Sorely Needed

The livability of my bedroom takes another lurching leap forward with the introduction of a bookcase. It's not new by any means. It's rather worn, and comes to me free of charge from friends who want for space more than furniture. In any case, I'm glad to have it. Previously, I had been storing my books in a variety of at best unconventional ways, and now I have them accessible and arranged in an aesthetically pleasing way for the first time in years.

Just before this, I had the books I meant to read piled up on an end table. You may recall, if I remember my own writing correctly, that I was very pleased with that development. This is because prior to that, all my books were boxed up and in the closet. The closet being as it is, they may as well have been on the moon for how quickly I could get to one that I wanted. It's not as if I had an inventory to consult in advance, either. It was less than ideal.

Smallest Sphere Of Influence

My room has lately undergone something of a transformation. I'm hesitant to say that it will be anything like permanent, because that is a place that perfectly exemplifies the principle of entropy as I understand it (which is not really well, I'm sure). Let's say that my room starts neat and clean. It'll stay that way for a few days, with the breakdown starting slowly. Inevitably, some kind of freak out will leave boxes and papers everywhere. I'll live with that for a period of time probably in months. The process is completed by a bookending freak out of cleaning.

Well, I had that second conniption the other day, and we'll just see how long I can hold it together. Something that encourages me is another development. I recently have acquired a string of small furniture items. A number of weeks ago I bought a chair from an attractive lady neighbor. It's really icing on the cake that the chair, weird-looking as it is, has been of value. It's rough around the edges, has a slender back and stands on three legs. I like it.

Desk? Yes.

I recently acquired a new used computer desk. I had the idea that it would be nice to have one for my laptop as well as the one I had already for the desktop computer. In the meantime though, it seemed as if it might be a handy thing to keep in the living room to help make up for our tragic lack of a couch. We have some chairs, but nothing to eat off of. Well, it hasn't exactly worked out for that, but I have been using it just for the laptop.

 The desk looks rather like that which might be used by the receptionist for an unimportant middle manager in some company. It's got a keyboard tray I don't use, and an area at the bottom where I can keep the laptop's case. It's been damaged some interesting ways, as though it was scorched by a fragmentation grenade or something. It works well enough, though. It certainly passes muster with me, if that means much.

Divots

I've never done any real golfing. I've done some mini-golfing (which is sometimes enjoyable but which can bring you to the point of tears as a child, I found). I lived around the corner from a golf course for years, but never did more than sneak onto the nearest green to sink some putts. What I'm getting to is that I never had the experience of creating a divot- that tear in the turf made by a vigorous attack on the form of the ball. They say you're supposed to fix it up before you go, though I don't see how that's a lasting repair.

I think of those divots whenever I find myself moving furniture about the home. This is not often. It's a hell of a think to see what has become of the space you forgot once it disappeared under a chair. Even if you're diligent enough to ensure that nothing important goes there and remains there, some rather interesting stuff can be seen, not the least of which is the depression made in the carpet by the legs of the furniture in question.

A Good Chair From She Of Beauty Fair

I seem to have a lot of opportunities fall into my lap. That is fortunate, since I would just as soon not do a lot of legwork. I never will have to if possibilities continue to present themselves at the rate they have begun to. I wonder if that 'Secret' thing could be true after all. If it's not that, it's something. I need certain little things, and then they come to me in some fashion. I certainly do hope that it keeps up for the foreseeable future.

A recent thing has been our need for furniture in this apartment, and a constant has been my interest in ladies. The two things coincided the other day. We need a coffee table, a couch, a proper dining table and chairs. Well, we still need most of those things, but we need one chair fewer thanks to one example of that  timeless pastime, ladies. It was a lady who lives on the very same floor of this building that I do who made this happen.

Emptying

I'm very adept at accruing possessions. They accumulate day by day, minute by minute, piling up and choking me, crowding me out of my home. They fill up my wallet, my bedroom, and cover the surfaces of everything over and over again, requiring the same treatment as snowbound streets. You'd think this would be true of everything, but that is regrettably not so. I manage to gather small items with no effort, but the problem is reversed with big stuff.

Furniture is somehow hard to come by. When we moved into the place I'm in now, we had a couch, a coffee table, a plastic dining table and a refrigerator. I personally had a bed, a dresser, a computer desk and a chair of dubious origin. We now have less than that. The couch, table and coffee table are gone. In truth, they could not be said to have ever been ours, but nonetheless we are worse off than we were a little over a year ago.

I'll Talk!

There I was, sitting in front of my computer and thinking about what I might write. You hear talk about what agony it is to stare at a blank page and not be able to come up with anything. In my experience, pressing like that is no way to come up with an idea. You've got to relax and wait for it to come to you. On this occasion, fortune smiled on me indeed, although it came in a form that I perhaps might have done without.

I was deep in thought, but a sharp sensation wrenched me out of it. It was pain, and I quickly traced it to my toe. Had I stubbed it? It seemed the most likely thing, but the pain was not of that nature. Wisely, I lifted my foot up to make a diagnosis. It was a quick one. There jutting out from underneath the toenail was a rather large splinter. I do apologize for the graphic nature of this, but I'm sure you appreciate that glossing over it would help nothing.

A Stable Platform

Sometimes I write on my laptop. I lay it on a table if I can, but will settle for the floor or my actual lap. The key is to have a steady, sturdy platform. I have to be careful, of course. Typing too hard is not good for the keyboard, which cannot be separated from the rest of the computer for replacement. The Qwerty layout is supposed to have been designed to make people ease up on the old typewriters, but that doesn't seem to be enough for me.

At least as susceptible is the keyboard for my other computer- a desktop model. I have a computer desk with a roll-out tray for the keyboard. I don't think I assembled it properly to begin with, and this was some ten years ago. It has since been disassembled and moved more than once. It's a questionable set-up at this point. One end of that tray is held into its mounting by entirely the wrong sort of screw. I don't know if it's from the original set or not.

What's A Desk?

I found myself recently contemplating once again the distinction between two different pieces of furniture. The great example of an ambiguous dividing line is that of the podium and those other things with which it is so consistently confused. There are lecterns, which are the thing people are mostly thinking of. A podium is what Olympians receive their medals on, among other things. There are also rostrums, or perhaps I should say rostri (if my Latin hasn't deserted me). It's a very muddled picture, and what authority is there to set people straight. Certainly the industry responsible for turning these things out has been derelict, and that may prove to be their undoing.

More clearly defined is something else that provoked me along these lines: the desk and the table. It's simple enough, and credit is due to someone for ensuring that the popular imagination, feeble as it is, has managed to seize upon the difference between them. A table is merely a plane affixed to four legs which bear the weight. It can be low or high, but it's a table. What makes a desk different? After a few moments' thought, of course it came to me. You're just adding some backing to three of the sides, and probably drawers to the front. It's sort of like the difference between ordinary pants and cargo pants, with the caveat that desks are for grownups and cargo pants really are not.