Different Mixers [Man and Bits of Paper]

Four years ago when I lived in Massachusetts for a summer, I moved into a spacious but unfurnished apartment. As a present, my mother bought me a set of something like seventy cooking items from Ikea. They came in a big box, densely packed, and heavy as all hell.

I knew, when I took everything out of the box and arranged it all around the kitchen, that they would never, ever go back into the box again. Just by unpacking it, I had disturbed so much of the box's internal structure that I could not stack things inside
of it as neatly as they had been.

That point when I had opened the box but before I had removed anything was the neatest and most complete that set would ever be.

At present, I can tell you for certain where perhaps twenty of those seventy items are. Most of those twenty are infrequently used, hyper-specific tools, and I'm not sure why I even own them. I have a garlic crusher. I don't crush garlic. I have a lemon squeezer. I don't squeeze lemons.

I have, however, wondered why those two tools are fundamentally different in structure, when they do almost the same mechanical action onto similar products.

I think one of the measuring cups has survived.

I think.

I do own, however, about thirty unrelated cookware items that I know for a fact I never purchased.

My theory, at this point, is that that cookware set and I have gone through six or seven moves in the past four years, and have been housed with six or seven roommates, each with their own set of stuff.

The kitchens, in all cases, have been integrated ones- everyone's pots living with everyone else's, a communal knife drawer, etc. Moving out is always something rushed, and hiding behind those drawers and cabinets, cookware is usually forgotten until last. One doesn't always see the proper pan lid hiding in the sink, and one could miss the plate that is in a roommate's room.

I am as guilty as my roommates- over time I just sort of took stuff that I thought was mine, and, three or four or seven pieces at a time, I began substituting their cookware for mine, and now I have fractions of many distinct sets of cookware, and they certainly don't add up to a whole. I have three pots and four potlids, but the lids are for pots I do not own.

Additionally, a lot of that stuff is cheap and breakable. I think of the fifteen plates I once bought, three remain, and one of them is chipped. I do, though, possess an unrelated set of twenty floral plates that I would never in a million years purchase, but yet somehow possess.

In any case, when we move I will be abandoning all of it, save three items, all of them by chance, from Crate and Barrel, and all Christmas presents, though they were different Christmases.

The first is a circular spatula full of holes, that my sister got me for cooking pirogues.

The second is a cast iron skillet my mother got me, for cooking all sorts of stuff.

And the third is rigel's vegetable steamer that her mother got her for, well, self-evident vegi-steaming.

As for everything else?

There are plenty of Ikeas in California, and plenty of roommates here who want to cook with my strange cookware.

How to Rid Yourself of Books [Man and Bits of Paper]

I will start with a declarative. More than any other possession, books are hard for me to let go of.

I hold the printed word in such high regard that I can sometimes lend books (but only to the trustworthy), rarely give books away (but only to the special), sometimes sell them (but I am always frustrated that they are not worth as much to others as they are to me), and never, never throw them out.

The one time I ever threw books away outright was when they had been stored over the summer in my friend's basement, and that basement had flooded. Not, you know, a big puddle flood. A foot deep of nasty groundwater seeping in from the hardest summer rainfall in a hundred years.

One or two big boxes of books and clothing were at the bottom of the pile of stuff, and after five minutes of examining them and choking on the clouds of mold emanating from them, I realized that exactly 0% was salvageable, and that both boxes should be summarily blackbagged and tossed.

I mean, of course, big industrial garbage bags for to hold trash. Not that each book should be disappeared fascist regime/ secret police style, bag-on-head. Wow- some sort of V For Vendetta / Fahrenheit 451 crossover is playing out in my head now.

And so we arrive at the problem- I am probably moving in the next few months. My apartment has approximately 30 linear feet of books in it. That's 250 pounds of books. I cannot move 250 pounds of books. Moving them across town was a bitch. Moving them across the country will either be painful or expensive or both.

Enter my friend Alan. Alan grew up about six hours northeast of Pittsburgh, in Middle-of-Nowhere-No-Really-We-Mean-It, PA. He has had two stays in Pittsburgh of around two years and then around one year, and although he loves the hell out of the city and its residents, he hasn't been able to stay permanently, due to ongoing financial crises of various sorts. He visited for the long weekend, and crashed on my couch (and it is a damn comfy couch too).

He even helped name this blog. The suggestion of TS Eliot's 4 Quartets beat out my idea of The Waste Land as a source of floral but effective language.

In any case, it occured to me sometime tonight that Alan is someone I trust. I trust him to not only not throw books away, but to appreciate the hell out of them the way he appreciates me, and the way he appreciates Pittsburgh. He is a man to which I would love to give books.

Given as well that he is a poor man, and can purchase perhaps a book or two a year, giving him as many books as he could take seemed like the best of all solutions.

Boxed in his car's trunk are about 60 books- a sixth of what I own. I have given them freely, without any sort of monetary solicitation, however paltry, from either party.

I want him to have these books.

True, they cost me money to buy when I did buy them, but that is money I don't remember spending. That is money that could have gone to movies or popcorn or something frivolous, but instead they went to paper, and the enjoyment of paper. I've gotten my pound of flesh from the books he's getting- they are all one's I've already read. And if I really need them again, its not like things go out of print anymore. No book I own is old enough that copies are rare, or even semi-rare. Half of them are mass-market paperbacks anyway.

True, keeping them is a comfort. Knowing that all that information, all those quotes and paragraphs and words are just at arms reach is a good feeling, a sort of warm blanket of information and phrase. But it can be smothering, and although a good feeling, it is just a feeling, and perhaps not as good as other feelings that not having so many damn books might allow. You cannot keep everything.

But everyone wins now.

Alan feels good- he has books, and he loves books. And they were filtered through me and my tastes, so they probably won't be crap.

I feel good. I'm three shelves lighter than I was this morning. It sounds sort of callous, but its one more thing I can check off on my List of Things to Do.

And the books feel good to, as they aren't being tossed, or disappeared, or thrown into a big Nazi fire, or turned into terrible, terrible sewer mold. They are being loved.

Just not by me.

Household Plant is Sad and Gone [Man and Bits of Paper]

Some time ago, I had some crazy architecture student roommates. Those times are now over, and have been for quite some time.

One of their stranger ideas was inherited from a crazy forty-something Russian one of them had stayed with in a sixth floor walkup in Brooklyn during an architecture conference. (Never thought I would say that sentence, but there goes) Rather than a shower curtain, he instead had a long, low pot (almost a trough) full of ferns and small plants. The splashings from the shower would fall into that and water the plants.

To mimic this, we bought a potted plant. Not a fern, a plant. One of those five foot tall fern-on-a-stick plants that doesn't need sunlight, or love. After a month of pulling fronds out of the drain and mopping up the spilled shower water brown with dirt, I bought a shower curtain and moved the plant to the living room.

I think I watered it once.

I think.

Today, I looked at it, and saw that all but three fronds had turned brown. I took it out to the dumpster. Tonight, I will watch the garbage man laugh and then crush it into planty death.

If it isn't dead already.

In any case, this is instructive as to how things go in my apartment- there is a weird thing, then it becomes a clutter problem, then it is ignored, and then I flip out and deal with it in the most final, regime-changing way I can.

I do not clean in halves.