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ORGANIZING – how it’s good for you and the environment

by Laura Leigh Way and Melanie Lalonde of Gadget Girrrls

In recent months, I’ve been coming up with solutions to make my home a more relaxing place.  There is a freedom that comes with getting rid of clutter and getting rid of “stuff”.  I’ve donated clothes to shelters, sold items online and turned my academic papers into notepads.  As a personal organizer, I’ve come to realize that being more organized can play a significant part in reducing both your environmental impact and your spending. 

All of us, at one time or another, have frantically searched through junk drawers looking for that BBQ lighter, the extra birthday candles or some spare batteries.  If, after a while, you can’t find what you’re looking for, you get frustrated and decide, “Ah it’s hopeless, I’ll just pick up a new one.” A few hours, days or even weeks later, you are looking for something else, and there is that BBQ lighter or the batteries you needed. But you already picked up new ones, which adds to the growing “stuff” pile that makes it difficult to keep a home organized. Does this sound familiar?

Replacing things we already have means we are consuming things we don’t need. The more we consume, the more waste we create: the more waste we create, the more stuff we eventually dump in our landfills. 

Being organized saves you time, money, and mental energy, you also save other household members the time and headaches that come with those agonizing, seemingly futile searches.  If items are consistently put back in the same spot, then no one wonders who lost the BBQ lighter again. The bonus? You’re being environmentally friendly and consuming only what you need. 

How can you achieve this?

Organize junk drawers so that you know what is in them.

1. Have designated areas in your home for things so they can be located easily.
2. Keep similarly sized items together so small things don’t get lost in larger piles.
3. Organize your papers well so you know where they are when you need them.
4. Get containers for organizing and label them so they are easy to identify.

Remember, we the Gadget Girrrls are here if you need some structured guidance.

I do understand, sometimes that new kitchen, office or workshop tool is just too hard to resist. Well if this is the case, don’t throw out the old one. Donate your old items to charity. There is always someone out there who is starting anew and needs more than they can afford to buy. Your donation could mean a lot to someone who is on a low budget.  The best part is that the item doesn’t end up in a landfill before it’s time.

Also, remember not everything that you perceive as garbage is actually garbage. Check your community listings to see if someone is looking for free household items. Post your unwanted items on Full Circles/Free Cycle (a community group aiming to keep useful items out of landfills). There are a lot of people who can make your trash their treasure. Look for community environmental groups who will re-use or recycle old household items for their projects. For example, Habitat for Humanity – Re-store; 

“Habitat for Humanity ReStores are building supply stores that accept and resell quality new and used building materials. They generate funds to support Habitat’s building programs, while reducing the amount of used materials that are headed for overflowing landfills!”  (http://habitat.ca/restoresc648.php) 

That said, if the item doesn’t work or isn’t repairable, it may be time to junk it. Best not to donate something that’s clearly at the end of its days.

Gadget Girrls 

Thank you Marie Robertson for posting this….performed by the amazing Ivan Coyote at Speak Up! on 4/10/2010. Presented by Center Women present.

ORGANIZING – how to get started!

by Laura Leigh Way and Melanie Lalonde of Gadget Girrrls

As a personal organizer, the most common question I get is: Where do I begin? 

Organizing can be a daunting task and it is quite time consuming.  Whether you are organizing your desk, a room in your home or your entire house, getting started is often the hardest part.  It is very common for individuals to look at a disorganized space and feel helpless.  One of the most important things you need to remember when getting started is that it goes much faster when you divide the larger task into smaller parts.

For example, you have a table full of a combination of bills, phone messages, magazines/newspapers and some dishes, don’t look at it as one big mess, think of it as four smaller chores.   Start with the least your least favourite task, because then all the others tasks will feel easier and easier.  Give yourself permission to take a break after each task; have a treat, relax for a while or get some fresh air.  This can be your reward for having completed a challenging task.  

When I go into someone’s home, I look at the space as a whole.  The questions I ask are: Does the person already have pre-assigned places for things?  Do items have an assigned space? If so, do they use them?  If not, then maybe the space isn’t accessible or it isn’t the best use of space.  It is important to be able to access your most frequently used items.

Here are three important tips for getting started:

1) Before you even begin to organize think about what you want for the space.  Is your kitchen table really meant to be full or papers or should it be a space to share and enjoy food with family and friends?  When you get mail, take 2 minutes and decide is this important or is it junk. Then recycle what you don’t need and file the essentials.  Be REALISTIC…..are you really going to read that flyer about state of the housing market?  If not recycle it!!!!!!

2) Baby steps: Don’t try and take on the whole thing at once. This just leads you to feel overwhelmed, anxious and stressed.  If you give yourself permission to do a small chunk of it at a time, it feels more rewarding when you’re done each piece.  Taking baby steps will get you farther ahead then trying to take a gigantic leap forward. When you take baby steps your less likely to fall or in this case give up.

