Like the wrench and the cracker

I know it’s long but you can’t get enough about a third of the way into it.  Before I saw this I’d never heard of the Viridian Movement, not sure I’ll follow-up on it anyway.  This letter though is so on the nose…well written, not to preachy, very attainable.  A lot of these ideas are established philosophies of my BFF in VA, but I still reacted with awe and appreciation at seeing them again.  Let me know what you think.  Does any of this sound familiar to you?  Have/Are you employed these techniques?  Did you actually read the whole thing?  Seriously, I’m curious…

“…….Furthermore, many of these objects can damage you personally.  The hours you
waste stumbling over your piled debris, picking, washing, storing, re-storing,
those are hours and spaces that you will never get back in a mortal lifetime.
Basically, you have to curate these goods: heat them, cool them, protect them
from humidity and vermin.  Every moment you devote to them is lost to your
children, your friends, your society, yourself. 

It’s not  bad to own fine things that you like.  What you need are things that
you GENUINELY like.  Things that you cherish, that enhance your existence in the
world.  The rest is dross.

Do not “economize.”  Please.  That is not the point.  The economy is clearly
insane.  Even its champions are terrified by it now.  It’s melting the North
Pole.  So “economization” is not your friend.  Cheapness can be value-less.
Voluntary simplicity is, furthermore, boring.  Less can become too much work.

The items that you use incessantly, the items you employ every day, the normal,
boring goods that don’t seem luxurious or romantic: these are the critical ones.
They are truly central.  The everyday object is the monarch of all objects.
It’s in your time most, it’s in your space most. It is “where it is at,” and it
is “what is going on.”

It takes a while to get this through your head, because it’s the opposite of the
legendry of shopping.   However: the things that you use every day should be the
best-designed things you can get.   For instance, you cannot possibly spend too
much money on a bed — (assuming you have a regular bed, which in point of fact
I do not).  You’re spending a third of your lifetime in a bed.  Your bed might
be sagging, ugly, groaning and infested with dust mites, because you are used to
that situation and cannot see it.  That calamity might escape your conscious
notice.  See it.  Replace it.

Sell — even give away– anything you never use.  Fancy ball gowns, tuxedos,
beautiful shoes wrapped in bubblepak that you never wear, useless Christmas
gifts from well-meaning relatives, junk that you inherited.  Sell that stuff.
Take the money, get a real bed.  Get radically improved everyday things.
          
The same goes for a working chair.  Notice it.  Take action.  Bad chairs can
seriously injure you from repetitive stresses.   Get a decent ergonomic chair.
Someone may accuse you of “indulging yourself” because you possess a  chair that
functions properly.  This guy is a reactionary.  He is useless to futurity.
Listen carefully to whatever else he says, and do the opposite.  You will
benefit greatly.

Expensive clothing is generally designed to make you look like an aristocrat who
can afford couture.  Unless you are a celebrity on professional display, forget
this consumer theatricality.   You should buy relatively-expensive clothing that
is ergonomic, high-performance and sturdy. 

Anything placed next to your skin for long periods is of high priority.   Shoes
are notorious sources of pain and stress and subjected to great mechanical wear.
  You really need to work on selecting these — yes, on “shopping for shoes.”
You should spend more time on shoes than you do on cars, unless you’re in a car
during pretty much every waking moment.  In which case, God help you.

I strongly recommend that you carry a multitool.  There are dozens of species of
these remarkable devices now, and for good reason.  Do not show them off in a
beltpack, because this marks you as a poorly-socialized geek.   Keep your
multitool hidden in the same discreet way that you would any other set of keys.

That’s because a multitool IS a set of keys.  It’s a set of possible creative
interventions in your immediate material environment.  That is why you want a
multitool.  They are empowering.
      
A multitool changes your perceptions of the world.   Since you lack your
previous untooled learned-helplessness, you will slowly find yourself becoming
more capable and more observant.  If you have pocket-scissors, you will notice
loose threads; if you have a small knife you will notice bad packaging; if you
have a file you will notice flashing, metallic burrs, and bad joinery.  If you
have tweezers you can help injured children, while if you have a pen, you will
take notes.  Tools in your space, saving your time.  A multitool is a design
education.

