One thing that moving does is make you question why you own things.
I used to own a beer bottle that had some significance or other to me. I kept it for a few years, moved it from house to house, and I’ll be damned if I can remember specifically what its meaning was. I want to say it was the first beer I had with the “elders” of my fraternity, but it may very well have been a beer I shared with my Dad, at some point or another early in my college days. The fact that I really don’t remember for sure speaks volumes.
There is a cost of ownership, and it goes beyond the particular space or square footage that an item occupies in a box. That beer bottle certainly didn’t take up any more space in a moving carton than any other household object, such as a pot, or a glass jar, or, say, 300 pounds of books that I’ll never read again. To me, it’s “How much psychological, mental, and emotional space is this object taking up in my brain?”
Because it’s not space, it’s time. It’s “Oh, that’s the Post-It™ note that she (?) wrote that inspirational thingy on, back when I was a something-or-other.” Try explaining the value of that to your insurance company when your house burns down.
And he’s going to relate this to a commentary on media… how? my readers are thinking. (I think there are twelve to fourteen of you. Thank you.) Well, two things:
One. If you’re going to uproot your life in search of knowledge and meaning about media, culture, or communication, be damned sure that it’s what you want to do. I am, myself, reasonably sure, but moving my little Post-Its™ around has been extremely taxing, to the point where I’m afraid it’s depleted my ability to study media. In fact, I don’t even think I know what media is. I think it’s like, TV or something?
Two. The media thing is coming back to me now, and if there’s anything I do know about media, it’s that it’s very good at getting us to buy shit, or stuff, as George Carlin more eloquently put it, and I’m here to tell ya, just be careful what you get. Avoid any kind of paper products on which meaningful things can be written. That stuff should all be available online now, anyway.
On the other hand, there are things like a wood carving a mallard duck that my grandfather created, probably over thirty years ago. When I pulled that out of its box and unwrapped it, it brought to me a great sense of comfort and home.
1 response so far ↓
Derek Ormond // August 25, 2008 at 8:06 pm |
Yeah, moving makes you ask yourself a whole bunch of questions. Then there’s that sense of finality when the moving truck pulls up with all of your stuff. Up until that point, I think we thought we were on some weird kind of vacation or something.
I threw out and gave away a lot of stuff before we moved up here, but I still have all of those things that you inevitably save for posterity over a lifetime. Opening those boxes can bring back anything from a gasp of remembrance to that almost forgotten tinge of pain you thought had finally gone away. It’s real and it’s all mine, though, and I think that’s a very good thing.
My George Carlin CDs are amongst some of my favorite stuff that I had the pleasure of unpacking. I need to get a record player again so I can pick up some of the old vinyl albums.