I’ve just moved to Spokane, Washington, after a few years in Utah, and I’m staring at boxes: a big box of SHOES, ditto BAGS, 10 cubic feet of BOOKS, a few boxes of KITCHEN, and (testament to my short attention span & general impatience with moving): BLANKETS AND STUFF, CDS AND STUFF, and the laconic and unhelpful STUFF.
I’ve been thinking a lot about stuff.
I’m starting a Big Girl Job, so I’ll have a little more cash to throw into my stuff. My default interior design concept has been “bus station,” and I’d like to up my game. Mostly I’m trying to trick myself into thinking that buying furniture can be as fun as buying shoes! It just costs a lot more (usually). And you can’t lift these big shoes yourself! Or put them together without crying a lot!
This blog is in part about being a Thrippie, and I know I need to define my terms, but suffice it for now to say that a Thrippie is thoughtful about her stuff. This thoughtfulness conforms to the Kenny Rogers wisdom of knowing when to hold and when to fold, when to scrimp and when to avert your eyes from the price tag. Yes, a Thrippie is thoughtful in the sense of “This only costs three dollars, but will I really wear it?” (a lesson I’ve only recently begun to take to heart). But Thrippies also think about what our stuff means and how we use it to shape our lives.
Roland Barthes (in Mythologies), and Guy Davenport (in The Geography of the Imagination), and other coolios have a lot to say about investigating and decoding our artifacts. But at the moment, those books are packed away, and it may take me a while to find them.
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