Cooking, Cleaning, and Love: Acts of Service as Acts of Friendship

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re mildly upset that she decided to clean their homes while they weren’t looking, but also grateful, as many of them have kids and don’t always have time to clean.</p><p id="42b3">That said, we tend to attract similar people in our lives. Our most recent house-sitter was nice enough to take out the trash and do the dishes, including putting them away. At one point, we had a house-sitter clean our entire downstairs and vacuum our stairs, which we hadn’t had time to do before she arrived. This was made even more impressive by the fact that she went to get her own vacuum from home to do it since she couldn’t find ours at the time.</p><p id="48e5">We have since come up with a word to describe this phenomenon: to Ghibli, based on Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki. One thing that is present in many Miyazaki films is mundane activities like chores and shopping. In <i>Kiki’s Delivery Service</i>, there is a fairly long scene where Kiki cleans her living space and does some shopping. In <i>Howl’s Moving Castle</i>, there is a scene where Sophie cleans the bathroom. <i>Spirited Away</i> is full of mundane activities that make up life in the bathhouse that serves as the primary setting.</p><p id="3fa6">Food is another common element in Miyazaki films. The aforementioned <i>Howl’s Moving Castle</i> has an extended scene with Howl cooking breakfast and the characters sharing a meal. <i>Spirited Away</i> has many scenes with amazing-looking food. <i>Kiki’s Delivery Service</i> has a bakery as a major setting, and there is a scene where Kiki helps bake a herring pie.</p><p id="c088">This is intentional in Miyazaki’s films — he likes to emphasize <a href="https://thepangean.com/Beauty-In-The-Mundane">finding beauty in the mundane</a> in his works, which sometimes resulted in issues with bringing his films to America. However, there are many people, myself included, that enjoy the simple tasks of cleaning, cooking, and shopping, as interludes between more action-driven scenes. There is a certain appeal to slowing the story down to appreciate the simpler things.</p><p id="4f25">So, we have borrowed the term “Ghibli” to describe the cooking and cleaning we do for friends. We describe it as “Ghibli-ing” and joke about “getting Ghibli’d” by people. Anyone who invites my partner over to their house runs the risk of getting Ghibli’d.</p><p id="84de">I honestly feel that this term is a good way to describe it. We do these things as acts of love and affection towards our friends; similarly, these actions in Ghibli movies are shown in a positive light as things that are beautiful and nice.</p><p id="c26c">Acts of service such as these are one of the primary love languages that we often hear about, and for my partner and me, cooking and cleaning encompass a significant part of how we express our love and

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friendship. We both have a certain reverence for Ghibli movies, as Miyazaki has demonstrated time and time again that he is a master of his craft. It seems like a fitting tribute to his work to me.</p><p id="3c0d">If you liked this, please subscribe to my publication, Thing a Day. I publish something every day on a variety of topics, so you never know what you’re going to see!</p><div id="c423" class="link-block"> <a href="https://medium.com/thing-a-day"> <div> <div> <h2>Thing a Day</h2> <div><h3>In which I write one thing each day.</h3></div> <div><p>medium.com</p></div> </div> <div> <div style="background-image: url(https://miro.readmedium.com/v2/resize:fit:320/1*eDMwsybTKAuurmHy6-tfoA.png)"></div> </div> </div> </a> </div><p id="c9a7">Here are some other things I’ve written:</p><div id="f303" class="link-block"> <a href="https://readmedium.com/i-love-food-and-food-is-love-38e0390814f6"> <div> <div> <h2>I Love Food, and Food Is Love</h2> <div><h3>Eating good food is almost as good as sharing good food.</h3></div> <div><p>medium.com</p></div> </div> <div> <div style="background-image: url(https://miro.readmedium.com/v2/resize:fit:320/0*D52pufFyXBDXOPMb)"></div> </div> </div> </a> </div><div id="6d84" class="link-block"> <a href="https://readmedium.com/a-happy-couple-four-cute-cats-and-no-kids-7e333b3aa13d"> <div> <div> <h2>A Happy Couple, Four Cute Cats, and No Kids</h2> <div><h3>I didn’t choose the cat life, the cat life chose me.</h3></div> <div><p>medium.com</p></div> </div> <div> <div style="background-image: url(https://miro.readmedium.com/v2/resize:fit:320/0*kW1sT76YcruvP8IK)"></div> </div> </div> </a> </div><div id="f661" class="link-block"> <a href="https://psiloveyou.xyz/a-couple-of-crazies-the-love-story-of-two-unstable-people-eba5b2d848b9"> <div> <div> <h2>A Couple of Crazies: The Love Story of Two Unstable People</h2> <div><h3>A story of compatibility, chemical reactions, and baggage.</h3></div> <div><p>psiloveyou.xyz</p></div> </div> <div> <div style="background-image: url(https://miro.readmedium.com/v2/resize:fit:320/0*nt6ZITnogn-filtK)"></div> </div> </div> </a> </div></article></body>

Or: How a Japanese legend helped us name a weird habit.

