clutter
1 March 2007I’ve fallen seriously off the wagon in the fight against Extraneous Personal Possessions that was being waged in my bedroom. This is mostly because all extraneous items I have can be sorted into two categories: shoes and books. For one of those, I waver between feeling terribly well accessorized & cosmopolitan, or feeling like the biggest NY cliche of all time, and for the other one, I vacillate between feeling well educated/ well rounded/ well suited to my profession, or like one of those horders you see on the news after their dead body is found surrounded by towering stacks of the New York Observer and pepsi bottles full of urine in an apartment that hasn’t been entered in over a decade. There are inherent upsides and downsides here. I almost always “win” at the fun game I play with myself called Don’t Wear The Same Shoes Twice In One Week (sister to perennial favorite Pick The Shoes Out First and The Rest of the Outfit Will Follow) due to the sheer amount that I have to work with, and I’m also the proud owner of these bad boys:
Which I wear to work when the pirate in me is feeling a little too stifled under all of the Ann Taylor pants and button downs. But I was recently looking through one of my college scrapbooks (because I like to remind myself of how hot I looked 20 pounds heavier and with no eyebrow maintence) and almost destroyed some of the pictures because I didn’t want evidence of my poor past shoe choice. So I’m sure certain footwear decisions I’m making now will make me want to cut my feet off some time in the not so distance future (eg, see pirate shoes above).
Kind of in the same vein is my bookc ollection, which is stacked length-wise on my bookshelves and floor because I’ve run out of room to properly display them. Over the holidays I a did a kind of Singled Out/ Keep Em or Dump Em rampage on my books where I looked at each one and asked “if I had to pack up this place and move tomorrow, would it be worth moving this book?” and parted ways with all of the ones that didn’t make the cut. This was a shockingly small number of titles, especially considering that I didn’t have to pay actual money for many of them and still more are galleys, the advanced copies that the publishers put out for publicity before a book’s publication, that cost about $4 to make and were also acquired for free. But, as with the shoes, I’m questioning my taste in literature a wee bit, as I still have Bergdorf Blondes in full effect on one of my hardcover shelves. But this week I read this article in which a pretentious former new yorker catalogues her book collection and gleefully recounts how she got the Williamsburg hipsters to take them off her hands once she was ready to leave the city and it made throw up in my mouth a little. Then I saw these two epsidoes of Brotherhood 2.0 in which Hank and John Green describe their respective book housing techniques and I realized (a) I’m not alone in this issue (b) it is almost certainly genetic, something I should have learned from a childhood where being crushed by a leaning tower of presidential biographies was a constant danger (my father and I are both carriers of this gene. Every birthday and holiday all he wants is books despite running out of room in a 5 bedroom house with no children in which to house the books. My old bedroom now has bookshelves jutting out from the walls at odd angles, like a fun maze decorated with the GRHS honor roll listing from 1996 and my horseback riding ribbons from when I was 12. Whenever he gets the inevitable “there’s no way you can read all of these” he responds with the inevitable “I’ve read all of some and some of all of them.” Because he was so afflicted, he so enabled others, buying me any book I wanted up through college before I took a job working with them. It is his fault that I’m like this, and he is probably thrilled about it. AND YET, whenever he is asked about me, he replies “she lives in new york, with all of her shoes.” There are WAY MORE books than shoes in apartment 4A, but whatever) and (c) I am done with trying to get rid of books. In fact, I’ve done a 180 and I WANT MORE. (also, (d), how cool are these book shelves? I want millions!)
My first step in this plan to make my apartment even more of a fire hazard than it already is (hi, Roommate Amy! It’s cool, we have insurance! Also, I promise that I’m going to find a way to rearrange the turtle tank so that we don’t have 6 gallons of water directly above an uncovered electrical outlet) is re-acquiring all of The Saddle Club books. If you were 12 when I was 12, and if you had a vague interest of the equine variety at all, this was pretty much all you read. Where I went to horseback riding camp, they were traded like cigarettes in jail. Sadly, I got rid of all of mine circa age 15 when I decided I was too cool. Then I went to college and joined the riding team and all I wanted on horse show days was 96 pages of squeaky clean horse related fun with lessons learned at the end. Luckily, I work for-slash-with people who are clever enough to know that repackaging the series is a smart way to go. LOOK HOW CUTE THEY ARE.
Sadly, our reprint timing can’t speed through all 101 editions, plus the 7 super editions, plus the 17 books from the “Pine Hollow” spin off series (in which they’re 17 and do things like get drunk! and think about sleeping with boys! While still loving horses!) in order to satisfy my immediate need to read (again) about 11 year old girls learning about baby foals and gymkhana, so I’ve been abusing my PaperBackSwap account and Amazon used book dealers in order to make sure I have a constant incoming stream of pony books. As if our mailman doesn’t already hate us for my magazine habit and Amy’s Victoria’s Secret catalog issues.
2 Responses to “clutter”
March 1st, 2007 at 4:34 pm
I would offer to lend you my collection (I think I’ve got up to about 90 of the saddle club) that I packed up when my parents moved and which they now cannot find in their house. I plan on ambushing the attic this summer and bringing them back with me to Georgia where they’ll be safe.
March 4th, 2007 at 6:24 pm
1) Man, my mind was blown when I saw a Saddle Club tv show (Australian? It was weird) and Max was actually kind of HOT. Gah! Yeah, I got rid of all my Stevie, Carole and Lisa goodness, and I hope you can find them all. So I can borrow.
2) And speaking of books, my biggest material dream is to someday have my own library (in a house, obviously), complete with fireplace. Something modest, like the Biltmore library: http://honeymoons.about.com/od/northcarolina/ss/biltmore_estate_3.htm.