As a further important development, you will become known to your friends and
colleagues as someone who is capable, useful and resourceful, rather than
someone who is helpless, frustrated and visibly lacking in options.  You should
aspire to this better condition.

Do not lug around an enormous toolchest or a full set of post-earthquake gear
unless you are Stewart Brand.   Furthermore, unless you are a professional
emergency worker, you can abstain from post-apocalyptic “bug-out bags” and
omnicompetent heaps of survivalist rations.   Do not stock the fort with
tiresome, life-consuming, freeze-dried everything, unless you can clearly sense
the visible approach of some massive, non-theoretical civil disorder.   The
clearest way to know that one of these is coming is that the rich people have
left your area.   If that’s the case, then, sure, go befriend the police and
prepare to knuckle down.
        
Now to confront the possessions you already have.  This will require serious
design work, and this will be painful.  It is a good idea to get a friend or
several friends to help you.
       
You will need to divide your current possessions into four major categories.

        1. Beautiful things.
        2. Emotionally important things.
        3. Tools, devices, and appliances that efficiently perform a useful
            function.
        4. Everything else.

“Everything else” will be by far the largest category.  Anything you have not
touched, or seen, or thought about in a year — this very likely belongs in
“everything else.” 

You should document these things.  Take their pictures, their identifying
makers’ marks, barcodes, whatever, so that you can get them off eBay or Amazon
if, for some weird reason, you ever need them again.  Store those digital
pictures somewhere safe — along with all your other increasingly valuable,
life-central digital data.  Back them up both onsite and offsite. 
        
Then remove them from your time and space.  “Everything else” should not be in
your immediate environment, sucking up your energy and reducing your
opportunities.  It should become a fond memory, or become reduced to data.  

It may belong *to* you, but it does not belong *with* you.  You weren’t born
with it.  You won’t be buried with it.  It needs to be out of the space-time
vicinity.  You are not its archivist or quartermaster.  Stop serving that unpaid
role.
         
Beautiful things are important.  If they’re truly beautiful, they should be so
beautiful that you are showing them to people.  They should be on display: you
should be sharing their beauty with others.  Your pride in these things should
enhance your life, your sense of taste and perhaps your social standing.
       
They’re not really *that* beautiful?  Then they’re not really beautiful.  Take a
picture of them, tag them, remove them elsewhere.
      
Emotionally important things.  All of us have sentimental keepsakes that we
can’t bear to part with.   We also have many other objects which simply provoke
a panicky sense of potential loss — they don’t help us to establish who we are,
or to become the person we want to be.  They subject us to emotional blackmail.

       
Is this keepsake so very important that you would want to share its story with
your friends, your children, your grandchildren?  Or are you just using this
clutter as  emotional insulation, so as to protect yourself from knowing
yourself better? 

Think about that.  Take a picture.  You might want to write the story down. 
Then — yes — away with it.
       
You are not “losing things” by these acts of material hygiene.  You are gaining
time, health, light and space. Also, the basic quality of your daily life will
certainly soar.   Because the benefits of good design will accrue to you where
they matter — in the everyday. 

Not in Oz or in some museum vitrine.  In the every day.  For sustainability, it
is every day that matters.  Not green Manhattan Projects, green moon shots,
green New Years’ resolutions, or wild scifi speculations.  Those are for
dabblers and amateurs.  The sustainable is about the every day.
        
Now for category three, tools and appliances.   They’re not beautiful and you
are not emotionally attached to them.  So they should be held to keen technical
standards.  

Is your home a museum?  Do you have curatorial skills?  If not, then entropy is
attacking everything in there.  Stuff breaks, ages, rusts, wears out, decays.
Entropy is an inherent property of time and space.  Understand this fact.
Expect this.  The laws of physics are all right, they should not provoke
anguished spasms of denial.   

You will be told that you should “make do” with broken or semi-broken tools,
devices and appliances.  Unless you are in prison or genuinely crushed by
poverty, do not do this.  This advice is wicked.
        
This material culture of today is not sustainable.  Most of the things you own
are almost certainly made to 20th century standards, which are very bad.   If we
stick with the malignant possessions we already have, through some hairshirt
notion of thrift, then we are going to be baling seawater.  This will not do.  

