The comfort of stuff
In general, I’m not a huge victim of consumer capitalism, but there are times that try my non-shopping soul. Moving. Pretty much every time I’ve moved, I have acquired some large stack of something of dubious usefulness. Leaving for Cairo and diplomatic wifehood, I bought fify linen cocktail napkins. They are really very nice, plain white linen cocktail napkins, but dude. Cocktail napkins. What was I thinking. Leaving Cairo saw me in a fabric store I really liked walking out with ten yards of a very cool cotton curtain fabric. Again, nice, but ten yards? Why ten? Why not two or twenty? What mythical windows was I curtaining? What was this fabric going to be for me, thousands of miles away from the life I had been living?
I’m feeling the urge again now. I have a sudden hankering for quirky fabric and good notepaper. I’m not sure why. I rarely write letters anymore (oh fie on thee, thou varlet email). But I am fantasizing about truly nice, heavy cream paper with an elegant, yet very subtle border. Perhaps it has our new address on it, perhaps not. Perhaps this stack of paper is 4×6 cards you can scrawl a little note on. Perhaps it is sheets of paper worthy of sonnets sent to secret lovers. And quirky fabric, until you make something of it, is just a Thing. An object that takes up space and gets dusty. I am not fond of Things. I much prefer stuff.
Stuff (unlike things) might be pretty but is fundamentally useful and useable. A pitcher you can put liquid in is stuff, not a thing. A china figurine of a dog is a Thing. Boxes you can throw change into or earrings or matches is stuff. A plant pot (with a plant it); candles that you really burn; mugs, hats, sparkly rings and yarn in the middle of being knit up. Stuff. It’s that William Morris adage that I love: Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.
It is strange how the acquisition of stuff is comforting. A suggestion of preparedness? (Curtains? I got ‘em. A sudden cocktail party for fifty? Check.) A sense of ownership, control? A resolidifying with matter the evaporating life, quietly disappearing into boxes?
I’m resisting buying things or stuff, for the moment. Now it’s almost a game, wondering what it is that will slip past my guard, that I will suddenly find myself owning. That will be the strange comfort of this move.
I do the same thing. Every single time I’ve moved except this last time when I sat on my hands and then when the itching got so strong I used them to go through the stuff I already have and got rid of a bunch. Oh, but there’s still too much!
Good luck, honey.
I moved 6 years ago and still have stuff and things in a 10X20 storage building I visit once a month.
It’s like Christmas very time I go…
I always move the stuff I’ve bought in moments of excitement and creativity. I have several boxes of fabric that are meant for several different patchwork quilts. With some, I’ve gone so far as to actually cut the cloth. I think to get rid of it would be to admit defeat. Plus, I’m afraid I’d just use the fact that I no longer had any fabric as an excuse to buy the next bolt of pretty stuff that I came across.
I loved going through and getting rid of my Things when I moved. It was freeing for me.
I like accumulating Things and Stuff, and then shedding myself of the Olde Stuff and Things, until one day, I find myself surrounded with New Stuff and Things and start missing the Olde horribly.
But when I buy THINGS, I tend to buy big. A guitar. A motorcycle. Forty skeins of merino wool. My justification? Things can turn into Stuff.
Just go buy something, dammit, so the rest of us feel better about all the Things that own us.
I say that, as you know, in complete and utter jest.
Amazing what we must have…
And so when are you having the cocktailparty to break them in..
You can invite me on that mighty fine stationary!
If it is going to happen anyway, then you might as well head towards a bookshop….
A new address requires, nay demands, new writing papers of the finest kind affordable (and new address labels, too). If the blogosphere weren’t quite so anonymous, I would offer to make you some new notecards or stationery on my computer. Guess you’ll have to settle for Crane’s.
I live to channel William Morris and his genius approach to stuff. I love useful. I love beautiful. I adore the two together. And to the Goodwill sack goes the rest. If only I could better tell, when I’m forking over the cash, which is which!
The temptation of things that are merely pretty or quirky hits me every now and then, but sooner or later – if I give in – I find that I really wish I hadn’t. Therefore my favorite boots, which were on sale for twenty bucks and look like something a construction worker would wear, are stuff. And the knee-high, calf-hugging, 3″ heeled boots that would look more appropriate on Barbie than on me, and cost ten times what my favorites did – those are things.
And I agree with alto2 – you must give in to the creamy new stationary. You must.
I thought I posted a comment here, but it appears to have disappeared…I suggested yarn.
Lovely stationary doesn’t really seem like a thing. Perhaps it will get you to close the keyboard and break out the pen. Letter soothe the soul.
(This, of course, from one whose laptop is perpetually open and one whose pens are used only to write grocery lists…)
I nominated you as a thinking blogger.