"'It’s just very fun to see myself and these other, you know, contestants, for lack of a better word, in their natural habitat.'
Mr. Isaacson’s apartment tour included a large amount of clothes spread across the floor; a dresser filled with gray wigs (for his sketch comedy, he says); and a desk that was given to him by his grandmother. 'I think of the clutter as, like, if you’re crossing a creek,' said Mr. Isaacson, who has since cleaned his apartment in response to some of the comments. 'There are sort of steppingstones that you use to avoid the water. And I think in a good messy boy’s room, there are steppingstones of floor.'"
Here's the "Boy Room" tour of Chris's room. More of "Boy Room,"
here, at Instagram.
I came away from the experience wanting to paraphrase Leo Tolstoy: Messy boy rooms are all alike; every neat rooms is neat in its own way.
Now, it's the negative that's all alike, so I've reversed Tolstoy's idea — Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. And that makes me want to examine the possibility that unhappy families are all alike and every happy family is happy in its own way. I mean, why not? Who has done the research here?
We're talking about chaos and order. It's chaos that is always the same. There are so many possibilities for order.
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56 comments:
"Messy boy rooms are all alike: every neat rooms is neat in their own way."
That's a mess.
Many possibilities for order, yes, but many more possibilities for disorder. I know Ann is not a physicist, but that is the basis of the second law of thermodynamics. It helps explains time's arrow, and many other things in the world we live in.
Men are at home with clutter, not just boys. Women are not at home with clutter, which is how they wind up doing the straightening up.
Women are always thinking of having guests over. Men are not.
“We're talking about chaos and order. It's chaos that is always the same. There are so many possibilities for order.”
No. There are far more ways for a system to be chaotic than to be ordered. That is literally the basis in statistical mechanics for the Second Law of thermodynamics.
Title Nine demands equal coverage.
The difference of the sexes, is girls care about what others might think. Men do not.
Landlords will admit they much prefer to rent to men.
AA : "We're talking about chaos and order. It's chaos that is always the same. There are so many possibilities for order."
With that statement, you are bordering on a discussion involving entropy -- where order and disorder play a major role. Congrats!
That's a mess.
Well played. One and done.
The great Anna Kendrick to the girls: Naked selfie your life away. Like, do your thing…but clean your room!
There is order in chaos. Chaos exists by virtue of incomplete or insufficient characterization or unwieldiness.
I came here to talk about thermodynamics, but I see it's already been covered. LOL.
Chaos v order
That is exactly what I immediately changed your happy/unhappy family to in my mind. Though I used chaos v peaceful. I grew up in peaceful. Mostly driven by the structure of farm life. Chores, 2 to 3 times a day.
The rhythm of the seasons, tilling, planting, cultivating, haying, harvest. There was not room for any debate. The spinning of the earth, and movement of the planets, gently guided our purpose.
There is order in chaos.
Agreed. While my stuff may not be "put away," I know where everything is. Once someone cleans the house, I can't find stuff anymore.
Nabokov reversed the Tolstoy quote as the opening line of Ada.
There will be a lot of "boy" rooms because of all of the boys that were raised without fathers.
Before the social construct of monogamous marriage about 80% of men were generally left out of the reproduction game.
The men who do not make themselves presentable to a prospective mate have Boy rooms rather than Man Rooms.
History has shown the obvious ramifications for using a harem/dominant male paradigm for assigning reproduction. One of the lesser manifestations are "Boy rooms."
We're talking about chaos and order. It's chaos that is always the same. There are so many possibilities for order.
Tangential.
The real discussion is whether or not the male wants to go through the effort necessary to participate in the next generation of offspring.
Women participate in this decision by setting the standards for acceptable organization and demonstration of capability, or in this case order.
Men who opt out of that can live pretty much anywhere in pretty minimal conditions.
my friend the Associate Professor of Fashion Merchandising asked me for a pic of my walkin closet
(which was actually a spare bedroom where i kept my clean clothes)
Baskets of clean clothes would go from the laundry to that room, where they would be tossed on the floor.
[Dirty clothes would go into the hamper in the bathroom while showering..]
The clothes room floor worked Very Well. The longer it had been since you wore something, the further down in the pile it would be; so frequently worn clothes were Right On Top; and if you wanted, say long underwear, you would know to dig down (in early winter that is)
To be FAIR.. the clothes on floor wasn't my original idea.. I stole the idea from my first girlfriend.. An Anthropology student (archeology)
rhhardin said...
Women are always thinking of having guests over. Men are not.
the first time i was in the anthropology students room; we had sex on her pile of clothes on her floor.
It was Very Comfortable.. MUCH better than a bare floor would have been; and Much simpler than having to move all the stuffed animals that were on her bed.. I never DID figure out WHERE she slept
My two boys’ spaces were always nicely ordered while my three daughters lived like comic pigs, so I have no idea what this guy is talking about.
AA : "We're talking about chaos and order. It's chaos that is always the same. There are so many possibilities for order."
