on space and home

Introspective observations from having my own place


1) It is no longer hard to floss.

There is no carrying water, no waiting, and especially no avoiding people. The only day I've missed was yesterday, when I worked 21 hours. I think in the past I've underestimated the "avoiding people" factor.


1) I am a Really Terrible hostess.

This is not true in a restaurant. At home, though, things are way less clear. One must direct/coordinate comfort, food, and flow of activities for more than two people--ideally while being at least a little entertaining. I will totally be reading up on this. . . probably a lot. Then y'all can come help me practice. :)


2) I dig my kitchen way more than I thought.

True story: I've never been much of a cook. I've always had good instincts and enjoyed it, but I think--once more--it goes back to that avoiding people thing. I never would have guessed. I actually have less time, now that I have a house, but the only time in my life I've cooked more than I am now, I was living with just mum and had tons of free time. Even the simplest food is exciting for me; today I made and ate nachos. It's so much easier without other people around. I think my first goal is to perfect several kinds of vegetable curry.

These days when I need to stay awake at work I tend to watch the food network, though I'm frustrated they don't do very much that's really healthy.


3) I did not choose my house.

I'm just now coming to terms with this. I needed a place to live; my price range was the very bottom of the market. I offered on virtually everything I saw (mostly short sales) that might have worked. The house I got was the only offer accepted on a house large enough and close enough that I could share it and use the money to get through school. If I have desperately and repeatedly asked you if you liked it, I was seeking reassurance that my situation is indeed not all that terrible. The house is too big for me; it's a ton of work, and it will be hard. It also doesn't feel nearly as homey to me as the smaller, further away ones I looked at.

That said, it will be ok. I have a house! And somehow it will get me through to finish school, which is why it was a good choice to take this house instead of a more fitting one. One of the great skills a nomadic lifestyle builds is the ability to lay out your home like a tent and take it up with you as you go. This will be a great home for me, however non-permanently.


5) If Finding Flow is to be believed, I have a masculine attitude towards my house.

That means that rather than taking pride in--and getting stressed out about--its cleanliness, I enjoy taking care of it when I can, and mostly take pride in paying for it myself. Quelle suprise.


8) I am actually a minimalist.

Despite having just moved from 112 square feet to 1600, I still love getting rid of stuff and still feel the need to budget space. Thinking a great deal about design and style as well.


13) New found (or re-found) pleasures-

Fresh salad
Washing my hair often enough to not have dandruff
Fuzzy cat slippers
Hot showers
Wandering out on the porch right after I wake up, to watch the sunset and get a lot of funny looks from the neighbors
Moving dancerish-ly through several rooms, mockery and observation free
Massage chair
Chairs
My kitchen/cooking
Apricot blossoms
Light on trees
Clean skin
Small errands on foot
Singing
Glissades and rolls
Much less ramen
Not wasting things
Sleep

unabashed rambling

organizing books is one of my Favorite Things In The Whole Wide World.

Back when I was in high school, it was my primary sane-making pastime. . . there was something incredibly calming about bringing order to something, particularly since it was such a tangible something and it managed to carry such a potent subtext of Future. I wanted to learn almost everything, and the books I owned were my tool kit, their untapped wisdom the best shot I had at getting to who I thought I wanted to be. When I was upset, I would make myself a challenge--get rid of ten books, or in extreme cases fifty. . . and since I had a source of free books, this lead to a constant refining and re-organization process rather than true personal-library anorexia. :)

Organizing books can be a bit like organizing your brain. When I left the home of my teen-angst, I would often satisfy this craving to externalize my thoughts by way of the library. Thirty interior design books spread about you on the floor are like a specialized meditation garden on the subject at hand. . . I've often been known to wander for an extra forty minutes or an hour looking for exactly the right combination of items to express my mental state, then take them home and wallow in the creative fecundity of my acquisitions, reading a chapter here and another there in attempts to pick up exactly the information I was seeking.

These days I'm a little less spontaneous with my reading and a lot more serious about my study habits, but I've discovered that my "books to read" document has come to serve a deliciously similar function, except even better--The Future is now. It's like the Wheaties of book organizing; book organizing for now and the long haul. Here are the books I plan to read in Philosophy--in Science--in French--entire lists of books imported from friends on interesting subject matter, a list of topics to research (and find the best books to read on them), everything I'm currently reading highlighted in bold. . . and, of course, the singularly satisfying act of deleting items from the list, productive if I've read them and cathartic if I've decided they no longer need apply.

It might possibly be the case that the list is shrinking slower than it is growing. It does include such list items as: "items in my library which don't belong to me," "the rest of the major Russians," and "other items in my library which do belong to me." For the moment though, it is finite, motivating, exciting, extremely reflective of my goals and progress towards them, and, as perhaps I've said, deeply, deeply satisfying.


