Tips On Not Buying A Decorative Owl Statue.

Like many people, I spent a lot of Quarantine trying to make my home more comfortable. This was no small task for several reasons. I had only lived here about five months when the lock down started and when I’d moved here I’d done so with all my belongings packed into my little 4-door hatchback. It was me and a cat and some backpacks filled with clothes and books. And that was it. In some ways it was the culmination of a decade spend slowly and deliberately shedding things and slimming down my life. It is possible that when I got here to Monterey I was living as light as I ever will (though I do still harbor the secret ambition to just live out of a backpack, but more on that some other time).

The problem with having only an economy-car’s worth of things though is that it makes the actually-living part somewhat difficult. For instance: nowhere to sit. That first weekend I bought a couch that came in a box and inside of a couple weeks I had a Craigslist kitchen table and a microwave and soon after that a TV and some bookcases. But that was about it those first few months.

One weird thing to know is that I live in an absurdly GIGANTIC apartment. The cost of modern housing being what it is, I have learned not to complain about this, but it is one of those odd ironic curve balls that life throws sometimes. I work for a public university that occupies a decommissioned Army base. I live in the old Army housing, which means that they don’t have studio apartments or anything (because the army had no need for that sort of thing), so I live alone in a two bedroom apartment designed for a military family. When I got the job here I told the housing people I just wanted the smallest, cheapest thing they had, they said, “Sure thing; it’s a 2-bedroom with a garage and a balcony.” God has a sense of humor.

So those first few months this place was pretty bare. A friend of mine called it ‘The Empty Place.”

If you’re into the aesthetic version of minimalism (which I kind of am, but that is really a secondary part of it for me), then you’ve no doubt seen the simple clean lines of white and gray rooms on Pinterest. Always with beautiful old wood floors and great light. Open concept floor plans and lofty ceilings. Kind of Frank Lloyd Wright crossed with the star ship Enterprise sort of look, but with more plants. Well my apartment is not that. Wall to wall cheap-ass carpet in most of the rooms. Old wood kitchen cabinets the color of wet cardboard. One living room wall is unreasonably long. The whole place is just damn weird. Bad design. Roman Mars would be very unhappy with this apartment.

I put my brain to it and tried to figure out how to make this a pleasant home without filling it with a bunch of crap … then Quarantine came along and things got … strange.

Like many people, I was forced to spend so much time here that I noticed every weird uneven-ness in the walls. I noticed every piece of crap joinery on the door frames. The place began to annoy me and rather than feeling like a minimalist, I felt like someone who didn’t know how to make a home, like someone who didn’t know what to put on the walls. And that isn’t actually me. So I went about fixing it. I bought another couch in a box, delivered by a singular intrepid UPS driver. I started my little window sill herb gardens. I bought some rungs and had ordered prints of pictures from my various travels. I even bought a cool black minimal desk for my living room. Throw pillows. Guest bedding. Lamps. I briefly even considered purchasing a decorative owl statue (Did not but it because it didn’t do anything but look like an owl).

By anyone else’s standards, this place is still pretty bare, but I think it is pretty about it.

One time I read an article about the way fancy restaurants and bars are designed and decorated. The guy in the article explained, “people love restaurants because the kitchens are practical and simple, but even better is the sense of plenty: lots of wine, lots of candles.” That made an impression on me and I wrote it down in the Notes app on my phone.   

Simple, but with a sense of plenty.

I guess that is what I have tried to do here, but I still feel weird about it because even though I am still mostly surrounded by things I care about, I do still feel like I could get rid of most of them in a heartbeat. So my minimalist brain shouts at me, “If you can live without them at all, then you should get rid of them now!”

A few months into Quarantine, I realized that all I really needed to live in this apartment is a mattress and a bar stool (the kitchen has a counter bar) and that's it. So why do I have all this other stuff???

The part of me that wants to live out of a backpack also wants to throw out the couches and the rugs and the lamps and the throw pillows. Most days it is a challenge not to over-purge and throw out my flatware. I’m not kidding. I have one set of bamboo utensils. Why do I need more than one knife, one fork, one spoon?

The answer of course is: other people. 

What kind of life are you designing for yourself when the only place to sit in your entire phone is on your one bar stool? It’s a life that doesn’t have anyone else in it. And I know that I would like this life to have other people in it. The loneliness of Quarantine has taught me that. 

