fix home

I am ashamed (yet proud) to announce that my apartment is at last officially lit. ^{Yep, for months I’ve been making do with just sunlight, my computer screen, light from the neighbouring kitchen and entryway, and occasionally a dim lamp that I’d move from the bathroom to my room. There you go, one little step towards normality and self-respect…}

Thank you, mister bottle-of-drain-cleaner.

I keep thinking of getting my home to look right as one big goal. Maybe that’s a mistake. If I look at it as several little goals, perhaps it will be easier.

My life is complete :). The level of detail is amazing, if you want to have a poster printed, choose a super high res image, you won’t regret it. The size I chose was proportional to the image so they didn’t have to reframe it. I even got 20% off because the box had been opened by someone and it had a micro-fold on one of the corners (so I guess someone did consider stealing it !).

I’m in the middle of some cleaning (far from done), and apart from my laziness, a few bad habits of mine come to my mind that I think play a substantial part in my lair’s untidy state. As a reminder to myself but also, who knows, as a potential eye opener to other Feng shui-ly handicapped individuals, here are those I can put my finger on so far :

- all my furniture is against the walls. This is bad. I live on my own and don’t need that much space. Having a big empy area in the middle of your main room is an invitation to being messy. That’s where the coffee table should go, for one. The trickier walking around in your place gets, the bigger the necessity to be orderly should appear.

- my couch-bed is always in bed mode. This is originally for a couple of reasons : I have nowhere to store my mattress, the couch looks horrendous due to its former owner’s suspicious use of it. I don’t spend half as much time in bed as I did when I lived with my family, but still, the sight of a big comfy bed isn’t the best motivator when it comes to tidying up your place. Last weekend, I was staying with a bunch of pals who share an apartment : turns out they’re not half as anal as myself when it comes to cleanliness ; their couches are full of holes, there’s cat hair all over the place, the posters on the walls are all torn or askew, yet I found the atmosphere super convivial because it’s like they have nothing to hide, and everything was where it should be. So perhaps I should worry a little less about cleanliness and a little more about being actually orderly : I must be the only one out there with Spiderman eyesight who scans the surroundings for micro-stains like it’s an episode of Room Raiders. Better have a lousy couch that says “welcome” because everything else is relatively orderly than a technically aseptic-clean apartment that makes people run away because it looks like the forbidden west wing from Beauty and the Beast. First, take all your stuff off the floor, make your place spatially proper, then you can start to worry about nagging details. Not the other way around ! I folded the mattress and put it aside, it looks fine enough. I hid the couch with a big spread instead and it looks pretty decent.

- You know what I hate to do ? Dust desks and tables, because that means taking everything off them first then putting it back. Now I’m thinking : is there any way I could keep the furniture dust-free for longer intervals ? Yes, there is : vacuum/broom the floor more often, dust travels, the more you have on the floor, the more you’ll have on the furniture, simple as that. More important : don’t let your clothes party down there all week, they’ll have just as much fun in your cupboard ; dust loves your clothes, can’t help it, when you pick them up and shake them around, that right there is more dust to clean off your beloved desk.

Okay, I still have a lot on my hands and I think just those three should be important enough for you to reevaluate your whole life. More to come !

EDIT : found a way to fit the mattress inside the couch. Problem fixed ! Now instead of having it stay in bed mode during the day, seems I’m getting into the habbit of keeping it in couch mode at night. Which is fine by me, I like sleeping on the couch, it’s cozy ^{since I’m so alone :/...}

I would like to be able to feel relatively shameless about my house. I feel no desire to die but if I were to die and people were to go trough my stuff, I’d like to have nothing embarassing lying around ; I have so many papers filled with aborted texts, hundreds of drawings I hate etc. I know it’s silly but I’d like a place where everyone can walk around without me having to be on my guard. It feels like it would take a lifetime to achieve that though cause I can’t find the resolution to throw some things away and even when I do, I keep filling tons of paper with my thoughts in a matter of days. Perhaps I should be more organized in my creativity if there’s any such thing. For one it would allow me to actually finish projects :)

Now that I’ve officially been single for quite some time, I thought I shouldn’t be ashamed to embrace my inner geek :). At least I haven’t reached the playmate stage yet. Birthday present to myself !

