maimysantiago99 replied to your post

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maimysantiago99 replied to your post “materialism”

I have no helpful suggestions but I totally feel you on this stuff, especially the buying everything or nothing and wanting to get rid of stuff but knowing you will be upset by it later. Just yesterday I was lamenting donating a pair of pajamas that didn’t fit anymore. It’s been almost a decade, but I loved them. But they’re just pajamas.

Yes! Oh my gosh!

I feel like… there’s so much pop-cultural awareness of hoarders from the awful TV shows, but nobody seems to really understand *why*. I don’t have a house full of garbage and dead cats like on the shows, but I do have really deep and inexplicable sentimental attachments to objects, to the stories behind objects, to the physical presence of objects, and it’s impossible to explain that, I don’t know how to. They’re not “just things”, they’re parts of my life and parts of my physical reality and parts of who and what and where I am in the world, they’re part of how I orient myself, they’re part of the landscape of sensations that mark my passage as a physical being. My memory is unreliable, and one of my poorly-understood coping mechanisms is stuff, and where I left stuff, and sometimes it’s self-defeating and sometimes it’s all that works to get me to interface with the world.

 And literally all of the advice I can find, for organizing or cleaning or living, or whatever, is about how to get rid of as much stuff as possible, and I know that’s counterproductive– I don’t want to live in an empty space, I don’t want to have only essential things, I really like having things and it is a genuine wrench to dispose of stuff, and I clearly do not feel the same way about things as most people do. Yes, I am often trapped by my own possessions, yes I suffer from not being able to find things I need under the layers of things I can’t use, but discarding everything and starting over doesn’t sound like freedom at all to me, it sounds like a horrible nightmare. 

But I can’t find any advice, or help, or anything, that isn’t predicated on the idea that clearly, I ought to discard almost everything I own, and if necessary, buy new replacements if it turns out I got rid of too much. And ironically, this advice is meant to be anti-materialistic, anti-consumeristic, and yet it’s predicated on generating a bunch of garbage and then buying new stuff. Always!

And not being good at managing buying stuff is kind of like… it’s a more dangerous path to addiction, I think, for me, than drugs or alcohol, because– well, it’s sort of like food– eating disorders are the worst because you can’t just opt out of food entirely, you have to think about it regardless of what it triggers. And it’s sort of the same with buying stuff– you can’t live without buying things sometimes, and so you have to deal with your broken ability to manage money and possessions no matter what it dredges up, and it’s just got to be messy and you’ve just got to figure out the best you can. IDK, man. 

This isn’t very articulate and I don’t know how to make it make more sense, but– it’s just one of those things, where I realize that I absolutely do not relate to the world in the way that most people do, apparently. It’s so fundamental I don’t even know how to talk about it, let alone how to analyze it in any way.

tiny house thoughts: carriage house??

I have really enjoyed scrolling through every plan on pinuphouses.com and looking at their tiny house, shed, cabin etc. plans. I don't actually love their aesthetic, particularly-- and the conceit is that each house plan is named after a different pinup girl? and often the 3d-renderings include a random woman in lingerie for scale, which is sort of, um. (I think the more recent plans have eased off that gimmick, but they do include artistic renderings of curled pinup posters stuck to the walls in even the newer renderings, which is sort of... like... implying you're building this garden shed to shag in, in a way that's sort of weird and faintly gross?) Anyway, currently this one is my favorite, a tiny house with tilted walls: Pentagon Cabin: Ann. If you ignore the way the human-figure-for-scale silhouette lying in the bed has zero details besides carefully-drawn breasts and fanned-out hair.

But anyway. The idea of a tiny house with a little loft bedroom and room for a couch downstairs to put Farmkid on is perfectly reasonable, though I also would really really like the idea of having a screened-in porch, because for most of the time I'm there, I'd get a bunch of use out of that. The main thing I was starting to chafe at, during my time in the yurt, was that I had nowhere to sit that wasn't in my bed, which is not exactly good ergonomically or from a, like, trying to do some writing now and then kind of perspective. But I also really wished I had an outdoor place to sit, safe from rain and bugs. So a screen porch is like... pretty high on my wishlist.

However, I was scrolling mindlessly through Pinterest last night and happened to see a floor plan that I realized was a carriage house. And it struck me, that'd be a really great approach to the sugar shack + small apartment concept. A small carriage house, with the utility shed on the lower floor, and an apartment on the upper floor. The one I saw even had a small balcony, which seemed absolutely fantastic. But.