Even though I only NEED a mattress and a bar stool, I don’t WANT the life that would create for me. I want a life where I host fucking dinner parties. Right now I could host a small one, but only because I have a table and chairs and haven’t thrown out my flatware yet. Now I just need the people. That part of life is slowly beginning to happen now that we are poking our heads out of our homes like suspicious meerkats.

It isn’t about the stuff, or the lack of it, not at this point in my life anyway. It’s about simplicity with a sense of plenty. The simplicity part I have locked down, now I have to work on the sense of plenty. And that is the work of a life.

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To Duvet or Not to Duvet.

I have a small and unimportant quandary.

So I’m a minimalist. I don’t actually enjoy using the term that much because it is ironically freighted with so much baggage as of late, but that is what I am. I am more interested in not owning much than I am in the austere aesthetic, though I do kind of like the aesthetic.

Over the course of the quarantine I have put more effort into making a comfortable home than I would have otherwise. So I probably do have more stuff in my apartment than I would otherwise and lately I have been feeling weird about it. So I have been thinking about going through everything again and doing a purge. So that is Data Point 1.

Here is Data Point 2: During quarantine I had to turn my guest bedroom into my home office and though it still has a bed in it, it isn’t really arranged properly to function as a guest bedroom because it primarily functions as an office and a cat napping area right now.

Now on to Data Point 3: Within the next few months I will be transitioning back to in-person work (though I don’t know exactly when that will happen). I am also beginning to hear from (fully vaccinated) friends and family who want to come out and stay with me, which is lovely and also something I had hoped would start to happen. After all, I live on the central coast of California and have an extra bedroom (because this two bedroom apartment is actually the smallest and cheapest place I could find. That’s a long story and not important right now).

So add all of that up and it means I have to start transitioning my guest bedroom back into a guest bedroom. Since I’d only lived here about five months prior to the pandemic and because the “extra’ bedroom was the last thing I was worried about furnishing, it was never really outfitted properly and was not a particularly pleasant room to be in, though people had slept in it.

Now I am beginning to think about how to make a pleasant and welcoming space for guests to stay in and almost without exception these will be people who are NOT minimalists and who — in some cases — actually think I’m kind of crazy for living the way that I do.

I’d like to provide a pleasant experience for people who come see me, because quarantine has left me feeling terribly lonely and there is little I’d like more than to see people, but, being a minimalist, I really bristle at the idea of buying a whole bunch of stuff I’m not going to use 90% of the time to cram into a room that I don’t use most of the time. I’m staring down the barrel of having to buy extra towels and bedding and probably some bins to organize the towels and the bedding and I need some more lamps (the light in the guest room kinda sucks if the sun isn’t out) and probably a chair and a rug and … other stuff? What goes in a guest room? I’ve never really had to equip one before. 

It feels like my natural inclination to make a bedroom look like a monk’s cell (that’s basically what my own bedroom is like) is probably not what a normal person would think of as pleasant after they had to take a weekend off work and make a long drive to come and visit me.

Surely there is a middle path here that I can find a way to navigate, but I simply have not yet found a way to navigate it. Probably this is what Pinterest is for, right? 

The other thing that bugs me about all this is that at least while the room has been my workspace, I was USING IT. Once I turn it back into a guest room, I will barely be using it most of the time. I would love to give it some kind of hybrid function, but I already have a dining room talke (where I am typing this right now) and a small desk in my living room where I also sometimes write. So I don’t need it to be a home office after Covid. I don’t have any other space-requiring hobbies. I don’t secretly make jewelry or anything, so I don’t know what hybrid function I would try to jam in there.

I also kind of hate how much time I am going to have to spend thinking about all of this. I’m going to end up saying things to myself like, “Maybe I should have a backup duvet …” and that is just going to make me go insane.

Look, I said at the top that this was a SMALL and UNIMPORTANT quandary. At least you know I am being honest with you.

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Post of Pictures.

Recently I have come across some pictures on the internets which I would like now to share with you. I’m not one who enjoys just reblogging crap, but with the rise of Tapiture and The Chive and the like, men have more and more opportunities now to waste their time online doing something other than watching porn.

Anyway, please enjoy these pictures, I did.

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A Very Long Blog Post about A Very Small Thought.

I have had something of a strange thought banging around half formed inside of my brain lately. You can tell me, but I think it is symptomatic of this furiously, technologically linked-in world in which we have all found ourselves living.

But let me start at the beginning, you have that kinda time, right? Well don’t worry, you can play Words with Friends while you read this, I won’t be offended.