With that statement, you are bordering on a discussion involving entropy
Fun Question: Which Has Higher entropy..
a) a blackboard full of notes
b) the same blackboard after you've erased it
So they’ve never heard of Jordan Peterson?
gilbar said...
my friend the Associate Professor of Fashion Merchandising asked me for a pic of my walkin closet
which she published in her text book.. YES gilbar is a PUBLISHED photographer! signed a release and everything
Few really unnecessary challenges happen in a Septuagenarians life. BUT the wife has this old friend she/we pay to help out around the house. No problem. I like her. But annually, to give her work the wife has a closet or pantry “ rearranged”.
OK that gives me a year to find everything again. But when it’s all back where I can find it… Boom, it’s done again.
This is similar to a new secretary rearranging my law office desk. Sure it looks neater, but where did she put everything.
I casually dated a guy until I went to his apartment. His bathroom floor was wall-to-wall covered in porn mags. Do you think I found his obsession more disturbing, or his unwillingness to keep a fecal area clean? He was a nice guy, too. Employed, talented, and kind.
The engineer on my last ship had my assistant put everything in my office away. Later that day he needed a report. After 20 or so minutes he asked where it was, as he was used to getting things from me within 2-3 minutes. I told him I had no clue- it wasn't where I had put it.
The office now looked neat, but it was no longer organized to where I could find things.
Neatness and organization are sometime correlated, and sometimes not. Long term filing of stuff that someone might want to look at in 10 years is different from all the stuff that needs to be looked at all the time.
The trouble with clutter (and I speak from experience) is that sometimes you CAN'T find something that you need and that you know you have somewhere in the house. So you order a new one on Amazon, and then a month later you find the original one. So now you have two, but you only need one, so the clutter increases.
Men are at home with clutter, not just boys. Women are not at home with clutter, which is how they wind up doing the straightening up.
Bullshit. Women will absolutely live worse than any dude. They straighten up all the time while in relationships as a form of control.
I think Unca Bosie got ate by the cannibals in Fed States of Micronesia (Pacific islands between Hawaii and Guam) specifically Pohnpei island. Joining his ancestor Irishman Tattoo John.
Sounds like Well Fed States to me. 🤔
It should be “large amount of clothing” not “large amount of clothes.”
NY Times stories are all alike.
Leo Tolstoy: Messy boy rooms are all alike; every neat rooms is neat in its own way.
Obviously a clean freak. He's simply biased. I'll put money on my mess being different from others' unless they program, dabble with electronics, write, paint and sculpt all in the same room.
I'm in my office chair at my keyboard 4' from my large monitor. On my left table is an Arduino breadboard I'm prototyping my LED display for a sculpture. On my drafting stool to the right is a plasthikos bust for a wax I'm planning. My right hand table has debri from my last LED tinkering. My keyboard gives me access to my editing, digital art and writing tools. My oil paints are in a box behind me near the radiator and the canvas next to them leans against my folded up briefcase easel.
That's just me. I'd also wager cash that there are others here who are just as uniquely messy.
Have you ever lived in a woman's dorm? During the sea sponge tampon craze, thankfully brief?
I always used the men's side of the dorms. My friend Tom might spend an hour every morning in a stall with Fat Tits and Ass, but he didn't rinse menstrual blood in the sink where I brushed my teeth. Plus, an excellent conversationalist. Went on to help edit Grizzly Man. He said they didn't use the extant video for good reasons. Spent a year colorizing Hitler and an Hello Kitty show. He has good distance from his work.
I said: you never used the women's room in B dorm.
gilbar : "Fun Question: Which Has Higher entropy..
a) a blackboard full of notes
b) the same blackboard after you've erased it"
Well, here we go. Solving thermodynamic problems usually begins with identifying the "system" boundary to make it easier to specify energy transfer to/from the system -- across said boundary.
So right from the get-go we have a problem : Does the boundary include only the blackboard, or does it include the entity writing and then erasing notes? If the system is only the blackboard, then IMO there is no change in entropy : the state of the blackboard before and after is the same. OTOH, if the system includes the entity as well, then the entropy of the blackboard+entity has increased.
Achilles:
The men who do not make themselves presentable to a prospective mate have Boy rooms rather than Man Rooms.
I have watched grown men with immaculate houses and dens walk around outside in flips, boxers and wife-beaters. Your little ditty is axiomatically false if you look around.
When I was single and living alone, I hated cleaning and organizing but I hated a mess even worse. Therefore I cleaned and organized exactly what mess I made right after I messed it and had a maid come in every two weeks. The bit of laundry I did ( underwear and socks) was simple. Get VHS ready. Put laundry in the washer. Turn VCR on and halfway through the movie and pause it. Put in dryer and play the rest of the movie and the laundry was done. The trick is to not let things accumulate. My girlfriends were always amazed my apartment wasn't a smelly, disorganized mess.
To echo others, I raised a daughter and have been married so don't try to sell me any bullshit about women being less messy. And yes, females have piles of dirty clothes... and skid marks.
"every neat rooms is neat in its own way."
Still a mess.
Come for the grammar, stay for the science.