Thinking about this has been entertaining, for sure, and will continue to be, but I do have to sort of interject that I am probably going to have to throttle back quite a bit on this whole concept. Like... I have a house. My personal budget for this is probably like a thousand dollars. My parents will undoubtedly insist on helping with this (they've loaned/given money/assistance to my sisters for various reasons, and have provided childcare and other logistics assistance to all three sisters also for various reasons-- naturally, more for the grandchildren's sake than anything else, but also for my childless sister, who's needed bailed out of a few things here and there and in general suffers from a combo of bad luck and poor money management and whose cat they've wound up with and so on-- and occasionally express to me that they feel bad that I'm so relatively neglected, and so will probably want to assist in this), and I'm glad to let them but I'm also really keen to keep it fairly minimal because honestly I don't actually need a beautiful vacation home on the farm, y'know? I just need a reasonably watertight guest bedroom.
Also my sister and BIL, the actual property owners, who would likely use the building for more than just housing me, have very little time or money to contribute to this, but should really have their wishes respected.
So...
My challenge is going to be to finish the daydreaming and extract out everything useful and realistic that I can get from it-- including if I find anything useful in the wild flights of fancy that are amusing me most-- and then make my little presentation on it, probably at Thanksgiving where my tiny-house-obsessed nephew will be present.

But that means I still have like a solid week free during which I can just daydream, so. I've requested some books from the library...

I don’t know what this is

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bomberqueen17:

An Age Of Ultron reaction snippet. I don’t know where this came from or what I mean it to lead into. Steve, Tony, Wanda, coffee, and a discussion of deep dark fears. 

“Fuck,” Steve said, groping hastily for a dishtowel to stop the spread of coffee across the counter. Tony opened his mouth, and Steve glowered at him. “If you even open your fuckin’ mouth right now, Stark—“

“You’ll what?” Tony asked. “What will you to do me, huh?”

“You don’t want to find out,” Steve said.

“Creative,” Tony said, nodding thoughtfully. “Well, about as creative as I’d expect from a man with no dark side.”

Wanda, hithertofore unnoticed at the table behind him, laughed sharply, then cut herself off. Tony turned to look at her. “What,” he said.

“I said nothing,” she said, innocent.

“No, no,” Tony said, “that wasn’t a nothing laugh. You were laughing at Steve not having a dark side, and I know you’ve seen it. Spill, Spookypants.”

“Nicknames like that do not endear you to me,” Wanda said darkly over the edge of her coffee cup, but Steve could see she wasn’t really offended. “But come now, Stark, how long have you known Rogers? You sincerely believe he has no dark side?”

Tony squinted at her, then looked over at Steve, who made his expression as neutral as he could muster as he cleaned up the spilled coffee. It had, of course, been the last of the coffee, and he of course had to put a new pot on and wait for it, and while Stark’s machines were incredibly fast at making coffee, it still meant he had to stand here for this.

“The rest of us were all rattled as fuck from your little stunt,” Tony said, “and Steve came out of it fresh as a fuckin’ daisy. What conclusion am I gonna draw from that?”

Wanda sipped from her cup, then stuck the saucer over the mouth of the cup, swirled it, and set it upside down, still connected. She held it for a moment, watching the outside of the cup where nothing was visible, and then picked up the cup, and considered the resulting sludge on the saucer. Maybe, Steve reflected, that hadn’t been coffee she was drinking. Tea?

She poked idly at the mess on her saucer with a finger. “I think you have it backwards, Stark,” she said. “It is not that Rogers has no dark side. It is that he has nothing but a dark side. I could not show him anything he did not already know. The worst things he can imagine have happened already to him.” She looked up, and smiled at both of them, a tight sad little smile.

Steve set his jaw and looked down, wishing he’d just given up on the coffee and left before this. Tony was staring at him but he wasn’t going to return the look, not now.

“You’re telling me Captain America is all dark side,” Tony said.

“No,” Wanda said. She stood up and came over to rinse her cup and saucer in the sink. Belatedly Steve recognized Turkish coffee, and wondered why he hadn’t thought of that before. Of course this kitchen had equipment to make Turkish coffee.

“Then what the fuck did you mean by that?” Tony demanded.

She ignored Tony for a moment, looking up at Steve, who made himself meet her gaze. “There is nothing left to fear,” she said, and her voice was unexpectedly kind. “You have already lived through the worst, and it has broken you.”

“He hardly looks like a broken man,” Tony said, gesturing, but Steve looked at him then, and could see his doubt.

“Neither do I, I daresay,” Wanda said, “but once you have already lost everything, there is not a great deal you can hide from yourself, down in the dark corners of your soul.”

Tony blinked at her, blinked at Steve, and took a step back. “This is a damn disconcerting conversation,” he said.

“Well, Stark,” Wanda said, “you did ask for it.”

(was going thru, for some reason, my Tumblr archives from 2015, and found this, which is probably in the Full of Grace ‘verse, which I haven’t revisited, but I rather liked it, so I’m reblogging it for those of y’all who didn’t follow me then. 

Man AoU was such a dumb movie.)

Interviewer: Suppose your house were on fire and you could remove only one thing. What would you tak

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Interviewer: Suppose your house were on fire and you could remove only one thing. What would you take?

Jean Cocteau: I would take the fire.