getting by with a little help from our friends (and my calendar)

First things first:

Sad Elephant is getting a new home!

Sad Elephant in his sad glory*

* photo included for reference in case you, like my father, are unaware that "Sad Elephant" refers to a couch. And in case you are also unaware, yes, the Philiraos name a large majority of their belongings.

Most likely, he'll be moving in with one of our dear friends, who likes him far more than her current couch. That is, if he manages to fit in the back of her brother's car. All signs (and measurements) point to yes.

Also, I would like to point out that it is a good idea to put things on one's calendar. When I called for my Salvation Army pickup, I wrote down the date on my scratch pad. I entered the date, time, and confirmation number into my phone, along with the number to call and change the appointment.

The date was Friday, November 4th.

I proceeded to transmute this date into Friday, October 28th, aka: tomorrow. Pretty sure I did that out of desperation to get Sad Elephant out of our house. He kinda-sorta fits in the room (space-wise), but he's really impinging on our pilates practice space. And my pilates practice in general.

Yes, a couch refuses to let me exercise. New couch doesn't help the situation, as it is really freaking comfortable.

Husband and I are really happy that someone we know is taking Sad Elephant. True, we have been eager to get rid of him and move on to our modern living room, but we still have an emotional attachment to the couch. We've spent probably a year cuddling on that couch, if that's possible. (I did the math. Five years living together, a few hours a day spent cuddling on the couch, we've probably spent a year on it. What? We're excellent cuddlers. We'd win gold in the cuddle olympics.) This is not to say that we will go over to our friend's apartment and cuddle on our former couch. That would be weird. Cuddlers, yes. Weird, no. (At least we try not to be.)

So, in this situation, we'll have visitation rights. We're giving the couch up for adoption. It's a great way to treat your furniture. Show it that it's still loved, just by someone else now.

Best part of all of this?  Because the Salvation Army pickup is actually next Friday, if the couch refuses to fit in the back of the car, it still has someplace to go, and I don't have to wait for another appointment. (Because the Salvation Army has the waiting list of a really fancy restaurant. For serious.)

I hope, for everyone involved, this works out painlessly.

I hope, in the future, I will stop referring to pieces of furniture with personal pronouns.  (Haven't determined if new couch is masculine or feminine. Perhaps neuter. I think it refuses to gender identify, as it is modernist.)

downsizing the library (or: why i'm a literary pirate)

Update: For a much smarter way to say some of the things I attempted below, see this post on Apartment Therapy.

I have a Masters in English. Throughout grad school, I called myself a "literary pirate."

Why? Specifically because in addition to the late works of Thomas Hardy, I truly appreciate the pleasure of young adult novels. Trashy ones, often times. I have read Twilight and although it is hardly well written, I appreciated it for what it was: a young adult romance full of misguided angst. (I didn't like the controlling hero or the heroine's self-definition through her love interest, but something about the crappy writing pulled me in and wouldn't let me go until it was all over.)

I have also worked in romance publishing. For a small, independent, mass-market publisher that couldn't hold on to good writers because it couldn't pay them what larger houses could. I have read a lot of mid-grade romance. And there are plenty of worse things I could have done for eight hours a day.

This could easily turn into a treatise about the values of popular fiction. I won't go there. Suffice it to say, I love to read and my tastes are not as discriminating as I once thought.

And I love books. I never thought I'd see the day when I'd even ponder buying an e-reader. I also never thought I'd see the day that I wouldn't by CDs, but that day has come and gone.

I love books, but I also love trees. And if trees don't have to die--or I don't have to be surrounded by dead trees--in order for me to read a book, I am all about that.  My expansive library had, in recent years, turned into a burden. It haunted me a little. I was already reeling from the fact that even after the purchase of a rather large bookcase a few years ago, I have no room for any more books. And then I went to grad school and had to buy probably 50 more. Husband has books from his parents' house and from grad school that live in boxes because we simply have no room for them.

And you know what's not happening to these books while they're littering my shelves and decorating my walls? They are not being read. And at the end of the day, a book is meant to be read. The majority of books are not decorative. The ones I have--mainly novels--are not coffee table books. They are gorgeous when they're all lined up, but that, in my opinion, is not their purpose. I'm a defender of literacy and someone who must have a book with her at almost all times. I read on the subway, I read in order to fall asleep, I read when I'm bored, I read for utmost pleasure. I can honestly say that, in my memory, there has never been a time when I wasn't reading a book. Meaning, there has never been a moment when you could ask me, "What are you reading?" and I wouldn't have an answer. I am always reading. I may have just started, I may be in the middle, or I may be desperate to get to the end, but I always have a book to go home to. But only read one book at a time. It's only physically possible to read one book at a time.

Ergo, I have hundreds too many.

I had to be vicious.  I had to be a pirate about it. I had to loot my library indiscriminately and box it up without thinking too hard about it. I would only keep things that met very specific criteria (favorite authors and books, gifts, anthologies, and things like Proust had to stay). I also did this when Husband was out, because he's not quite a literary pirate yet.

I packed until I ran out of boxes, and 175 books later we have significantly downsized our library. Husband came home, looked sad, forced me to babble something like I did two paragraphs ago, and then proceeded to unpack his boxes of books from other locations and pack a lot of them up as well.

I think the folks at the Salvation Army are getting a great deal. Since they're getting the better part of the library of a literary scholar (in pirate guise), these books are annotated. I took out about 6 Post-It pads worth of notes, flags, and other sticky items. Would I want to buy already-underlined and marked up books? No. But maybe someone else will, and they'll learn from my notes and underlining.

