Unpacked
I've been back in the SoCal again but two weeks and a day, so I know you'll all be shocked to hear that I'm already unpacked!!!!
Well, almost. I still have to put away my computer speakers, a desktop foosball set and the boxes to my new computer and associated peripherals, and try to pawn my stereo off on an unsuspecting friend for a while so that its storage becomes someone else's problem. But, that's a far cry from where everything was at, oh, 3 p.m. today.
Trouble is, all my junk just sat unattended in the middle of the living room floor before today. Several suitcases and miscellaneous pieces of luggage cluttered our usually anti-minimalist living room floor. It wasn't my (or I'm sure my parents') original intention to leave my college-era crap in a post-modern arrangement prominently occupying our one area of livable space. Unfortunately, there just isn't any place for it.
See, when I graduated high school four long years ago, my paternal grandmother sold her home in Michigan and moved in with us. Her bedroom, located next to mine, had formerly been the guest room. Of course, this meant that 99 percent of the time it served as the family pile o' junk, and the other 1 percent we spent frantically emptying it of all contents so we could house actual guests.
My family had already been cramped for storage space by the time of this development. At some point during my high school years, my parents had a mini "barn" -- really just a barn-shaped shed -- installed on the concrete slab behind the house. This worked wonders, allowing us to get rid of our storage unit and move our clutter to the backyard, where it could be haphazardly piled out of site and in a place that wouldn't need to be cleared out in the unlikely event of company.
But, our hodgepodge of crap violates several laws of physics, in particular that whole conservation of matter bit, so despite our expanded storage horizons we continued to accumulate junk and with the arrival of my grandma saw the demand for our puny allotment of storage space fall grossly out of equilibrium with our ever-skyrocketing supply of junk. (Now with 50 percent more new, Michigan junk!)
My parents acted swiftly, decisively, and with tremendous courage, moral fortitude and foresight in this time of grave family crisis. That's right, they had another shed built in the backyard. This one wasn't quaintly shaped like a barn, but was more your run-of-the-mill, big-ass storage shed, erected behind the garage on a slab of concrete specially poured for the occasion. The addition of the second shed helped ease the mounting tensions that menaced nuclear war in our quiet tract home. Furthermore, this intervention even got my parents short-listed for the 1999 Nobel Peace Prize, but they got shafted as the Royal Academy opted instead to award it to Doctors Without Borders. Sure, like delivering life-saving medical treatment in active war zones trumps staving off would-be apocalypse in suburbia. But I digress. . . .
The junk/storage conundrum seemed to have reached an impasse at this point. My room, which had been so magnificently spartan shortly before I left for college, saw a steady encroachment of crap, principally my mom's quilting paraphenalia, as she'd taken to using it for a sewing room while I was away at school. That didn't prove too destablizing, however, though I resented my executive desk being reduced to such a use.
No, the real trouble began when I returned to school for my senior year last fall. My parents accompanied me back to Chicagoland to help move me in, and on the same trip went down to Indiana to move my maternal grandfather out. He now occupied my bedroom, and while we didn't diversify our collection with a lot of Indiana junk, his arrival did inaugurate a decisive confrontation in the combat between clutter and space.
Since my grandpa doesn't squeeze in and out of tight spaces with the greatest of ease anymore, my mom decided it'd be best if he moved into my room. I didn't (and still don't) mind this much. More accurately, it doesn't bother me when I'm away from home and wholly unaffected. I don't resent it even now, when I'm living under my parents' roof again. But it does kind of complicate the storage situation a bit.
What space to expand I once had in my room is now completely gone. Access to my closet and desk have been virtually sealed off by the deployment of myriad medical supplies. And compounding this situation is that the room I now inhabit, formerly my dad's room/the back bedroom/that other room piled ceiling-to-floor with useless old crap is, well, piled ceiling-to-floor with useless old crap. And now my useful new crap has to go there, too.
Thus the delay in getting unpacked. I finally decided to show some initiative on this front today (I've been showing all kinds of initiative this week; if I wake up tomorrow and discover I've been turned into June Cleaver, don't be surprised and please shoot me). Unloading the luggage proved surprisingly less painful than first suspected. There wasn't too much crap stuffed into any one suitcase, so I made pretty good time. Problems arose, as expected, when I had to find new homes for my not-so-neatly piles arranged radially in the living room.
A scant few things made their way into my desk. The luggage was banished to the rafters and entryway of the behind-garage shed. My stereo has since discovered a hiding place beneath the table in the living room. But everything else pretty much needed to go in my new room, and that wasn't happening so fast.
Putting off the inevitable as long as possible, I finally hunkered down into the no man's land shortly after 2 a.m. Deciding that I needed more space than a narrow walkway to the bed (like an even narrower walkway along the foot of the bed), I began rearranging the room in a manner sure to make even a hardened criminal like Martha Stewart cry. My technique was twofold: first, build onto existing piles of crap, like one already occupying an entire corner; then, when unable to reach higher, toss lighterweight junk on top of the heap, repeating the process as necessary until the crap stays precariously balanced atop its mountainous perch. Using these time-honored methods, I managed to create that elusive footpath at the end of the bed and cleared off perhaps one-third of the desktop beside my bed. Good enough for me.
