{"id":72417,"date":"2013-12-07T14:00:13","date_gmt":"2013-12-07T19:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=72417"},"modified":"2013-12-06T13:55:56","modified_gmt":"2013-12-06T18:55:56","slug":"bag-lady","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/polyamory\/bag-lady\/","title":{"rendered":"Bag Lady"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Maria Padhila<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know how long Isaac and I would have yelled at each other if the repairman hadn\u2019t rung to get buzzed in. We\u2019ve been doing major renovations in our condo after a flood took out the downstairs bedroom and bathroom this summer, and on top of that, the other day the dishwasher runneth over. <\/p>\n

\"Poly
Poly Paradise at Burning Man. Photo by Eric.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The dishwasher is known around the house as the George W. Bush Memorial Dishwasher, because we replaced it sometime after 9-11, when the then-president gave selected households checks for a couple hundred bucks and told them to go shopping for America. Given its origins, it shouldn\u2019t be surprising that every so often the dishwasher and the disposal get mixed up and start choking on each other\u2019s drainages, resulting in a countertop flood. The dishwasher is doing a heckuva job.<\/p>\n

But the downstairs flood is what has touched off the topic of dispute between me and my legal husband. The day before, while I was at work, he had made one of the usual three or four calls the reconstruction has made necessary — there\u2019s always some question about where something needs to go — and he told me he\u2019d put some things in the trash room.<\/p>\n

Over the past decade, I\u2019d shoved a lot of stuff into my closet. One of the things I asked for in the flood renovation was to turn my big closet into a storage area we could all use — something that could hold the camping supplies, for instance, so they didn\u2019t fill up the entryway. This meant that when the construction people put in new floors and drywall, they also reconfigured the big closet space. I had to take everything out. It is now in boxes and bins stacked all over the one usable room of our place. Isaac and I have been sleeping on an air mattress for a month. I have been living like a bag lady. [This really gets the message<\/a> across musically, and is worth the watching.] We\u2019re a little touchy. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Compared to many women in my demographic (work in an office in a city), I don\u2019t have a lot of clothes and shoes. Certainly not compared to those in the influx of new wealth fueled by war spending that\u2019s hit Washington, D.C., in the past few years. I feed on the edges of some of that, and I\u2019m able to telework at home in sweats sometimes, so I can get away with a wardrobe that\u2019s mostly black and old, low pumps and pantsuits, never quite in or out of style; you just trade out some blouses once in a while. Some refer to it as rocking \u201cThe Hillary Clinton,\u201d though she\u2019s become more stylish in recent years. (It made it easier to live out of one storage bin for a month.) I don\u2019t have to show up looking memorable or current. I have no idea how some women do it. I see them walking K Street in heels and my mouth drops open. Stockings. Accessories. Every day. I admire the evidence of care and energy and hope I will never have to come up with it.<\/p>\n

All that\u2019s to explain that it became easy to shove stuff into the spaces unoccupied by clothes. Mostly things I had to worry about in the baby-proofing, years ago. Art with disturbing images. Fragile ceramics. Sharp edges.<\/p>\n

And written material. I have lots of books. No, I don\u2019t know how many. Yes, I have read most of them — not all, but most. Yes, I understand that books are now all available on The Internets and so I should throw them all away. Yes, I have heard of the Internet. No, I am not a hoarder. Yes, I know there are libraries. No, I don\u2019t think that once I read a book I should get rid of it. Yes, I often read books more than once (I have some I\u2019ve read probably more than 20 times). Yes, I do look in many of them from time to time. Yes, I use them for reference in my writing. Yes, I know the Internet provides references. <\/p>\n

Internet references often suck. The ones that don\u2019t are behind firewalls you have to pay for (professional journals, hello Aaron Swartz). Books and magazines from small presses, poetry, fanzines, graphic novels, art books, feminist manifestos, punk zines — these things don\u2019t get put on the Internet; they don\u2019t go into second printings. When they\u2019re gone, they\u2019re gone. <\/p>\n

And this has nothing to do necessarily with their quality, usefulness, or beauty. Sometimes they vanish because it serves those with power for the record of these events or ideas to perish. If we\u2019re lucky, they\u2019re rediscovered — the book 12 Years a Slave<\/em> was forgotten by most for about 100 years. One of my favorite quotes, which I\u2019ve heard attributed to Brian Eno: \u201cAnalog corrupts, but digital corrupts absolutely.\u201d That is, you can still read an old scroll that\u2019s been nibbled by moths around the edges. You can\u2019t read a damaged disk.<\/p>\n

But my stuff — the stuff I\u2019ve been shoving away, keeping out of everyone\u2019s way for years — has more meaning, of course, than one could see in those logical arguments. I\u2019m aware of that, as well.<\/p>\n