PS : Guybrush looks like me when my tinnitus gets out of control. Now that I think of it, it could be that the reason behind it all is in fact an actual zombie pirate torturing me with voodoo tricks.

Did some more work to sort the place today but clearly not enough. At least I’m pretty much done moving things in (and almost all my brother’s stuff is gone, except the really big stuff for some reason, like the damn TV and exercise machine). I am so so so so so lazy. I’m beginning to be really worried about myself. When am I gonna grow up ? And will no one help me out of this mess ? I feel so lonely :(. Sorry for whining here again. I’m losing my bearings.

Today I went to apparently the biggest flea market in the world to look for a poster I had seen there years ago (it’s not on ebay etc nor can I find something equivalent). Obviously I didn’t find it although I was lucky enough to find the shop in the ocean of shops out there.

It’s just crazy because I asked one random guy, he said “posters ? ask my pal here : Hey, Jacques (or whatever his name was), this guy’s looking for posters”. Jacques (or whatever his name was) : “oh the posters shop, sure I know where it is, it’s my shop, I’m just hanging around here cause there’s f**ing nobody. Let me take you there ! What you looking for ?”. And he just walked me to the place which I would never have found otherwise !

He knew his stock by heart and showed me the only Pulp poster he had left but it was a rather tasteless album cover (from an awesome album though) and not a picture of the band itself or its singer, which for some reason is what I wanted (it’s just that Jarvis Cocker is so absurdly tall that I always thought he’d look funny on a door).

Since I had gone all the way there and my walls are awfully blank, I didn’t want to leave empty-handed, so I settled for the two least original posters in history : Audrey Hepburn and the Beatles. I’d probably cringe at anyone who owns the same posters but then if I leave my apartment empty I’m gonna be judged anyway so I might as well leave fake clues to my personality !

I like the Audrey Hepburn photograph cause she looks sweet and not too skinny on it ; I actually had the same one years ago (I confess) and when I felt sad or stressed I’d just glance to the two big calm eyes on the wall.

I’m not fond of the idea of having a poster of a film just because you like the film or of a band just because you listen to it, I like when it’s aesthetically pleasing otherwise I feel like I’m just randomly advertising myself. Decoration is so tricky : it takes either a lot of money, or a lot of patience, or a lot of talent, or a lot of comfort with ridicule : I tend to think in colours and moods, which is the kind of decoration that asks for considerable money, or talent (if you’re ready to do all the bricolage yourself) or patience (to find the right store that has what you want and is not expensive). The alternative for most young people, or young people in movies anyway, is just to paste lots of stuff on the walls that says “hey, I like this ! and this ! and this !”. I like some things and people too but I’m not necessarily comfortable with them surrounding me, most of my favourite bands look quite dorky anyway. I probably give all this too much thought, guess I’m too self-conscious, which is why I usually end up not decorating at all or not inviting anyone for that matter (when depression kicked in I just abandoned the idea altogether -well, my room for the last two years was really tiny so there was little point in having anyone over anyway). But I’m realising the point of a habitation is to be welcoming and not to make people want to worship your soul : it’s never too late to understand concepts 4 year olds are familiar with, I guess :s !

The Beatles one I bought because it’s from the late era, which is the one I like, but I didn’t want it in my main room because I just find it too obvious, so instead I hanged it in the entrance so that it’s the first thing you see when you leave the bathroom (you don’t really notice it otherwise) ; the effect is pretty funny because they’re crossing their arms, staring at you and looking super-judgemental, so the idea is that they’re going “did you wash your hands ? did you leave the seat clean ?”. I hope people will get it that way anyway. Shall I add speech baloons ?

Fixed the light in my main room. I won’t even say how long it’s been dead cause I’m ashamed. But now, hopefully, things will look a little merrier when the sun is down.