3) Don’t feel ashamed to ask for help.  Hire a Personal Organizer or enlist friend who is willing to help out.  Having additional support is often the key to getting you started.  Someone else can look at the space from a different point of view and give you a fresh perspective.  Make sure that you find someone who is safe for you.  By this I mean someone who can motivate you in the way you need to be motivated.  Some people need a person to come in, take control of the situation and say, “Okay, you need to do A-B then C”.  Other people need someone more sensitive who says, “I can see you need some help, what can I do?” 

Remember, you’re not alone.  There are many people just like you who feel overwhelmed at the thought of organizing.  It’s important to remember that organizing takes time.  Oh and don’t forget to enlist some help, take small steps and be realistic.

Gadget Girrls 

This is a Flash Mob Dance Video which was organized by Kim MacGregor.  Kim created this as a tribute to her best friend Erika Heller who died of colon cancer last year.  Each and every telephone conversation they ever had, Erika would end by telling Kim “You’re an amazing woman”!  Well, Kim wanted to do something special to honour her friend….and this is the result.  Kim’s goal is to reach 1,000,000 viewers so, please do your part to help her reach her goal and pass this on!

Jeanne Robertson, award-winning humorist, professional speaker. For those of us at a certain age, you will enjoy!

Clip from an episode of the Golden Girls where Dorothy’s lesbian friend falls in love with Rose.

Desire and Faith

It would be easy to say that the next step after figuring out what we want is to take action. However, it wasn’t long ago I learned that after searching in our hearts for what we really want, we also need to think about how strongly our desire is for fulfillment of it and how much faith do we have in ourselves to accomplish the task. Desire drives us and faith sustains us toward our ultimate goals in life.

Desire is one of the most basic instincts we possess as human beings. We have desires at the physical level but we also desire more intangible things, such as power, prestige, fame and control of our lives, to name just a few. It’s these many differences of what we desire combined with the quest to fulfill them which makes us all different.

At the centre of it all, I believe that we all crave a life filled with uninterrupted happiness and yearn for answers to how to fulfill that need. Most times we look externally for these answers, but in order to truly find them, we must turn inward and seek them within ourselves.

The desire for ultimate fulfillment is what joins us all and what makes us move and shapes our lives. So, why is it that we keep searching for the answers outside of us, when it is inside of us that the desire is born and is fed by our internal fire? Why do we not pay attention to the inner light called intuition that we are all born with. The light that is inside all of us that attracts the right people and the right opportunities; the inner spirit that arouses with us in the morning and fills us up with hope and optimism because we are given another day and another chance to try again.

This inner light is the fuel that generates self motivation. It urges us to seek out more for ourselves and to fulfill our lives. Some can call it faith, others intuition, or even God. At the end of the day, it is our God like sense. We need to keep that light on, to keep moving and to take action. No one wants to have just 15 minutes of fame or temporary relief from a pain killer, or being healthy for only half of their life.

We want to fulfill our life constantly, it’s a natural instinct. Unfortunately some of us feel that it is impossible to reach this fulfillment. When we arrive at a long sought after goal we are in bliss, but we are quick to think that it will come to an end because no one is supposed to be constantly fulfilled. Perhaps that is the root of our unhappiness. Sometimes we get afraid to allow ourselves to be excited about going after what we truly want. We are afraid that it might not happen and we sabotage the manifestation of our dreams by telling ourselves that it is too good to be true. It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

The moment that these destructive thoughts enter our mind we lose the light. We lose our intuition, the connection to our spirit and the peace of mind of knowing that fulfillment will still be with us tomorrow regardless of today.

When we connect to our light, to our spirit, we have no fear or anxiety about the future. We must have faith in ourselves otherwise you cannot have faith in anything else.

There is something we all need to remember when we are going through all these challenges. Faith and fear can not co-exist so you need to decide which one is the one you are going to follow. It is up to you.

Ima
www.ortega.ca

“*Are Lesbians Going Extinct?*”—edited by Lise Weil and Betsy Warland and dedicated to Mary Daly.

In an essay written in 1983, Nicole Brossard wrote: “Une lesbienne qui ne reinvente pas le monde est une lesbienne en voie de disparition.” (A lesbian who does not reinvent the world is a lesbian going extinct.) At that time, the phrase made very good sense. As writers, thinkers, activists, and in our day-to-day lives, we felt (many of us) compelled to reinvent a world in which we were for the most part invisible if not unthinkable, a world whose values we largely rejected. Today, over 20 years later, we are accepted, even embraced, by mainstream culture—as co-workers, wives, mothers, as TV talk show hosts and anchorwomen!—in ways we could not have imagined then. But how have we gained this inclusion? Have we gone quiet as lesbians (not denying our lesbianism but seldom foregrounding it)? Are we still reinventing the world? As writers, are we inventing new forms? Is there still a radical edge to the word “lesbian”? Or are we now, by Brossard’s definition, a disappearing species?

