Saturday, October 17, 2009

i guess i live here now

...
Happy One-Month Anniversary, Box Blog Project!

We are marking this special occasion with a serious attempt to UNPACK BOOKS. This is difficult because a) the books are hidden behind, well, everything, and b) putting books on shelves means I live here, and I've recently been considering not.

But, my thinking goes along the lines of "stay in Carson City until after the 2010 election," and that's over a year away, so unpack the books I do!

(Make the good sentences, I don't always.)

Unpacking the books will also result in extra closet space, which I could definitely use. Otherwise, I'll be playing checkers with these boxes until I die.


there's extra space back there somewhere

Sadly, even though I cleared the big bookshelf a month ago, this project requires surfaces to transition objects from place to place, and there is more crap on the bookshelf again. So first that stuff has to come off.


I suck at leaving space

Then I have to force myself to retrieve the boxes of cassette tapes from the top of the closet (wedged under a blender and a crock pot) so I can place a small batch of cassette tapes into one of the boxes.


cassettes by the box

Opening the lightest box takes me immediately back to 1997: my Slower Than cassette! Mixtapes from Jim and Jim and themikeabrego! Oh, and this reminds me that we have misplaced the mixtape Jim made for The Sister in 1993, which we both love so dearly that she gave it to me to back up digitally. Ahem. So these boxes MUST be sorted shortly. But not today. Must not get distracted. However, I will not put them back in the closet so I remember to do something with them... themikeabrego brought all his old tapes out into his mancave and maybe I can do the same thing for myself, somehow.


tapes


more tapes and themikeabrego 

But first, the books! And a list of items of interest:

  • The second dead spider of the Project.
  • A copy of The Tommyknockers belonging to Mr. Eric Foreman.
  • Oodles of books acquired from The Parents' former second-hand shop in Baker City, OR (a weirdly large percentage of Oscar Wilde).
  • Pride and Prejudice, which The Sister has currently checked out (possibly overdue) from the library because I insisted we read the original before reading the zombie version.
  • Several volumes of the Lemony Snicket series, reminding me to re-read the whole thing again. I stopped reading right after The Penultimate Peril. I hate when I do that. It happens to me with video games, too: I get distracted right before the last boss and never play again.
  • A page from a magazine, clipped, I assume, to illustrate the bedroom decor my then 12-year-old self would like:
    is that an Apples in Stereo album cover on the wall?  
     
  • The ADD Quest for Identity, a book purchased at a seminar Jim and I attended (1997) in the hopes, I guess, that we might be able to tame his spazzier qualities. Thirty minutes into the workshop I decided once and for all that the "diagnosis" was useless, the "disease" was imaginary, and our lives would all be easier if we accepted that some people's brains work differently. No medication or behavior modification necessary.
  • A thesaurus. Useful!
  • A box of zines and other punk rock mementos from the late 90's. I don't have the stomach to sort these today. This box goes in the rapidly growing pile of music-related crap.
  • A copy of The Fountainhead, stolen from the Westchester Country library in the year 2000. I have been wanting to read that again. My library karma is so totally crap.
  • The Martha Stewart craft book with the instructions for cucumber sake cups! This is not really that exciting, as obviously the "recipe" is available online, but I'd been looking for it and now I've found it and that is a good thing.
  • Notebooks from my music classes at UNR, plus tons and tons of music instruction books, some written by my grandfather. Plus The Smiths Louder than Bombs! And dozens of other songbooks! These are gonna need a shelf of their own. Did I mention the growing pile of music crap?
  • A collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald stories (stolen from Jim). Fall is an excellent time to read these and then contemplate killing yourself. While listening to Jawbreaker. Just saying.
  • A Lord of the Rings box set, missing The Fellowship of the Ring. Um? Any former roommates out there in possession of this?
  • Several copies of A Separate Peace, which I have never read. Putting both of them in the to-go pile.
  • A box marked "probably books" that fell and almost killed me. And then turned out to be full of yearbooks.
All of this leading me to the revelation that I have no idea how to organize my books. It's been so long since I had shelves and the desire to fill them that I suspect most of this collection has spent its life in boxes. Sad.

So, for now, I'm just piling these books onto these shelves and hoping I will someday be inspired to organize them in some way.

I feel accomplished, but also defeated.


there's that extra space


i guess i live here now 

4 comments:

Bryan said...

Those poor, poor spiders

TonicScale said...

Whoa... Spiders!!! Oh My...

Gina said...

This is exactly why I like having a basement. I can give the illusion of being (somewhat) organized above ground, while below lurk my boxes of books and tapes from 1997.

Before I had the luxury of a basement, I sometimes got a storage space, depending on how small my apartment was.

Good luck with the project. Let me know when you will move to Portland.

jen scaffidi said...

Oh, the luxury of the storage space. Most of this junk has been in storage for the last 10 years, which is part of what inspired me to sort through it, finally. I'm hoping to whittle it all down to fit neatly in my home. If I can't use it or don't access i regularly, then maybe I don't need it? I hope?