Various

Royals, rags

-Well that is some depressing news about Kate Middleton. I wish her well. She is not reading this. Do you know who is? Commoners who, like me, found this an interesting story in a semi-lighthearted and largely mysterious way, prior to learning of her diagnosis. And I do have a word for you at this time: it’s fine.

I mean if you were holding forth nastily, that’s never nice, but if you just found it all a bit huh and shared memes or something in that spirit: Fine, it is fine, you do not need to atone. It is easy to forget now what the available information was as recently as yesterday: a princess with an unnamed but seemingly not life-threatening ailment (announced as not cancer, and with a stated return-to-public-life date of Easter) suddenly appeared in an official photo meant to announce all-is-well, but it turned out to be digitally altered. It was entirely reasonable even for those who (like me) initially figured, this is a woman at home with a health condition, to then wonder whether this was in fact…? Whether it was, in other words, not health-related.

What I’m saying is, it is quite possible that I am The Asshole in general, but on this, I think, the ghoulishness of those who found this all a bit entertaining Before has been overstated. The peasantry works with the information we have, and the official mix of (understandable!) discretion and (understandable if poorly-thought-out) attempts at reassurance was extremely weird. If anything, the response was very Free Kate, ala Free Britney, where the sense (entirely accurate, it turned out) that she was in a bad way was just not matched with the knowledge of what sort. And the public had been led not to a ‘not your business’ but to something stranger.

Or maybe what I’m getting at is, I don’t think you can hurl a how dare you have been amused by this, the woman has cancer!! at a public that had literally been told that the woman in question did not have cancer and was in fact doing fine, here she is, or is she. This isn’t a case where the public should have known, it’s one where the public, for all its speculation, was being if anything more credulous than made sense.

I think you can hope Kate Middleton gets well soon and not treat the beyond-unavoidable temptations of the before-we-knew story as an opportunity to self-flagellate or (worse) to congratulate yourself for being too dignified to gossip about royals, or for having had some sort of premonition that this was a matter too serious to joke about. Because I promise you, people with personal experience with such matters in their own lives were well-represented among the billions who joked about it, without yet knowing what it was.

-This question is not royal or serious but it is personal: What sort of towels do you guys use to clean up with? My household switched a few years ago from paper towels to reusable rags. These are a mix of bar mops purchased at the supermarket for this use, which we use for surfaces; cut-up old cotton t-shirts for kids’ faces (and, truth be told, as napkins); and outgrown baby washcloths for when the t-shirts aren’t substantial enough for say a red-sauce-heavy meal. We do still have paper towels, for formal occasions or cooking-blotting-type purposes, but hauling those home is no longer a frequent occurrence. And the bar mops are much better at wiping things down, so I don’t want to go back.

It’s all very eco and shabby-not-chic, but my issue isn’t aesthetic. It is that these rags, barring the t-shirt-derived ones, need to be washed and folded. All we do in my household is wash and fold these bar mops, I swear, that is it, there are a million of them and we do laundry (not just for those, but they’re thrown in) every other day. Work-from-home lunch break? Folding bar mops. It feels eternal and cuts into such leisure time pursuits as organizing my kids’ rooms. Is there some better way to go about this?

-I found a credenza. I mention this in case you were going to point me to some. You find one credenza and then you’re really off the credenza market, is the thing. Barring those in literal palaces, there aren’t credenza polygamists. I’m a one-credenza woman, tops. The credenza reveal, and the full story of how it came to be that one, is going to have to wait until said credenza has credenza’d its way to my home.