Did you know that if you go to Ikea’s website, you can find out what is in stock where, as well as where in the store to find it? Look, I’m not the only person to feel bloated with stuff by the end of the holidays. When I dragged The Historian to Ikea last Saturday, it was full of people who were, presumably, looking for better ways to store their stuff.

One of the times that I came home from the hospital I had a deep urge to purge unwanted things from my life. A friend of mine who works in psychotherapy described this as “important identity work.” No doubt, D, no doubt.

It turns out, I was not alone. By the end of our 2-week break, I was at Ikea looking for things to organize the home. Strolling through the bedlinens section I heard one woman say to the man she was with, “Can’t we just try this for a little while, and if you don’t like it we can go back to the way it was?” And I turned around 360 degrees and realized that I was surrounded by couples at odds with each other, as far as the eye could see.

I came to Ikea armed with a list of stuff to buy, especially for the formerly-flooded basement. But you cannot get organized simply by moving around the stuff that you have. Eventually, you have to purge.  You can NOT buy a string of holiday lights shaped like squirrels (for just $12.99!) and just assume that you will find a place to put them. If you are lucky, your husband will restrain you from buying more than one set of squirrel lights and numerous lamps.

And that’s where Marie Kondo comes in. You can sit down and turn on Netflix and watch her wrangle a parade of familiar-looking houses into shape. Mind you, I have both of her books, and I believe in her deeply, but I hate this show. For one thing, the families are excessively attractive, especially that dumb bitch in the first episode who doesn’t even know how to do laundry or put stuff away in the kitchen. But you better believe that her mascara is PERFECTION. For another, I simply don’t believe that that interpreter is doing a decent job. If they were willing to hire a decent interpreter, they might not have so many of those stupid white subtitles that Netflix seems to favor.

Then there’s the cultural aspect. I watched the beginning with my friend S from Germany, and, let me tell you, Americans, the world is delighted to watch you choke on your own stuff. Not that S said as much, that is my own value-added analysis, she merely said, “I think it’s weird to watch an Asian woman tell Americans how to live their lives.” If you even cared a little about culture, you might explain the role that animism plays in Kondo’s worldview, Netflix.

Anyway, the point of the show is that we have too much stuff, and there I was at Ikea, which is Stuff Central, and I got to say to The Historian, “Look! There’s a lamp you don’t want! And there’s another one!” Since I checked the website ahead of time, I came with a good list that only required 4 trips through the check-out, where the checkers-out seemed unaware that they were in a Worker’s Paradise with free wi-fi.

Now, please excuse me. I have to go assemble a plant stand.

One of the strangest things about moving from the U.S. to Canada is how subtle the differences are, but they are there. For example, it might take you days to get snow tires on your car because we have a pseudo-British approach to customer service, even at the American-owned Costco. My mom was good enough to call and ask if they could put tires on our car, and the guy who answered the phone at the Tire Centre was like, “Maybe.” Mind you, he only answered the phone because I complained when they did not.

Overall, I’m happy to go on and on about how wonderful the heatlh care is here. However, sometimes I find communication to be difficult for one as literal-minded as me. I regularly get asked, “How have you been feeling lately?” Look, this is just too open-ended of a question. Lately I’ve been nauseated, but when I report this, I find nurses or doctors are likely to say, “Hmm, have you taken anything for that?” The truth is that there are wonderful anti-nausea drugs out there, but they all make me a bit tired or dopey, so I have to be pretty nauseous before I’ll choose to be dopey.

I’m pretty sure that when someone says, “Have you tried . . . ?” that is Canadian for, “I won’t help you at all until you take what I have already prescribed you.” Fair enough. However, do you really expect me to follow all of that? The other issue is that when you are a doctor or nurse, you are socialized totalkextremelyfast. I only half realized this until I brought S to an appointment, and she was like, “Did you get all of that?” Now, I understand that the short appointments are the doings of insurance companies, OHIP, and the payers in general, but that does not change the fact that ordinary people–not to mention those of us with compromised brains–do not get what you are saying.

Is that plant stand still not assembled?