The Beginning: I have had a couple of nearly picture perfect weekends lately (two out of three and that third one wasn’t too shabby either!) and a couple Monday mornings ago I found myself standing outside of work about twenty minutes early (as is my custom for reasons passing understanding) and so I was going through my phone and deleting spam-flavored emails and checking The Facebook and (pointedly) re-reading texts (I get a smidge obsessive-y, which is no doubt clear to you since I still write a blog [Although come on! If this was 1998 I would be the hippest cat that you know!]).

I am doing a very poor job of writing this blog entry. Let me start again.

The Beginning, Again: So I have had some very good weekends lately and they were really and actually good, not just the kind of good that we content ourselves with when we spend Saturday night lit up all laptop-blue and trying to convince ourselves that Pinterest and Stumbeupon are the same thing as fun. I’m not bragging or anything (look at how cool and awesome and fulfilling my life is!), I'm simply saying that actually participating in the life is sometimes even better than observing it from the bottom of the 4G connection on your phone. But then sadly Monday reared up and I found myself thumbing my way through my own phone before work and I discovered that not only had I not missed anything in the world, but also, that my very wonderful weekend had gone almost entirely undocumented. Can you believe it?! Not a single Facebook post or Tweet or picture or email, nary even a text to record the whole damn thing.

This inspired in me two sudden, simultaneous and conflicting emotions.

The first is relatable to all of us, I think. Mainly that it was so very refreshing and sweet to have had a totally unconnected bit of life. It was like a deep, deep breath taken in Downward-Facing Dog, or something! I felt so off-the-grid awesome! I felt like the good kind of hippie! (The kind that showers, looks like a normal human being, recycles without making a big deal about it, in case you were curious).

It was the sort of free and relaxed and, dare I say, proud feeling I get when I go for a hike and there is no one else around at all. There is something very fortifying and affirming about thinking to yourself, “I am so unconnected right now that if I tripped and fell down this ridge right here, I would pretty much be on my own and would most likely die … because I have Sprint and the service sucks up here on this firebreak … so I had better not fall …”

But I’m digressing again.

So now this is the other thought I had about my undocumented, unconnected weekend and I’m sure that this is relatable to most of us as well: startlingly strong anxiety.

As in: What the hell do you mean there are no texts or pictures or Facebook updates or Tweets or blogs or what the hell ever else? How the hell am I going to REMEMBER this?!

See, I’m one of those people who locks a particularly good (or bad) text message. I save pictures on my phone until the contract is up and then I have those pictures transferred to the next phone, just so that I can have memories locked into pixels riding around in my pocket in case I ever want to remember those things. I mean, this is a fucking blog after all! I have so many tiresomely specific memories encoded here that quite often I feel like it is more just my diary than it is my internet presence as a writer who exists in the world.

But this is all taking a lot of words to explain and you’re very busy and important and probably losing that game of Words with Friends you’re playing with your mom, so let me just get to the point:

The Point: There was a part of me, that Monday morning a couple of weeks ago, that was so very afraid of the fact that I had no memories in digital form. I became suddenly and seriously aware of the limited and unreliable ability of my own brain to remember in detail all of the things that I wanted to remember in warm and pristine clarity. And the realization made me a little sad. All of those blurry pics of my cat in my phone are going to exist into the far reaches of forever, but these nice and sweet and wonderful memories are going to melt away at a rate that would be positively unacceptable if my brain were a Polaroid. It was a little hard to know that those memories might fade out of focus and one day bleed into the confused background of my own memory.

I suppose this is not a new concern. And really, I suppose it is really about the fleetingness of life and not just the fleetingness of memory.

I thought that all of this was rather profound when I sat down to write, but now it feels a little saccharin. But who the hell cares? It isn’t like you’ll remember this post tomorrow anyway.

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Plagiarism!

Okay. I think that was all of the ham-related things I had to say …

You know, I was having a conversation about Pinterest recently and apparently there are some bloggers complaining that Pinterest is hurting blogs because Pinterest users are essentially “stealing” content. To which I say, “poppycock”.

But it presents an interesting dilemma.

My roommate Sparkle Fairy said that it would be similar to some college student somewhere copying one of my short stories off of this here blog and turning it in as his/her own work. Well that doesn’t really bother me that much, but – I’m just thinking about this now – as long as I stick to writing poetry about ham, I don’t think I will ever have that problem anyway.

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