I just made a huge decision I’ve been avoiding for a long time. Instead of panicking like I’d imagined I would, I feel calm, with a terrible headache. My heart is numb.
Can we still hold each other?
Don’t aim for anything - collect meaningful stuff. This is my problem with this sort of decor - everyone is in a rush to cultivate a design personality instead of developing one. The cool shit in our grandparents house? It’s there because they bought it in 1945 and never threw it away. These apartments and Dwell spreads always look cold, mainly because there’s no personality, no life, no anima (what’s up Grosse Pointe). Buying an old sewing box to hold your decorative arrows because you saw it in a magazine and it looked cool isn’t as exciting to me as someone who went to a local furniture store and picked out some plain old wooden box they liked. Rooms like the one pictured above say nothing to me about the owner’s style or interests - it only tells me that they read Apartment Therapy and have an eBay account. Our grandparents’ homes had soul. We don’t have soul - we have blueprints for style, and it feels empty.Fuck your map.
I’m fascinated by and addicted to thinking about this tumblr, mostly because I wonder what the opposite would be? What would a satisfying decor be to the people who are fed up with terrariums, vintage maps, and Eames chairs? I’m mostly wondering because this is what I want for my own home. I don’t want my house to look like every other apartment/house in Apartment Therapy and Dwell. When I visit the antique mall (that might be my problem right there) with my mom, I have to remind her and myself: no Eames. Nothing Danish. We have plenty of that, and we’re starting to look like a mid-century museum. So we look for primitive wood bowls and milking stools (my favorite stepping stool in the antique mall, in a booth of antique fishing equipment, is “Not For Sale,” unfortunately). But isn’t this just as much of a design THING? What should I be aiming for? Puffy couches and particle board shelves? Will this become the new THING?
Maybe the point is I shouldn’t be aiming at all?
(This goes for everyone’s obsession with Pinterest as well, where I keep seeing identical rooms posted over and over again, when all I want to see pinned are the types of things found by Andy at Reference Library and Leslie Williamson’s photography of the interiors of artists’ homes.)
I agree. Our generation wants everything now, complete and immediate. We gotta learn to let some things simmer.
For the last few days I’ve had to resist an intense urge to pack a bag and take off in the car without telling anyone. Of course in the fantasy, I wouldn’t come back. I build it - there would be coffee and music and fuck, why not pick up smoking again. I would pull out of our apartment building’s parking lot where almost all my belongings sit by the dumpster and not even look at them. I might even snicker a little fear-snicker. Anything to convince myself this is the fix.
I’d drive to the coast, find a little beachside hotel room. Not THAT one of course, but another one. Full of pride and faux-sincerity and whisky, I’d resist another urge to draw on the walls and punch holes in them. I’d imagine the blood on my knuckles and how it would hurt but I wouldn’t cry. Because my leaving made me that tuff.
You ask me why I don’t leave. I say it’s because I’d last hardly a weekend in that room before realizing I was trying to leave myself behind, and goddammit if I didn’t follow me.
What animal does this to herself?
(Source: thechocolatebrigade)
