Step in Sh*t and Land in a Shower

I am not naturally a tidy housekeeper. In fact, tidy and me only rarely appear in the same sentence. Generally, under duress. Or lately, Saturdays, as the new custom around here is to invite the whole family over for dinner on Sunday.

So this morning I am wrestling a hangover and the mess of not-quite-emptied plastic containers and piles of newspapers that we've left in heaping stacks on the floor. It's amazing, actually. When you factor in that we cleaned to a shine just last week. It seems to defy my grasp on what is possible, this mess that Rick and I are able to generate in only six days.

Anyway...other than the colony I found thriving in the sink, I discovered a rogue among the cookbooks: Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers. Now, I know very little about wabi-sabi. Really only what it says on the back of the book:

Wabi-Sabi is the quintessential Japanese aesthetic. It is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. It is a beauty of things modest and humble. It is a beauty of things unconventional...

Aside from my instantaneous and abiding respect for people who still spell aesthetic with an 'a' -- I don't know; it's just prettier that way -- I was taken both by the simplicity of the philosophy, and the fact that I discovered it, misfiled, among the cookbooks. Was I just tired one night, returning books to their places? Did I read only the 'Wabi-Sabi' part and think, "Oh this must be about grilling?" Could it be that I figured this book was filled with Japanese-style fish recipes?

In my defense: oy. Let's just blame it on the ghost. Yes -- let us just close our eyes and believe for a moment that a 17-pound cat-turned-ghost made the climb to the Eastern philosophy shelf at the top of one bookcase (hey! I never said I wasn't organized -- just messy), grabbed this book, and moved it across the room to live with the cookbooks. Perfectly plausible, no?

I had a little dilemma about whether or not to return it to its rightful place. I mean, this is a book that celebrates imperfection, and who am I to argue? Oh right. I'm the asshole who thought this was an Asian-style cookbook.

I did, though. Move it back. Because my Virgo drive for order trumps the beautiful perfection of a simple mistake. If not moldy Tupperware.

But there could be mischief afoot. Who's to say? Maybe this time the ghost will be a little more direct. Maybe this time he'll just slip the book into my pile of summer reads. Maybe that would be just the sign I need.