As soon as I've done writing this, I'll be off to return to my roots--organizing my physical, material personal library for the first time in almost a year, with space to keep my books where I can see them, and all in one place. I finally have the bookshelves, and I've been looking forward to it for days.

Organizing my books right now has two kinds of additional significance, above what it had when I was a teen. For one thing, as I have scarcely begun to believe, it seems that I have a home. While I don't see myself loosing my taste as a minimalist and I think I'll always be aware that it costs money to maintain Things (including a personal library of any size), I no longer need constantly to imagine how many camels it would take to carry all this, or how exactly I would pack the entirety into my Geo, or what I would leave behind and expect never to see again when I depart for Europe. I'm perhaps a bit too scarred to become attached to Things--which is not all bad--but it will certainly be a different thing to approach the project from the perspective of having a single, stationary, almost permanently allocated home.

The other difference is that as I've become more serious in reading, I care to depend on other people's libraries less and less. If I've put significant time and effort into reading this, I want to own a copy--I want to keep notes about it, maybe even (God forbid) underline sections in pencil--I want to be able to reference it and find the right parts when I need to, because someday soon I'll be using this to do my work. Personal library has become not just a projection of future destinations, collection of past favorites, and source of occasional reading material, but something far more vivacious, almost constantly interactive.

Exciting. Tasty. Very filling.

As I said, Satisfying.

So thank you, Mary, for sharing your library organizing experience. Sometimes when your favorite things are--we'll say quirky--its nice to know how other people enjoy them to. . . and as it turns out, writing (and sometimes reading) about sorting books can be almost as fun as sorting them. :)

Everyone will fail you; keep trying

Ah, so I suppose I lied. However, posting once in March does give the post sequence a pleasing symmetry, so I've forgiven myself and I think you should too.

Also, home ownership is nice, thank you very much; pleasant and overwhelming. I just have to keep reminding myself to take it one repair at a time; it sat empty for at least six months before I got it, and even the really terrifying repairs (drainage!!!!!) will be alright till the end of the week. Meanwhile, I pace, stretch, sleep, and dream of turning the roof into a power source, the living room into a dance studio and the basement into a library--but as I said, one project at once. :)


Now that you are all updated, I can move on to being excessively morose and impassioned about things nobody cares about or can change, like self-immolation, and food. I know you're all on the edges of your seats. Ready?


Anyone I talk to often knows that I obsess a lot about "my" kids, most of them people in extraordinarily painful and probably hopeless circumstances. One of the ones I've been most worried about is in her mid teens, and has been in foster care since she was a toddler. Perhaps some of you can relate to the experience of being shunted from one place to the next; perhaps some of you know what it feels like to be abandoned by your family, and some of you may have experienced massive trauma and its aftermath. There might even be someone reading this who has had the experience of aging out of the foster care system--and if this is you, you are probably aware of how likely it is, in that circumstance, for a person to shortly end up crazy, homeless, or dead.

In my efforts to help this friend secure a home before being dropped headfirst into adulthood, there's a particularly important step that I've been working on. I've been trying to hammer the point that even if she had joined up every gang, tried every drug, broken every window, and burned down every shed she'd come across, she would still deserve a safe and loving home in which to grow up. Every child, no matter how ignorant, violent, or difficult, deserves to be kept safe and to be unconditionally loved.

This is a hard lesson to swallow, after a life like that, because it means you can no longer run away. It isn't because you weren't trying hard enough, it wasn't because you were dirty, or stupid, or deeply inadequate as a human being. It wasn't because no one cared. Talk of personal responsibility and systemic inevitability, in this context, adds only mud; you didn't get a family because the world we live in is profoundly, heartrendingly, terrifyingly unjust.


It is perhaps my favorite thing about humanity that when finally confronting ourselves with this kind of truth, we begin to calm. Regardless of all that we've been taught for our whole lives--about hard work paying off, about how being healthy means not getting hung up upon these things--this is what we see in our everyday. Injustice is the truth we feel and breathe. To touch it, name it, can be profoundly sane-making--perhaps because the only way to look such monstrosity unflinchingly in the eye is with an aim to change it.

And that is how we should be.


For systemic violence, systemic change.

House buying holiday

So I've gone all slacker. At the moment, my only consistent responsibilities are working 50 hours a week and keeping my homebuying process moving along. ..

what an awesome break!

Day Dreams will return in April--and I'm thinking of cutting to four times a month with more substantive posts. We'll see. :)

till then, though I've mostly stopped commenting, know I do still read your blogs.

Have a great couple of months--

Day

waltz