Not my bedroom. 🙂
I read somewhere that you should treat your primary bedroom as a relaxing oasis. A beautiful space in your home that is calm, peaceful, and inviting. A place where you can leave all of your worries at its threshold and put your feet up in a luxurious king-size bed where you get the best sleep of your life. It’s well-lit and decorated to your liking. And nothing is there to distract you except for the book you are reading or your favorite tv show, and you have all the time in the world to enjoy it.
Do my friends have bedrooms like this? Or am I only seeing these havens in home décor magazines and on HGTV? I can tell you one thing – my bedroom is nothing like this. It’s messy. And when I say messy, I don’t mean dirty. In fact, it’s quite clean. It’s just not neat. Sometimes, I refer to my room as a “sorting station” for wayward sunscreen bottles, lost coffee mugs, and unopened mail. It’s also the spot where I can’t decide what to wear, critique myself in the mirror, and wonder if I’ll ever lose the pandemic weight. And more than anywhere else in the house, this room has witnessed every emotion I possess, from depression to delight. Instead of calling it an oasis, I’d describe it as more of a lived-in corner of the house where I can just be myself.
I would love to prioritize cleaning up my room, but by the time I straighten up the more public-facing rooms in the house, I’m not inclined to tackle this one too. I do the minimum tasks during the week to make it less chaotic. I make my bed every morning. I hang up the clean clothes and put the dirty ones in the hamper. I do the best I can to manage the clutter. On weekends, I sort through the odds and ends that don’t belong. When I feel particularly motivated, I’ll reorganize my closet and straighten up my pajama drawer. Once in a while, I’ll have a bag of donations ready to go, but it might sit for a few weeks before I call Purple Heart.
Besides my husband, my kids, and twice a month, my cleaning people, no one else comes in here to look around and judge me. So maybe it is a different kind of oasis after all.
Summer is my favorite time of the year to read. The days are long, and the weather is perfect for sitting by the pool or on my patio engrossed in a story. I like beach reads that are page-turners, mysteries I can’t put down, juicy celebrity memoirs filled with gossip, historical fiction that exposes me to a whole new world or culture, and family dramas that serve as an escape from reality.
This is the IT beach read of the summer. It’s been on the New York Times bestseller list for nine weeks and is at Number Two as I write this. There was so much hype surrounding this book which can sometimes be a problem for me. Here is the setup: boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, have lots of good sex, and get engaged. Then, boy dumps girl without explanation and doesn’t tell their friends about their breakup, and they are all vacationing together somewhere in Maine – their happy place.
In my opinion, this is the book that should have been the IT book for the summer. A young family moves into a beautiful house that overlooks a cliff. They love everything about the house except that it is a popular location for people to come and commit suicide. Gabe, the husband, prides himself on having talked seven people from jumping, but one night he is unsuccessful, and a young woman dies.
When I’m not reading, I’m probably watching a Phillies game on television. Baseball is in my blood, and I count baseball movies like Field of Dreams, Bull Durham, and Moneyball as some of my favorites. When I heard this author and movie director talking about his new book on a recent podcast, I immediately put it on hold at the library. Last year, I read “Off the Cliff” about the making of Thelma and Louise, which was excellent. So, it was time for me to dive into another Hollywood story.
The following haikus were inspired by real-life events.Â