Editorial – Lise Weil
Lesbians might have been…great. As some literature is: unassimilable, awesome, dangerous, outrageous, different: distinguished. Lesbians, as some literature is, might have been monstrous—and thus have everything.

Bertha Harris, “Notes on Defining the Nature of Lesbian Literature,” Heresies 1977.

 What’s easy to forget. What I tend, when I forget, to forget entirely. How BIG it was, the change we (Lesbians) stood for—and in many cases brought about—back when we were busy reinventing the world. As big and as powerful as the energy produced by two women bodies in love, which to me at the time was clearly the most creative force in the universe.

We were on the frontier of human possibility, challenging the most deeply held assumptions and divisions of mankind. We were breaking everything wide open. No part of human experience was exempt from analysis, revision: not the bedroom the boardroom the battlefield. And it was all of a piece—love, sex, desire, politics. That above all.

For we were first and foremost a movement of lovers, our cry for revolution coming from the same place as those other more intimate cries of longing and discovery. Of Woman Born, Woman and Nature having exposed the lie of objective third person reporting, of objective truth. Ours was a movement that honored the subjective, the body, a movement that began in our cells in our bones in our centers. The most thoroughly embodied revolution ever to emerge on this planet.

Also the most precarious—because of, just for starters, homophobia, woman-hating, trivialization coming from every quarter and often from ourselves, not to mention all our own personal disabilities, which had a tendency to flare once collective passions subsided. Precarious because it all began with two women bodies in love, and bodies in love don’t generally stay in love. Precarious because, having invested so much in each other, it was inevitable that sooner or later we would disappoint each other, would be disappointed. Sometimes bitterly, sometimes unbearably so.

Disappointed or not, most of us, as several writers in this issue attest, went on to make lives for ourselves that accommodated to, aligned with, the nonreinvented world. We forfeited, as Bertha Harris put it, our “unassimilability,” the mark of our “greatness.” Yet it’s the mark of maturity, some would say, to accept the world as it is, not as we want it to be. And often, of course, it’s a matter of survival. Either way, the result was that over time, this movement that began in our cells and soon expanded to fill the whole world, this wild embodied revolution, this magical gap in time, fell victim to what’s been called the “outside-context syndrome,” moved so far outside our present context that we could no longer perceive it. And truth be told it was easier that way, less painful.

Because when it does come back—and it does, from time to time, music will bring it back, or dreams— it comes back entire, the mouth of my Lesbian Body opens up wide to receive it and it sweeps through my whole being. I’m in an altered state—”a dream child of desire”—and when I look down on the life I’m living now it pales in the light of then.

Of course the world now is on the whole a far more troubled place than it was when we were busy reinventing it. The stakes are higher than ever. And lately history, let’s face it, has not been being made by us. In the months before and after Obama’s election, it seemed the hopes of every shit-kicking Lesbian I knew, my own too—hopes not only for the US but for a future on earth—were pinned on the success of this one man. And no sooner did Obama fever die down than Captain Sullenberger landed his plane on the Hudson, bringing on an orgy of old-fashioned male hero worship. So lately it’s been hard to ward off questions like: What lives did dykes ever save? What sort of healing force in the world did we ever amount to? What new world did we bring into being?

When it comes back to me, when it all sweeps through me again, I have answers to these questions. That lesbian movement of the 70s and 80s was the first and is still the most resounding YES WE CAN in my entire life, the first dawning of wild possibility.

Healing? We did it by the force of our hearing—as Susanna Sturgis recalls in “And Will Rise?” We did it by the force of our love: “I kissed her and I was immediately home… Everything made sense. I had no language for where I was or who I was but I felt comfortable in my skin for the first time in my life.” (Margie Adam in “Lesbian: Going All the Way”).

According to another writer in this issue, Trivia itself, back in its incarnation as a print journal, saved lives, just by arriving in mailboxes on a regular basis. And of course it could be argued that the election of a man who models abounding love and respect for his wife (who looks like a dyke) and adoration for his daughters was made possible at least in part by a strong lesbian/feminist movement.

With this issue of Trivia, with these two issues—for Trivia 10 burst its seams months ago and spawned a Part 2 which will appear in the fall as Trivia 11—we collect histories, conversations. We attempt to remember who we were, to say who we have become. We remember how big it was. How it was interrupted. How it was made small, both inside and outside us. We take stock of the ways in which it continues to ferment in us, and around us, and beyond us. We weave a thread of continuity. As Elana Dykewomon writes in “Who Says We’re Extinct?”: “We did it for love. We still do.”

TRIVIA: Voices of Feminism is an online relaunch of TRIVIA: A Journal of Ideas, an award-winning international feminist literary magazine published from 1982 to 1995, edited by Lise Weil.

