i love stuff perhaps a little too much and itās impossible for me to pick a single trinket but in general i think the stuff that i own thatās the most important to me at this point is stuff iāve gotten secondhand at estate sales vs just bought new. assigning a personal history to something older than myself, keeping things that meant something to someone else meaningful for a little while longer.
started going estate sale-ing summer after i finished college with a great friend i made at school, which feels like the start of becoming the me i am now and collecting stuff that i really intentionally wanna try and keep for the rest of my life. pictured below is a grail from my first ever estate sale: a yearbook from my school 100 years before my graduation.
itās the first thing you see when you walk into my apartment, the first place i lived in alone long-term - kinda wanna keep it by every entryway as i move apartments.
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Thereās something so cool about walking through someoneās former home and navigating their possessions. You get a feel for who they were and what they valued, and a sneak peek into their own personal treasure trove.
Someoneās last remaining items can have an entirely new life, and the world can have one less item in the landfill.
Itās like forming your very own chosen family of heirlooms and cherished valuables!
Jan 6, 2025
The opposite of decluttering. Iāve gotten watercolors painted by the departed, photographs of the people they cared about and had hung above the bed, a well-used typewriter from a mom-and-pop repair shop that no longer exists, and 19 sheepāall sold togetherāof various materials and so many other things.
Itās like a museum of strangers and cities passed and I like to think they know I cherish their memories and hold their lived dear.
May 29, 2024
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one of my childhood pleasures that have stuck w me since. i love realizing i own 2 things of the same nature and deciding to expand my collection HOWEVER it needs to be a sincere collection (something u build over a long period of time and where each item has a little backstory) as opposed to an artificial one (getting 30 items in one go from the same place.) so far i have a silver rings collection and a "rocks that have a strange shape or pattern" one!
Jan 17, 2025
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Mar 23, 2024
a treatise on the attention economy - checked it out on libby and got through it over the course of a work day, a lot of really interesting social and cultural explorations about how time itself is the final frontier of hypercapitalism and what decommodification of our attention and time should look like
the book starts with a story about the oldest redwood tree in oakland and how the only reason itās still standing is bc itās unmillable, and how being uncommercializable is essential to our survival. it ends with an exploration of alt social media platforms (mostly p2p ones) and what keeping the good parts of the social internet and rejecting the bad ones should look like
all in all a super valuable read; my only nitpick with the book is that odell isnāt just charting the attention economy but also attempting to āsolveā it and relate it back to broader concepts about labor and social organizing, but her background is in the arts which leads to some really wonderful references to drive the points home while also missing some critical racial + socioeconomic analyses that one would expect (or at least really appreciate) from the book she promises to deliver in the introduction. but this does also make the book easier to read which is good because everyone should definitely engage with what she has to say
will definitely be revisiting
Mar 25, 2024