Eat your heart out, Martha.
Well, almost. I still have to put away my computer speakers, a desktop foosball set and the boxes to my new computer and associated peripherals, and try to pawn my stereo off on an unsuspecting friend for a while so that its storage becomes someone else's problem. But, that's a far cry from where everything was at, oh, 3 p.m. today.
Trouble is, all my junk just sat unattended in the middle of the living room floor before today. Several suitcases and miscellaneous pieces of luggage cluttered our usually anti-minimalist living room floor. It wasn't my (or I'm sure my parents') original intention to leave my college-era crap in a post-modern arrangement prominently occupying our one area of livable space. Unfortunately, there just isn't any place for it.
See, when I graduated high school four long years ago, my paternal grandmother sold her home in Michigan and moved in with us. Her bedroom, located next to mine, had formerly been the guest room. Of course, this meant that 99 percent of the time it served as the family pile o' junk, and the other 1 percent we spent frantically emptying it of all contents so we could house actual guests.
My family had already been cramped for storage space by the time of this development. At some point during my high school years, my parents had a mini "barn" -- really just a barn-shaped shed -- installed on the concrete slab behind the house. This worked wonders, allowing us to get rid of our storage unit and move our clutter to the backyard, where it could be haphazardly piled out of site and in a place that wouldn't need to be cleared out in the unlikely event of company.
But, our hodgepodge of crap violates several laws of physics, in particular that whole conservation of matter bit, so despite our expanded storage horizons we continued to accumulate junk and with the arrival of my grandma saw the demand for our puny allotment of storage space fall grossly out of equilibrium with our ever-skyrocketing supply of junk. (Now with 50 percent more new, Michigan junk!)
My parents acted swiftly, decisively, and with tremendous courage, moral fortitude and foresight in this time of grave family crisis. That's right, they had another shed built in the backyard. This one wasn't quaintly shaped like a barn, but was more your run-of-the-mill, big-ass storage shed, erected behind the garage on a slab of concrete specially poured for the occasion. The addition of the second shed helped ease the mounting tensions that menaced nuclear war in our quiet tract home. Furthermore, this intervention even got my parents short-listed for the 1999 Nobel Peace Prize, but they got shafted as the Royal Academy opted instead to award it to Doctors Without Borders. Sure, like delivering life-saving medical treatment in active war zones trumps staving off would-be apocalypse in suburbia. But I digress. . . .
The junk/storage conundrum seemed to have reached an impasse at this point. My room, which had been so magnificently spartan shortly before I left for college, saw a steady encroachment of crap, principally my mom's quilting paraphenalia, as she'd taken to using it for a sewing room while I was away at school. That didn't prove too destablizing, however, though I resented my executive desk being reduced to such a use.
No, the real trouble began when I returned to school for my senior year last fall. My parents accompanied me back to Chicagoland to help move me in, and on the same trip went down to Indiana to move my maternal grandfather out. He now occupied my bedroom, and while we didn't diversify our collection with a lot of Indiana junk, his arrival did inaugurate a decisive confrontation in the combat between clutter and space.
Since my grandpa doesn't squeeze in and out of tight spaces with the greatest of ease anymore, my mom decided it'd be best if he moved into my room. I didn't (and still don't) mind this much. More accurately, it doesn't bother me when I'm away from home and wholly unaffected. I don't resent it even now, when I'm living under my parents' roof again. But it does kind of complicate the storage situation a bit.
What space to expand I once had in my room is now completely gone. Access to my closet and desk have been virtually sealed off by the deployment of myriad medical supplies. And compounding this situation is that the room I now inhabit, formerly my dad's room/the back bedroom/that other room piled ceiling-to-floor with useless old crap is, well, piled ceiling-to-floor with useless old crap. And now my useful new crap has to go there, too.
Thus the delay in getting unpacked. I finally decided to show some initiative on this front today (I've been showing all kinds of initiative this week; if I wake up tomorrow and discover I've been turned into June Cleaver, don't be surprised and please shoot me). Unloading the luggage proved surprisingly less painful than first suspected. There wasn't too much crap stuffed into any one suitcase, so I made pretty good time. Problems arose, as expected, when I had to find new homes for my not-so-neatly piles arranged radially in the living room.
A scant few things made their way into my desk. The luggage was banished to the rafters and entryway of the behind-garage shed. My stereo has since discovered a hiding place beneath the table in the living room. But everything else pretty much needed to go in my new room, and that wasn't happening so fast.
Putting off the inevitable as long as possible, I finally hunkered down into the no man's land shortly after 2 a.m. Deciding that I needed more space than a narrow walkway to the bed (like an even narrower walkway along the foot of the bed), I began rearranging the room in a manner sure to make even a hardened criminal like Martha Stewart cry. My technique was twofold: first, build onto existing piles of crap, like one already occupying an entire corner; then, when unable to reach higher, toss lighterweight junk on top of the heap, repeating the process as necessary until the crap stays precariously balanced atop its mountainous perch. Using these time-honored methods, I managed to create that elusive footpath at the end of the bed and cleared off perhaps one-third of the desktop beside my bed. Good enough for me.
Eat your heart out, Martha.
posted by Alexander Dubcek | 04:28
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