The zen of Cleaning Tiktok

and lists galore

This is the Kos newsletter: warm email notes from your friend in Seoul. Finding the simple joy in parenthood, bodies, spirituality, creativity, beauty, and living abroad. Sound like your jam? Subscribe below for weekly notes.

Hello friends,

Thanks for all your warm messages about my life update last week. Meant a lot. :)

It was a good week. You too? It was short because we spent the first half on the beach (glorious!) and returned to only a couple days of school and minimal demands aside from like 400 loads of sandy laundry.

Speaking of laundry and my personal tendency to obsess about things, I have gone off the deep end for Cleaning Tiktok, Cleaning influencers, and Facebook Housekeeping discussion boards. Like, I am in love. Watching these folks’ steam clean their couch with a Bissell and then pour that disgusting water in the toilet is *chef’s kiss*. Listen to someone walk through how to sanitize a front loader? Yes, please. Watch a professional cleaner on Tiktok take down haters when she says not ALL bleach is a disinfectant?! The MAJESTY! (Who knew this??? We’re supposed to be looking for “disinfecting” on bleach packaging or else the solution is meant for whitening and does NOT in fact disinfect. Mind blown.) Eating up Go Clean Co washing floors w/ a magical concoction of powdered Tide, boiling water, and a splash of bleach with the O Cedar spin mop? It’s my meditation.

Sometime in the last couple weeks, this newfound interest led me to create a Google Doc titled Cleaning House in the U.S. wherein I list newfound cleaning products like smiley yellow scrubbers, Dawn Powerwash Spray, powdered Tide (65,000 won for a small box here!), Cascade dishwasher detergent, hydrogen peroxide, and cute caddies to carry it all around in. In my head, I dash into the hallowed aisles of Target after a year and a half and systematically solve every life concern by crossing out Bissell Pet Steam Cleaner on my carefully tracked list after I set it tenderly in my big, beautiful, red cart. Then I head to ye American Costco, my one true heart, and load up on disinfecting bleach, powdered Tide, distilled white vinegar, white dishtowels, and microfiber cloths and ruminate in the effervescent satisfaction of acquiring everything I need to handle my home while eating a loaded hot dog in my minivan.

This is not the first time I thought Target or Costco could save me, and certainly not the last time I’ve thought a list could either. Other Google Docs lists I currently have going are:

• Clothing Edit Summer 2022 (but this morphed into three lists so now I have)

• Sensitive Skin Beauty

• The Boys’ Clothes & Shoes (Sizes and Needs)

• Work Set-Up

  And then of course the biggest checklist of all, a shared doc tracking every gosh dang thing we have to do to move from Seoul to San Francisco:

• The Move

All of this is to say that I channel stress by making lists, digital and print. I’m also running again for the first time in a long time AND scrubbing baseboards, decluttering cupboards, and giving away a bunch of stuff. All in all totally fine because a) I have to do this stuff anyway before we move b) I’m able to do it which means I feel 100% better after having Covid a month and a half ago and that’s a huge relief. It was rough for a few weeks after. THANK YOU to all the cleaning content creators out there. You guys are the real MVPs and quite possibly the only content creators I wholeheartedly enjoy these days.

Best wishes to all of us on our obsessive tendencies and if you have dirty water to dump down the toilet, don’t do it without taking a video for sake of the rest of us!

Koseli

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If you liked this newsletter, there are three things you can do to support me: 1) Follow me on @toasty_kos, 2) Subscribe to my Little Things podcast, and 3) Share this newsletter by clicking below. I see and appreciate every like, comment, share, and good vibe. xo Koseli