My partner and I are both people for whom acts of service are a primary love language. As I talked about before, I enjoy cooking for and feeding people, as does my partner and many people in my friend group.

My partner takes it to a whole other level sometimes. She very much likes to cook, clean, and generally do chores for the people she cares about. We’ve had friends ask her to help tidy one part of their house because their kids take up a lot of their time, and my partner instead cleans their whole house without them realizing until it’s too late.

She also tends to clean things without actually telling anyone. In the pre-COVID times, we were at a friend’s house on Friday for game night, as we usually do, and there was a small fire in his oven. There was no danger from it — a bit of grease ignited and flared up for a few seconds — but he commented about how they needed to clean it.

The next day, we were at his house again for a tabletop RPG session that my partner wasn’t a part of. Early on in the session, I went to get some coffee, only to discover my partner hard at work scrubbing the oven down. I laughed, and she gestured for me to be quiet before asking if I had a spare card that she could use to scrape ash off of the oven window. I gave her a little-used loyalty card and went on my way.

Over the course of several hours, she did a number on that oven, cleaning it as much as she could with a plastic card, some baking soda, and water. Eventually, after the game had ended, the host made his way to the kitchen to discover a much cleaner oven than he started with. He was both amused and put out that my partner had done this behind his back, feeling that he should’ve done it himself. His wife thought it was hilarious.

My partner does that a lot. She has cleaned toilets and bathroom sinks without the hosts knowing; she’s done some stealth-dusting and organizing while people are playing board games; she’s cleaned the houses of people she’s house-sitting for. Generally, the “victims” of her cleaning sprees are mildly upset that she decided to clean their homes while they weren’t looking, but also grateful, as many of them have kids and don’t always have time to clean.

That said, we tend to attract similar people in our lives. Our most recent house-sitter was nice enough to take out the trash and do the dishes, including putting them away. At one point, we had a house-sitter clean our entire downstairs and vacuum our stairs, which we hadn’t had time to do before she arrived. This was made even more impressive by the fact that she went to get her own vacuum from home to do it since she couldn’t find ours at the time.

We have since come up with a word to describe this phenomenon: to Ghibli, based on Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki. One thing that is present in many Miyazaki films is mundane activities like chores and shopping. In Kiki’s Delivery Service, there is a fairly long scene where Kiki cleans her living space and does some shopping. In Howl’s Moving Castle, there is a scene where Sophie cleans the bathroom. Spirited Away is full of mundane activities that make up life in the bathhouse that serves as the primary setting.

Food is another common element in Miyazaki films. The aforementioned Howl’s Moving Castle has an extended scene with Howl cooking breakfast and the characters sharing a meal. Spirited Away has many scenes with amazing-looking food. Kiki’s Delivery Service has a bakery as a major setting, and there is a scene where Kiki helps bake a herring pie.

This is intentional in Miyazaki’s films — he likes to emphasize finding beauty in the mundane in his works, which sometimes resulted in issues with bringing his films to America. However, there are many people, myself included, that enjoy the simple tasks of cleaning, cooking, and shopping, as interludes between more action-driven scenes. There is a certain appeal to slowing the story down to appreciate the simpler things.

So, we have borrowed the term “Ghibli” to describe the cooking and cleaning we do for friends. We describe it as “Ghibli-ing” and joke about “getting Ghibli’d” by people. Anyone who invites my partner over to their house runs the risk of getting Ghibli’d.

I honestly feel that this term is a good way to describe it. We do these things as acts of love and affection towards our friends; similarly, these actions in Ghibli movies are shown in a positive light as things that are beautiful and nice.

Acts of service such as these are one of the primary love languages that we often hear about, and for my partner and me, cooking and cleaning encompass a significant part of how we express our love and friendship. We both have a certain reverence for Ghibli movies, as Miyazaki has demonstrated time and time again that he is a master of his craft. It seems like a fitting tribute to his work to me.

If you liked this, please subscribe to my publication, Thing a Day. I publish something every day on a variety of topics, so you never know what you’re going to see!

Here are some other things I’ve written: