from getting an ID to requesting a pet license to applying for a loan or opening a bank account to proving your income history to a landlord, would you have the documents you needed to get it done? If you have those documents, they go in the folder.
Daryl and Marlin, our ship cats! It’s Marlin’s second season sailing (though he’s been with us three years- got locked at the seaport last season for crimes) and Daryl’s first! What sweet babies 💖
The people have spoken: What Crimes Has Locked This Poor Soul Away
You are Marlin, ship’s cat and mascot of the tallship Lady Washington. It is the summer of 2021, you are about a year old, and full of Mischief.
Lady is docked in the Port of Everett, and no one is paying attention to you- never mind the fact that they’re doing their jobs and getting money so they can keep pampering you. No, they’re not paying attention to you Right This Instant, so you decide you want to take a little jaunt off the ship and explore on your own.
In addition to the marina, the waterfront, and all manner of other delights, the Port of Everett also has a Naval base, so you decide to check it out! See what all the fuss is about.
Of course, wandering kitties without the proper credentials aren’t allowed on high security Naval bases, so when the Marines inevitably capture you and ask you where your people are and what you’re doing here and how you got here, you just curl up cutely and bat your eyes and meow the most pitiful meow because these new people are paying attention to you but not the Right attention, no one’s even petting you!
They call the number on your collar, which goes to the captain of Lady at the time, who… is on leave. In Florida.
“Ma'am? Is this your cat?”
“Oh god yeah where was he?”
“A high security government facility. Can you come pick him up?”
“Considering I’m on the other side of the country, no. Let me get in contact with the crew to send someone.”
“Thank you. Also he’s very cute.”
“I know.”
So the captain does just that, playing telephone while trying to find someone to go pick you up. Except by the time a viable crewmember is chosen and calls back to confirm, you’ve gotten bored and decided you want to leave.
So you clawed the Marine holding you and escaped.
You get a smidgen more exploring time before you’re captured again and taken to your crew and back to the boat, but at this point no one is happy including you, because no one pet you the Whole Time you were off adventuring and that’s a damn travesty.
And not only that, when you get back to the ship, you’re locked up tight in the aft cabin because no one trusts you anymore not to wander off and break into government facilities when they’re not looking, and then when the boat gets back to her homeport in Aberdeen, they do you just the WORST injustice and lock you inside there! For the whole winter! And then the following summer, because you are now a Criminal and Criminals don’t sail.
Except this season, you made Big Pouty Eyes at everyone, and they caved and let you back on, so you are a very happy kitty now.
With a tracker in your collar so this doesn’t happen again.
Anyway here’s some additions from the Maasai and Kikuyu, two grassy plain-dwelling groups from Eastern Africa that I think count as unfuckwithable
Feel like Poland should be included since we’re literally called “people of the fields” according to the etymology of Poland.
Also look at her GO
I’m Métis, here’s some of ours! You’ll notice it looks remarkably similar to the above.
We also have some less intricate clothing (if it looks a bit Victorian to you - that’s pretty much the right era for most of this!)
Can’t believe no one’s done it yet I will be the person to add the cowboys: Latin American focus.
Here is the Chilean huaso:
Gauchos, from primarily Argentina where they’re a large national symbol close to the level of cowboys in the US. Also gauchos are in Uruguay. Their pants are called bombachas and the other garment wrapped around them are called chiripas. They work in grasslands called pampas, known for being really fertile:
While they’re not as dressed up as the others or have as prominent of a culture, for a broader Latin American cowboy context, I feel like also adding llaneros, who are from Colombia and Venezuela, in the llanos region, a type of tropical grassland similar to the pampas, hence the name llanero. Pampas get annual flooding and these guys would go barefoot a lot, and you can see that the stirrup on the horse’s saddle is really different than what you’re probably used to seeing, to accommodate for that, which is what I want to point out as an aspect of plains cultures developing clothing/accessories/tools to suit the environment.
Cowboy culture happened wherever Spanish colonial influence and grassland biomes came together. They differ based on the grasslands having different climates (ex tropical in South America), and the local indigenous influence (ex, backtracking to gauchos, they would use this tool called bolas to catch animals, which were basically two balls tied to a string that you threw and it spun around an animals legs, and were an indigenous invention):
I would love to keep posting cowboy dress lol but will stick to the post’s theme of grassland of course.
Adding to the post, I, hereby, present people of Kalash and Chitral:
Chitral means ‘field’ in the native language Khowar. Both Chitralis and people of Kalash are known to be indigenous people of Asia.
[Image Description: A digital painting of two older black mer people kissing, their tails twined around each other. The mer to the left is a trans man with visible top surgery scars. He has short grey hair in an undercut and the tail of an epaulette shark (tan with black spots). The mer on the right is a fat woman with grey hair partially in cornrows and the tail of a mandarinfish (orange with turquoise patterns). Both wear a few bands of gold jewelry. /end ID]
im not even joking rn this fucking painting made me start uncontrollably sobbing. Do you know how long it took to paint? How expensive it was? The cat was content for hours and so loved that the girl held him there and paid for him to be painted with her. Imagine having such a bond… imagine being so loved and loving so much back…
Apparently this is almost a genre of painting. Its human nature to love and cradle cats …. And the bond these cats and their people have. To sit together for hours to get a painting to attempt to immortalize the love you two shared
Let me show you these charming paintings by a French artist Léon Comerre! I like to think these ladies were like “me and my kitty look so cute together, we must get a portrait made of us so that everyone knows how we love each other” 💕
(Also, having matching ribbons with your cat is the loveliest idea ever 🎀)
Meanwhile, I’m a fan of this Gainsborough, where, if you squint, you can see the outline of a furious cat who was not about to be in this portrait:
Obsessed with the concept of a character who has never been treated kindly or gently in their life (or in a very long time) and suddenly being treated gently and with care and being stunned and then overwhelmed by it.
Now, tenants at another Dream-owned high-rise building in the York South-Weston community, 22 John St., are joining their neighbours in the rent strike.
Tenants at both buildings — which together hold over 300 units — are striking to protest “years of rent increases and mismanagement that are pushing working-class tenants out of their homes, and out of the York South-Weston neighbourhood they love."