"Messy boy rooms are all alike; every neat rooms is neat in its own way."
A.K.A. Entropy
" Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. And that makes me want to examine the possibility that unhappy families are all alike and every happy family is happy in its own way. I mean, why not? Who has done the research here?"-said Althouse.
I always thought that Anna Karenina's plot illustrated the latter point. Every unhappy family in that novel is unhappy because of adultery (or more specifically, selfishness.) The happy families seem to be happy in different ways. Levin and Kitty are happy after they marry because they are young and the focus of each other's lives. The Scherbatsky family is happy because they are a big extended family that bears one another's faults and tribulations.
But, I have read some arguments that make the case for the former. One was from a literary critic who maintained Tolstoy meant that happy families are boring, so they don't make for good story lines. Another was based on something called the "Anna Karenina principle." The principle is that any complex undertaking has to meet a series of minimal requirements to be successful. If any one of those requirements is missing, the undertaking fails. Family relationships are complex undertakings, so every happy family has met all requirements and so are all alike, but the unhappy families could have failed to meet any one of several of the requirements, and so are all unhappy in their own ways. I heard a priest say once that all happy families are alike because they are all oriented toward God, but all unhappy families are different because there are so many ways to turn away from God. The theory I found most persuasive, though, was from a Russian literature professor, who said that the happy families were families that learned to live in intimate love- the kind of love that is lifelong and on which you can base a family. The unhappy families were those who were still consumed with the idea of romantic love and all its turmoil, passion, and intensity. He use a short story of Tolstoy's called "Family Happiness" that preceded Anna Karenina, and has a very similar story line except the heroine returns to her husband. Obviously, it didn't catch on the way Anna Karenina did, so maybe it also means happiness is boring.
AFAICT, I am an outlier when it comes to neatness among guys. I don't leave piles of clothes on the floor (not large piles, anyway) and generally put things away in closets and drawers, which are then usually closed properly.
My wife is the messy one, who leaves cabinets and drawers open, and too many of her too many shoes on the bedroom floor.
She was raised with her own room upstairs where her parents rarely ventured; I shared a bedroom for many years with the knowledge that neither my mother nor our maid would pick up our dirty clothes for us.
I have to stop watching. I had no idea how addicting it could be to see messy bedrooms.
I've found most people's bedrooms are cluttered. Food dishes left out is where I draw a line. My husband is the one who trained me to make the bed everyday.
"So right from the get-go we have a problem :"
I am coming to the position that the concept of entropy is useful for steam engines but little else. For example, using entropy to define the arrow of time is unworkable (IMHO).
TMI, Oligonicella @12:26PM!
Thank God there were no grizzlies near that bathroom, Tina Trent @12:13PM!
Tolstoy's famous opening line is famous...
But it's also bullshit -- what on earth did he know about happy families???
General Robert E. Lee once said, "Let's clean up this room, me boys; otherwise it's chaos!"
Women are not at home with clutter, which is how they wind up doing the straightening up.
Not always. And I've got 26 years of marriage as proof.
My dorm room was so anally tidy people would remove their shoes and have tea with me.
But this was New College. Red ants swarmed down a drainpipe and had to be hosed out. I lost a first edition Ulysses. Plus everything else.
They reimbursed me and I moved the fuck out. Plus, girls are gross. My off campus roomates were mostly men with wbom I was not dating. Despite that one meade explosion, things were tidier.
But Christ, the smell of that rotting meade. Never let Meade explode.
A messy room is a gateway drug to becoming a furry.
My wife is the messy one, who leaves cabinets and drawers open, and too many of her too many shoes on the bedroom floor.
It is no common, I total forgot about the wife.
If I come into the kitchen in the middle of her prep, I always have to close draws and cupboard doors, and the dish washer. Lots of them open. After the fact, I remember her mother cooked exactly the same way. Often she would have cookie sheets resting on open drawers, because there was no more counter space
The shoe thing, I'll share that 50/50
Made me think of the older adults, typically women, who are OCD hoarders, living in the aisles between the piles. Yet even in their chaos there is order of a sort since they know where things are to retrieve them.
ten rules for life includes: Make your bed.
In the advice columns of the Washington Post and NYT, there are frequently complaints by women that their husbands or boy friends “don’t do enough” of household chores. This article illustrates a main reason: young men don’t care much about neatness, cleanliness, and order. You never see men complaining that their wives or girl friends don’t care enough about keeping the car polished, or the golf clubs sparkling. I think this aspect of male behavior declines with age, so if you were to visit a random sample of retired men living alone, you would find that their apartments were cleaner and more orderly.
I thought that the woman organizer was insensitive - her idea was just to throw out the things the guy liked having around if she wouldn't have liked having hem around. She could have suggested he buy those organizer shelves or those wall boards they have in garages. You keep all the stuff but it's not on the floor. I think those guys do their basic living at their girlfriends' place. Generally she at least keeps the bathroom clean, changes the sheets and throws out the pizza boxes.
Will Ferrel as the North Star.
A place for everything and everything in its place.
This can apply to a boys Messy room.
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