Crazy talent, slangily / MON 7-22-24 / What the KonMari Method leaves you with / Stuck, with no easy way out / Early PC platform / Lady ___ "Shallow" singer / R&B singer with the 2006 #1 hit "So Sick"

Constructor: Laura Dershewitz

Relative difficulty: Easyish (solved Downs-only)

THEME: POST-IT NOTES (50A: Sticky yellow squares ... or. description of the circled letters and what they follow?) — phrases in which "notes" (specifically, "do," "re," and "mi") follow the word "IT": 

Theme answers:

• BREAK IT DOWN (21A: Explain something in steps)
• KEEPS IT REAL (31A: Acts like one's true self, colloquially)
• PUT IT MILDLY (40A: Was understated in one's description)

Word of the Day: KonMari Method (63A: What the KonMari Method leaves you with) —

Marie Kondo (近藤 麻理恵, Kondō Marie, pronounced [kondoː maɾie], born 9 October 1984), also known as Konmari (こんまり), is a Japanese organizing consultant, author, and TV presenter. 

Kondo has written four books on organizing, which have collectively sold millions of copies around the world. Her books have been translated from Japanese into several languages, and her book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (2011) has been published in more than 30 countries. It was a best-seller in Japan and in Europe, and was published in the United States in 2014. [...] Kondo's method of organizing is known as the KonMari method, and consists of gathering together all of one's belongings, one category at a time, and then keeping only those things that "spark joy" (Japanese language ときめく tokimeku, translated as equivalent to English "flutter, throb, palpitate"), and choosing a place for everything from then on. Kondo advises to start the process of tidying up by "quickly and completely" discarding whatever it is in the house that doesn't spark joy. Following this philosophy will acknowledge the usefulness of each belonging and help owners learn more about themselves, which will help them be able to more easily decide what to keep or discard. She advises to do this by category of items and not their location in the house. For example, all the clothes in the house should be piled up first, assessed for tokimeku, and discarded if not needed, followed by other categories such as books, papers, miscellany, and mementos. Another crucial aspect of the KonMari method is to find a designated place for each item in the house and making sure it stays there.

Kondo says that her method is partly inspired by the Shinto religion. Cleaning and organizing things properly can be a spiritual practice in Shintoism, which is concerned with the energy or divine spirit of things (kami) and the right way to live (kannagara): 

Treasuring what you have; treating the objects you own as not disposable, but valuable, no matter their actual monetary worth; and creating displays so you can value each individual object are all essentially Shinto ways of living. (wikipedia)

• • •

Well, the revealer is a winner, I'll give it that. I was very much not enjoying this puzzle before I hit the revealer, but the revealer really ... Revealed, you know? Like, I saw the "IT"s and I saw the "notes" but I sort of thought the "IT"s were a coincidence and I had no idea what the notes were doing (besides helping make my Downs-only solve easier—once I got the "RE," the "DO" seemed likely, and then the "MI" was a gimme). And then eventually POST-IT NOTES and I thought "damn it, that's good. That almost makes the rest of the puzzle worth enduring." Actually, "enduring" is a little strong. It was just extremely blah, with overfamiliar and dull fill everywhere (EKES, NE-YO, MS/DOS, zzz), and no real zing to break the monotony (except MAD SKILLS—that's plenty zingy) (33D: Crazy talent, slangily). I also really Really hated, in an admittedly nitpicky but nonetheless vehement way, the fact that the second themer was a third-person indicative verb phrase, where the others were just ... verb phrases. BREAK IT DOWN, PUT IT MILDLY, but ... KEEPS (sssss) IT REAL. Nails + chalkboard to my ears / eyes / soul. I know, I know, you have to have symmetry in the themers, as well as the proper note sequence, so it's only fair to make a little allowance for phrasing incongruities / anomalies, but look, I winced, that's just what happened. Whether it should have happened, that's not my concern. But as I say, that revealer is a real redeemer. It brought me all the way back to ... neutral on this puzzle. Dislike + Love = somewhere in the gray middle, feeling-wise.

My one big mistake (solving Downs-only) was getting the tense of LOST SLEEP wrong. I wrote in LOSE SLEEP. I have no idea why. Just stupid. It gave me GEE (instead of GET) in that cross, so I couldn't clearly see the error. Dumb brain glitch. Otherwise, no serious trouble. My worst mistake was probably imagining that ALGERIA was the [Northernmost country in Africa]. I was close! And it fit! And ended -IA! Ugh. That's the answer that slowed me down the most. I definitely did NAAN before ROTI, but those crosses looked bad pretty quick, and luckily I knew enough to keep my eye on the NAAN in case it turned into ROTI—and it did (22D: Indian flatbread). I learned that NOVA was the name for [Smoked salmon] from doing crosswords, so as I was writing it in, I was pretty tentative. "NAVI? No, that's the Avatar people. NOVI? NEVA? Oh, it's NOVA! That's right, I remember, it's a word that could definitely have a different clue ... but doesn't." Had IN A ___ at 43D: Stuck, with no easy way out, which left me stuck, with no easy way out, or way in to the SE, especially since I had the very appropriate "OOH!" instead of the not-really-a-"reaction" AWE at 59D: Reaction to seeing the Northern Lights, perhaps. A "reaction" is something something you do or say. AWE is a feeling. Blah blah blah I'm sure you word lawyer / AWE defenders are right in some technical sense, but boo. [Feeling upon seeing the Northern Lights, perhaps]—that, I like. "Reaction," I don't. Also in the "Don't Like" column: LESS as an answer for 63A: What the KonMari Method leaves you with. Way, way, way too vague. Not KonMari-specific enough, at all. True, you do get rid of shit, but the point of the "Method" is tidiness—it's right there in the title of the damn book (The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up).

So ... cool revealer, cool MAD SKILLS, the rest ... SPLAT. Net grade: middling. Some scheduling news: I'm here for the rest of July, then in early August I head west to see my dad and extended family, so I'll be out for a week again, during which my trusty substitutes will substitute once more. Thanks to them for their able work this month, and prethanks to them for that same work next month. I'll be spending early August in Santa Barbara, making several trips into the L.A. area, so if you live down there and I owe you a visit or you want to buy me a drink, just remind me or let me know, whichever applies. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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