Isaac had no idea all that stuff was back there in my big closet. \u201cWhere are all these books coming from?\u201d he asked. He started challenging me on whether I \u201creally needed\u201d all this stuff. <\/p>\n

This is the rap I\u2019ve had to go through with a number of people in my life. And it was the rap I had to go over with Isaac the other day — with anger fueled by the hurt of, again, not being understood; of having to unpack these hurts all over again.<\/p>\n

I never felt as though I were allowed to take up any space on this Earth. As the \u201caccident\u201d on the tag end of a large family, I was in the way — I even felt guilty for eating, most of the time. As I went out on my own, I dragged a stack of boxes from group house room to studio apartment to basement storage room, sometimes with a place of my own, but rarely with enough time free from work or spent in any one place to really unpack and settle in.<\/p>\n

A few years back, I began exploring my relationship to stuff, going a year attempting not to buy any new stuff. The kind of awareness generated by opening the door to even thinking about \u201cstuff\u201d has been something I\u2019ve cultivated and benefited from ever since. My relationship to stuff has changed and shifted through action and reaction. I\u2019ve felt as if I had no right to have any stuff of my own at all. I\u2019ve felt guilty about my stuff and felt I\u2019ve had to hide it. I\u2019ve felt encumbered by my stuff and experimented with trying to be free of all of it, to live without stuff of my own volition, not because it was taken from me. <\/p>\n

I think one of the many reasons Chris came into my life is so that I could explore this relationship to \u201cstuff.\u201d With the major Capricornage in his chart, he believes nothing made today could possibly be as good as the way it was done in past times. He believes everything can be repaired, made to work again. It is a beautiful thing in a person, except when you are trying to brush your teeth in his bathroom and there are screws, nails and various small parts everywhere and you realize the toothbrush you were about to use has been employed to scrub rust off something. He also has a lot of Virgo, which means he can\u2019t bear to throw away something that might be of use.<\/p>\n

Isaac, a triple Virgo, has a different variant of the same thing — he can\u2019t bear to keep something around that isn\u2019t being used (or could be used elsewhere). And I\u2019m airy as fuck, which means I just shove it all in a closet and go la la la<\/em>, pausing once in a while to overthink it. Until I realize that the one of five existing copies of a hand-printed chapbook by probably the most gifted poet I\u2019ll ever know, a sort of male Emily Dickinson, might have been dropped off outside the Goodwill, because in my haste to prove I don\u2019t need any stuff, I\u2019ve failed to honor the important stuff.<\/p>\n

In exploring my attachment and nonattachment to stuff, I\u2019ve realized how it houses meaning and memory, becoming a sort of external hard drive of times past and possibilities imagined. This is the stage I\u2019m in now. I literally put away pieces of my life when I married and had a child, and I\u2019m now unpacking them. I need the chance to look through them, feel the realities and the symbols there, and above all decide for myself. <\/p>\n

So when Isaac put my movie poster of John Woo\u2019s The Killer<\/em> in the trashroom, I wasn\u2019t just ticked because I have a thing for Chow Yun-Fat. Which I totally do. I was hurt because the object held my past as a film writer, my dreams of writing a screenplay, the times when I could see violent films without thinking twice, the afternoon in the hotel suite when I interviewed John Woo, an introspective, deeply spiritual man, while he talked haltingly about his difficult childhood in Hong Kong. <\/p>\n

And now there\u2019s no place to put it. Not on the wall, not in the closet. I don\u2019t even know if I could give it away. <\/p>\n

Living with people is hard. We all bring our stuff, and we can\u2019t find places to put it. We can\u2019t always agree with what we want on the walls. I\u2019ve been in houses with kids where the kids have stuck random stickers and pictures on the wall. It looks so sloppy and chaotic, but you know what? The kids live there, too. Why is it taken for granted that the parents control the space and all the stuff in it? It\u2019s just an interesting question — I\u2019m not saying we should all start tagging everything or leaving our toys everywhere. But it\u2019s a question. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s even harder to know what to do with stuff when you go outside the couple model. Everyone brings their own to the table, in an unmatched collection of dishes, plastic and silver and enameled iron. There\u2019s sweet pie spilling out of a crumbling crust and showpiece carrots cut into rosettes. If we\u2019re all going to make this work, maybe some of us need to bring less. Maybe some of us need to make room for more. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Maria Padhila I don\u2019t know how long Isaac and I would have yelled at each other if the repairman hadn\u2019t rung to get buzzed in. We\u2019ve been doing major renovations in our condo after a flood took out the downstairs bedroom and bathroom this summer, and on top of that, the other day the … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7221,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[207],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72417"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7221"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72417"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72417\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}