I also defiantly left my name in most of them. It's like writing your name on a dollar bill. Maybe I'll get it back one day.

Here are the results:

Note: These were full.

Not shown: three more boxes.

It's a disorganized mess, but the books are going to a better place, where they will ideally be sold to people who will read them and love them. There's Dickens and Austen in there, Flaubert and Turgenev, Bronte and Bridget Jones's Diary.

I'm already having thoughts--I kept a Christopher Rice novel to reread and now I want to reread all my Christopher Rice books--but I know I'll feel better when I have new, light shelves covered with meaningful artifacts from our travels and our life.

Salvation Army just needs to come now so I don't have any more time to think about it.

What about you? Does the mere idea of downsizing your library make you rock and suck your thumb? Or have you always had a carefully pared-down collection?

shedding some light on the situation

As mentioned previously, lamps have given me a minor headache. Or a major OCD attack. You see, I have two fixations I'm trying to work though while simultaneously redecorating our living room. They are as follows:

• I have what I have recently termed an unhealthy obsession with symmetry.
• I am extremely rigid in my ideas of what matches.

 Are these necessarily bad fixations? In the scheme of things, no. A little symmetry never hurt anyone, and in the long run, rigid matching is more attractive than not matching at all. But I think they're limiting me. They came to a head when it came to lamps.

First I immediately thought we needed two matching lamps to go on our end tables. Because that's just what you do, right? This directly butts heads with Husband's and my lighting needs and preferences. I like what could be termed "mood lighting." I (pretty vehemently, maybe violently) dislike overhead lighting. Husband of course likes lots of lighting and thinks overhead lighting is pretty effective at that. Our living room and bedroom have ceiling fans (an awesome feature in a New York apartment, I might add), which conveniently feature lights. I get a little stabby when Husband turns them on, particularly in the bedroom. Overhead lights are, to me, for the kitchen. For places in which you'll be working. Not for cozying-up places. I prefer not to be on display while cuddling up watching Dancing with the Stars. Husband also likes what I term "funeral parlor lamps." You know, floor lamps whose fixtures face upward like this. Apparently they are traditionally called "torcheres." I take my terminology from my mother, and I have seen them in funeral parlors. I think they're fine for providing additional lighting, but not for right-by-the-couch task lighting. I'm not saying Husband wants these as our primary lamps. He just likes them more than I do.

Keep these differences in mind as we proceed.

Next, my rigid matching problems. This extends to all areas of my life that involve matching. Dressing, makeup, decorating, perhaps even cooking. And I'm really anal about it. I currently think our throw pillows don't adequately match with our rug. Time the throw pillows spend directly adjacent to the rug? Zero. So I'm going with it, because they aren't diametrically opposed and coordinate enough not to be jarring. When first thinking about lamps, and their shades in particular, I wondered if they were supposed to match the rug. I don't know why I chose the rug as the item in the room they should definitely match. Balance? Something at that height should match something on the floor? I just wanted to be weird? Probably the latter.

I got over that pretty quickly, because if I hadn't, my lamp shades would need to look like an abstract aerial view of the Midwest in order to match my rug precisely.

So whatever darn shade comes with the lamp I like is the shade that the lamp will wear for the foreseeable future. Unless the lamp randomly comes with a shade screen-printed with, like the Kardashians or large dice or perhaps some chevrons. I have chevron issues. Also Kardashin issues. Dice are fine.

In order to break myself of the symmetry habit--and focus on balance instead--I thought maybe we could each pick out a lamp. Thus satisfying the new balenced-not-crazy-symmetrical initiative and our different lighting needs and preferences.  Ergo: I get a table lamp on "my" side of the couch, and Husband gets a standing lamp on "his" side of the couch. (He really likes lighting to be high. He is rather tall, but less so when he is sitting on the couch.)

Here are our ideas:

Possible table lamp for me (from West Elm)

Possible standing lamp for Husband (from CB2)

Putting them next to each other like that rankles both my matching and my symmetry tendencies, so I'm going to try and write them away. The lamps are similar in these ways:

• Exposed cords (the glass jar lamp's cord runs through it, while the standing lamp's cord runs down the whole of it [and allows you to adjust the height!]).
• Drum shades (not exactly the same size, but the same shape).
• White shades (it doesn't look that way in the top photo, but the glass jug's shade is actually white.
• Organic materials. True, a glass jug is nothing like a wooden frame, but they're both organic materials. The wood frame definitely has sharper lines, but it does complement the round glass bottom...by being the exact opposite? 

I think I'm okay with it. I sort of prefer the wood over a metal floor lamp, just because both glass and metal might be too shiny (and sterile?), and the wood adds warmth. And our room is cozy. We'd like to keep it that way.

Of course, now that I say this, we will go see these lamps in person and Husband will not like his lamp. He is unsure about the exposed cord, which is bright blue. I can work with it, I think. I will probably like the glass jug lamp in person, as my only qualification for a lamp was "glass jug base." Since it's called the Glass Jug Table Lamp, it's obviously meant for me.

As soon as we began looking at lamps, we discovered how much more expensive they were than what we'd hoped. Everyone wants a $30 lamp, right?  But we figure these, like our couch and rug before them, are long-term investments. We hope to have these lamps for years and years (hence our deliberation and blogging about them so darn much), so spending upwards of $100, while not a drop in the bucket, is something we can rationalize in the long run.

Yeah, this isn't a blog about saving money in home design. This is a blog about "re"-decorating an apartment you never decorated to begin with. (Hence the "re.") Investments abound.

We are saving money in other places. Wait till you see my blog about wall art!