TRIVIA publishes feminist writing in the form of literary essays, experimental prose, poetry, translations, and reviews. The journal encourages women writers to take risks with language and form so as to give their ideas the most original and vital expression possible. TRIVIA’s larger purpose is to foster a body of rigorous, creative and independent feminist thought. http://www.triviavoices.net/

Empowering Forces by Ima Ortega

May 2010

“It is all in your head”

I never understood what that meant until now. In the previous article we talked about desire, we talk about this empowering force that drives us to achieve our goals. But we all know that desire must be accompanied by actions for something to manifest otherwise we are just wishful thinking.

What stops us from taking action? Why are we so afraid to step into the unknown and take a risk? To take that action that will bring us a little bit closer to our goal or our dreams? This is what brings us to the conclusion that it is all in our head. About a year ago when I started my journey as an entrepreneur a very successful man told me that it was all in my head. I had no idea what it meant and I felt that he was just brushing me off. Easy for you to say – I thought – you are already there. Throughout the year after deciding to follow my passion I wondered if I had lost my mind for giving up my job, my salary, the security that comes with it; although that is only relevant until the company decides to downsize. After many tears and anxious, frustrating moments I understood that I had to change the messages in my head. Messages that have a huge impact on what we wish for and in the action steps we take to obtain what we are wishing for. These messages subconsciously control our lives and it should be us controlling the messages so that we can move forward through our lives.

I am talking about messages that stop us from dreaming big, playing big and realizing our full potential although we have known for years that we have so much potential. Not simply the internal messages but ones from our parents, teachers, friends, coworkers, bosses. Messages like, I am not good enough, be more realistic, get a real job, stop dreaming, I can’t do that! These messages get in our subconscious and next thing we know we are living in autopilot hoping to win the lottery or marry a rich person or working in a job that we hate because we have to pay the bills. We are scared to follow our dreams and we tell ourselves … it was just a dream.

But I’ve discovered that we can listen to these messages, or we can reprogram our minds to hear other messages. Messages of encouragement to follow the path that makes us happy. Messages that help us believe in what we are doing and attract what we want. To stay focused – to follow one course until successful. Since our minds follow orders blindly then why not just change the messages. To be able to do this we need to live in a conscious world. This will allow us to discard all those negative thoughts and beliefs and replace them with new beliefs that will help us take action even though what is coming is scary. Think about a baby when learning to walk, a baby will fall many times and not even once will he or she think – this walking thing is not for me, I am done. Not even once will a parent discourage the child from trying again. They fall and they cry if they are hurt but they stand up and try again. So why do we lose this ability to believe that we can “walk on our own” and when we fall just dust ourselves off and try again. I believe it is because of those messages and the beliefs we have in our head.

So how do we stop this? We start my making a list of our beliefs and measure the value of these beliefs, are the negative messages really true, or just some discouraging message I was given long ago. If that is the case, then start replacing it with a new belief, one that serves YOU! We achieve what we believe either positive or negative. So why not get rid of the thoughts that serve no purpose and strengthen the belief in what you want for yourself, let those thoughts dominate and rule your life consciously. Allow yourself to get excited about what you want before it happens, because that is how you will attract it. Stop thinking you should not get excited because of disappointment in case it doesn’t work. Get excited and more that anything do what excites you.

I am not saying that it won’t be scary, but when it is, this is when you look inside to the empowering forces of desire, vision, dreams and words of encouragement, pick yourself up and continue walking. Remember, we fall so we can learn to stand up again, that is all. Shift your thoughts from “no” to “how” and take baby steps. Your success is not about you but up to you.

As you can see, it is all in your head.
Ima
PS: This is what I love doing, photography www.ortega.ca
Enjoy

Just shortly after I turned 40 (oh so long ago), for the first time in my life I thought I wanted to have a baby. I saw the window of opportunity leaving me, AND if my mother could do it at 40 years old, so could I! Well the feeling left almost as quickly as it came, especially when I realized how old I would be when my child would move away from home. Nodda!

But I did end up with a baby, a baby Bouvier. Her name is Kayla, and when Kayla first entered our household she had to be let out several times in the middle of the night to do her business (11:00pm, 2:00pm, you get the picture]. Those first few months exhausted me, and I was thinking of HAVING A BABY??? Thank goodness my friends are having children, so I can fulfill my desire to hold them and smell them.

My Kayla has been my loyal, stedfast companion for 9 years now and the inspiration for one of the sections in our Dorothy’s Classifieds: “Paws of All Kinds“, a place for all you proud mamas and papas to put images of your beloved pets. We invite you to register and show your pride!

Dorothy’s BFF Jan has updated her photo of Colby, can you get any more adorable!

Next week I will share with you what I’ve learned from the Dog Whisperer, truly amazing!
Wendy,
a.k.a Dorothy