You should be planning, expecting, desiring to live among material surroundings
created, manufactured, distributed, through radically different methods from
today’s. It is your moral duty to aid this transformative process.   This means
you should encourage the best industrial design. 

Get excellent tools and appliances.  Not a hundred bad, cheap, easy ones.  Get
the genuinely good ones.  Work at it.  Pay some attention here, do not neglect
the issue by imagining yourself to be serenely “non-materialistic.”  There is
nothing more “materialistic” than doing the same household job five times
because your tools suck.   Do not allow yourself to be trapped in time-sucking
black holes of mechanical dysfunction.  That is not civilized.

Now for a brief homily on tools and appliances of especial Viridian interest:
the experimental ones.   The world is full of complicated, time-sucking,
partially-functional beta-rollout gizmos.   Some are fun to mess with; fun in
life is important.  Others are whimsical; whimsy is okay.  Eagerly collecting
semifunctional gadgets because they are shiny-shiny, this activity is not the
worst thing in the world.  However, it can become a vice.  If you are going to
wrangle with unstable, poorly-defined, avant-garde tech objects, then you really
need to wrangle them.  Get good at doing it. 
      
Good experiments are well-designed experiments.  Real experiments need a theory.
They need something to prove or disprove.  Experiments need to be slotted into
some larger context of research, and their results need to be communicated to
other practitioners. That’s what makes them true “experiments” instead of
private fetishes.

If you’re buying weird tech gizmos, you need to know *what you are trying to
prove by that*.  You also need to *tell other people useful things about it.* 
If you are truly experimenting, then you are doing something praiseworthy.  You
may be wasting some space and time, but you’ll be saving space and time for
others less adventurous. Good.  

If you’re becoming a techie magpie pack-rat who never leaves your couch — that’s
not good. Forget the shiny gadget.  You need to look in the shiny mirror.
       
So.  This approach seems to be working for me. More or less. I’m not urging you
to do any of this right away.  Do not jump up from the screen right now and go
reform your entire material circumstances.  That resolve will not last.  Because
it’s not sustainable.
        
Instead, I am urging you to think hard about it.  Tuck it into the back of your
mind.  Contemplate it. The day is going to come, it will come, when you suddenly
find your comfortable habits disrupted. 

That could be a new job, a transfer to a new city, a marriage, the birth or
departure of a child. It could be a death in the family: we are mortal, they
happen.   Moments like these are part of the human condition.  Suddenly you will
find yourself facing a yawning door and a whole bunch of empty boxes.  *That* is
the moment in which you should launch this sudden, much-considered coup.  Seize
that moment on the barricades, liberate yourself, and establish a new and
sustainable constitution.
         
But  — you may well ask — what if I backslide into the ancient regime?  Well,
there is a form of hygiene workable here as well.  Every time you move some new
object into your time and space — buy it, receive it as a gift, inherit it,
whatever — remove some equivalent object.

That discipline is not as hard as it sounds.  As the design of your immediate
surroundings improves, it’ll become obvious to you that more and more of these
time-sucking barnacles are just not up to your standards.    They’re ugly, or
they’re broken, or they’re obsolete, or they are visible emblems of nasty,
uncivilized material processes.  

Their blissful absence from your life makes new time and space for something
better for you — and for the changed world you want to live to see.

So: that summarizes it.  Forgive the Pope-Emperor this last comprehensive
sermon; it is what I learned by doing all this, and you won’t be troubled
henceforth.
*************************************************

…….

Bruce Sterling
bruces@well.com”

So I have really big feet.  What that means to this blog is that I have trouble finding fun stylish shoes in my size in the regular retail world….so I turn to ebay.  Here is the problem I have in that world: with years of lowered expectations in shoe shopping to rely on, I limit my search criteria to women;s, 11, red.  What happens is that I’m faced with 4-5 fabulous pairs of red size 11 shoes.  Another result of lowered expectations is that I’ve trained myself (and friends) to buy any cute size 11 shoes, ever.  So now I have some cute red pumps, cherry boots, red strapy flats, red loafers and adventurous red sandals.

So mission accomplished.  Go big or go home.

I love my red shoes but I was thinking whilst in the bathroom stall at work the other day that any day I wear (any color) fabulous shoes, I sacrifice certain things.  Like anonymity in the can.  Now this has never been a priority of mine as I’m known to whistle, kick other people (that I know!) and I, without fail, always use the middle stall.  Where was I going with this?  Oh yeah, I haven’t posted this month.  Was it worth the wait?  Seriously though, I’ve yet to find a happy medium between laying low and not engaging unwanted attention and my love for bright, sometimes obnoxious accessories.  I wonder if this is how Big D feels…..

tommorow….Haha suckers!  Just kidding, though I won’t write anything now since I’m at work.  I take no issue with spending salaried time reading YOUR blogs but I think using said time to pen my own would be pushing it.  What?  You didn’t think I had limits did you?  I’ll swan!

I am just southern enough to use that phrase and for All right and I’ll write to sound exactly the same.  You love it!

So this morning (ie noon thirty) when I got to work I shared an elevator ride in the parking deck with 5 young male med students.  They are often running about my office building as they have classes and lectures and the what not.  Sometimes I say hello or just click past them in my heels hoping they think that I’ve already achieved my goals (as indicated by high heels and photo badge on zippy retractable thing) and should therefore be envied or asked out.  So in the elevator I would have normally stood up a little straighter, been grateful for my cleavage and tried to decide which eyebrow to raise exactly how high to transform the vacant look in my eyes into something mysterious.  This time however I didn’t care that I probably should have washed my hair this morning or that my pants were wrinkled and arguably too short since they revealed my non-matching socks.  (I’m not a total hobo, they matched each other just not my outfit)  Why this change you ask?  Well before we entered said elevator we were walking down neighboring ramps and I heard them reviewing their menus selections from lunch at Moe’s.  One of them inevitably said something about beans which immediately hijacked the conversation.  I think/hope that they didn’t know that I’d heard the first part of their conversation and so openly made fart jokes in what they thought was code if I hadn’t heard the first bean reference.

“I hear it’s good for your heart”

 ”It’s a  fruit you know”

“Like a fine wine, it ages with time” (I’m sorry is there anything that doesn’t age with time?  Isn’t the concept of time the basis for the process of aging?)

These guys are going to be doctors.  We might all luck out, they might all become proctologists and they can joke away and write off their bean lunches as research.  Or plastic Surgeons and once and for all separate time and ageing.

Sigh.

…what people do want is a chance to take a break at work while appearing productive, assuming they have one of those screen privacy thingys.  What people want is a break from trying to pry giant panties off her son.  They want to procrastinate, they want to ruminate for the lord, rise up bloggin and they want to take my hand, salt lick sucks, nettie and Liam is 2!!

Huh?

I you got all of those references then your favorites list looks like mine.

So who am I to hinder those efforts.  I believe firmly in the golden rule and so here is a new blog post.  My goal is to post two times a week.  Not as crazy as everyday and not as pathetic as once every six weeks.  I also believe firmly in compromise.

So to make this post worth your while, here are some cute things my nieces have said:

( as we passed Stonecrest on I-20)

JJ (age 2) “What’s that?” (breathy and amazed)

Alibear (age 5) -sighing resignedly- “The Whole World”

JJ (pause) “Do they have animals there?”

Alibear “I don’t think so”

 Why is it that kids pick up on and speak truths with such speed and accuracy?  JJ also doesn’t that she should use nicknames in place of proper names when she can combine them instead.  For example, my sister Isabelle also goes by Izzy and so JJ calls her Izzybelle.  So now I do too.  And my kitten whom I refer to as Roxanne has recently been upgraded to Roxyzanne.

I think she’ll be a publicist when she grows up.  Unless…..she also has been known to proclaim at rest time that she is NOT going to close her eyes “and that’s my choice!”  So maybe a replacement for Stephen Colbert,  or the next Gloria Steinem.  Good thing I don’t have to decide her future.

It’s midnight, that’s my excuse

just got back from Athens where my sister and her two daughters and I went to the season opener of the uga women’s gymnastic team.  It was a lot of fun.

While I enjoy spectating in general, and I can follow gymnastics pretty well (they fall down bad, they ’stick the landing’ good) I could definitely tell a difference between my own commentary and what I would have heard if I’d been watching it on TV.  You know like the music in a scary movie.  Or any movie really; happy music happy stuff, impending doom music impending doom stuff. 

So the thing is I didn’t know when to pay attention or the back history of each athlete or the move they couldn’t do until now.  I missed that stuff.  But it was still fun.  Plus it was a big breast cancer awareness fundraiser thing so there was pink pink pink pink pink.  What more could a 5 and 2 girl ask for?

I was also SHOCKED and how young everybody looked.  Not the 5 and 2 year olds but all the college kids.  I know that 12 year olds can’t go to college but damn that’s what they looked like.  I wonder what the person who saw me when I was in college and thought I looked twelve is doing now?  They’d be……almost 40.  Awesome.

crazy sitcom-worthy stuff happens to me everyday and I just wish it was easier to share it all with you.  Woe is me.  Here is what I can remember:

 Big D poser

I turned left from Briarcliff onto Ponce the other day and what black man do I see standing there with his cane?  SOME RANDOM BLACK DUDE WITH A CANE!  Where is Big D I ask!  Is this some new school v. old school thing.  Did big D retire?  Can Culture icons do that?  If Creative Loafing doesn’t pick up on this soon I’m gonna write a letter.

Childhood Irrationalities Vindicated

When my sister and I were younger he had bunkbeds, who didn’t.  And I think I’m not alone when I say that we fought over who got to sleep on the top bunk.  Or who had to sleep on the top bunk.  Two big reasons, we rotated who slept on the top bunk becasue invariably that person would fall off and you got bonus points if you hit your head on the dresser on the way down.  (That’s actually a great segue into the first time I saw a penis…I’ll definitly save that for another blog.) 

ANYHOO, my big motivation for not sleeping on the bottom bunk was the fear that if I was on the bottom then surely the occupant of the top bunk would wet the bed which would result in a PG golden shower.  Every adult I every shared this fear with assured me that was impossible.  Ha ha, not so I tell you!  This christmas I went on a roadtrip with my sister, her partner and my two nieces.  Guess who slept on the bottom bunk under said 5 and 2 year old?  Guess who awoke to the cold drip drip drip of (you got  it) of someone else cold pee.

Merry Christmas to me.  I’ll admit I was so pleased to be right after all these years that I wouldn’t change a thing.  What is wrong with me?

So my sisters gave me an iPod nano for my birthday, very fun and birthdaytastic.  And I was up really late last night playing with it and have been loading any cd I can find since I’ve been home from church.  Even now as I write this I’m switching back and forth b/t wordpress and iTunes.  It makes me feel fancy.  I feel like I’m a participating member of my generation.  A feeling that is new to me.  We’ll see how long it lasts…

In between bouts of that today I’ve been cleaning my room.  I have WAY to many clothes.  I have a lot of nice clothes but mostly I (apparently) buy a lot of the same thing.  Over and over.  It does make organizing my closet a bit more straightforward.  Longsleeved v-neck purple shirts here, shortsleeved purple v-neck shirts here.  Pretty much repeat that formula for every color but only about 4 styles.

So here is my resolution, I don’t want to buy anything I already have.  That includes toiletries (I found about 18 things of lotion in my room today), tchotchkes of any sort no matter how tempting or adorable, anything commemorating an event, time or place.  Another resolution to attempt would be to let go collections I’ve accumulated.  I’ll tell you one thing, if you wait long enough trying to decide whether something is important enough to keep, one of two things will happen; you will forget t it is and why it was every a question of keeping it or enough time will have passed that said object has become obsolete.  Like the Chick-fil-A coupon that expired in 2006 I allowed my self to throw away.

 Baby steps…

Hey this post turned out to have very little to do with my iPod. 

does limited attention to all three equal reliability for one?  Today is my birthday, celebrating the completion of my 28th year by joining a blog for super secret reasons…wouldn’t you like to know.

Everyone I know would describe me as funny and will be a little too excited that I’ve (potentially) started a blog.  “Oooo, Allen is so funny I bet her blog will be high-larious!”

Think again!  I plan to make mundane observations about war and poverty.  That or a joke a day, I haven’t decided.

I feel as free as a barn swallow…