Hi readers,
I tried something a little different. This is a conversation I had with my friend K on a drive to Oregon this summer. We really did have this conversation, almost word for word, but when I transcribed it, I moved some pieces around and added explanation here and there to make it make sense and tell a more complete story. I don’t know what genre of writing it is anymore. Also, drawings.
—N
San Francisco is behind us; at least the slowest part of this long drive is over. It’s early in the summer and early in the day, but already hot, and the bridge is full of cars heading both directions. The parts of my legs that aren't covered in shorts are sticking to the bench seat and the sun slants harsh into the windshield, obscuring my vision as we drive east over the bay. Next to me, K is eating an apple. Our conversation, between sips from a thermos of warm coffee, has gotten interesting.
Me: How do we manage sentimentality in our lives?
K: What do you mean?
Me: I’m trying to figure out how to be a person who cares about my things, my objects, in a world where there are so many objects. How do we handle growing sentimental to inanimate things like pieces of art? And what do we do with them?
K: I’m curious about the lifecycles of objects as well. Think about plebeian art, handmade things like crocheted afghans and family heirlooms. We don’t want the stuff our grandparents want to pass down to us. It ends up in a box. It’s like we don’t have the capacity to hold onto it.
Me: Or we feel like we don’t have the time to organize it and care for it.
K: We don't have space for it! Or time. If our families, our grandchildren, can't value our sentimental objects, then no one will.
Me: Last year, my mom and dad and I cleaned out my uncle’s house after he died. He lived with my grandma for his entire life, and all of her belongings were still in the house. Sadly he hadn’t taken very good care of them and most of my grandma’s cherished things were kept in this leaky shed outside. They were all getting destroyed by rain and rot and mold in the years after she had died. Then, in the process of cleaning out the house last year, these squatters who were occupying the house ripped the storage area apart and threw all of my grandma’s stuff out into the mud during the rainy winter. All of these dolls, antique art pieces, magazines— getting smushed into the mud. I was there with my mom afterward trying to salvage things— school photos, report cards, wood carvings, all of these truly sentimental items coming out of this shed. My mom was like, Oh my god this was my childhood doll, these are my toys. This is my sister as a baby. And it was heartbreaking, tragic. But it was all already in the process of becoming garbage. Eventually I suggested to my mom that maybe the eventual destiny of these objects is that they get composted. That’s what happens to all things, that’s what will happen to f us. To try and embody that fully, I took all of these moldy comic books and I used them to mulch my lemon tree. Maybe the paper dye was bad for the soil, but where else were they gonna go?
K: It's eventually gonna get in the soil.
Me: Here’s another thing from that same time: my uncle, he stored about a hundred bottles of mead under his house. He kept bees and harvested the honey to make mead, and he stored all the mead under his back porch, I don’t know why. I was over there one day with my mom and I started pulling bottles out. They were wet and the seals were black or broken but the glass itself was fine, so I spent a few hours emptying rancid mead in the yard and then I took the bottles home and washed them. Now I'm making my own mead and storing them in the bottles. Maybe that's another thing about our sentimental items. Maybe they become useful somewhere, they store future mead. Someone is inspired by our creativity to make something else.
K: Was all that stuff (besides what you salvaged) put into a big dumpster?
Me: A lot of it went to the dump, which is definitely not in the composting spirit. There was this suit of armor that my uncle had created that my mom took home that is now in my parents' yard. He was an amazing artist. There was so much leatherwork and metal work. He wrote all these plays. The plays are in my closet now in binders. And I'm like, where do these plays go? Someone wrote a play. Shouldn't it be performed? Or digitized? Should it go on the internet? It's complete with lighting design and a score.
K: That's crazy.
Me: I have at least two plays in my closet.
K: Maybe we'll do them someday.
Me: At least we could do a reading. That would be fun.
K: I feel you. There's creativity always all the time. It can be done for money in a commercial context, or not. Something about these things your uncle made— he didn't make them being compelled by some employer or selling the plays, and that makes them more special. When I think about all the products we throw in the trash every day… Real humans made the things we throw directly into the trash! That flies under the radar for some reason.
Me: We definitely don’t treat most things as sentimental or precious at all. This whole notion came into my mind because I have these hard drives in my desk at home that contain these folders called "Nina stuff". It's my stuff from my family computer when I was in middle school. In like 2004, I spent a lot of time in these video game internet forums. In the forums, everyone had an image that was attached to their name when they made a post. I started designing these avatars and email signatures for people.
K: People would ask you for them?
Me: Yeah people would message me and I would design these images for them on Photoshop. I was like 12 years old. I saved them all and now I still have a folder on a hard drive of my digital art from the early 2000s. I was looking through it recently and it prompted this sentimentality question: Where does this live now? It's not taking up physical space, it's taking up digital space. But does it have a home? Is it an archive somewhere?
K: Totally. I have this lunchpail box that has become my sentimental letters box— letters, notes from friends and lovers. I have to ask myself, who digs through that stuff? No one except me, once in a while. Every time I move, my ritual is to confront the box and go through it. Otherwise, it's just crammed behind something in my room. But usually when I confront it, I become curious enough to open it up and see what's inside and that's why I keep it around. Most of the time I try to not keep things like that around; I travel pretty light. But it is funny. Like you don't know what to do with your old digital art, but maybe the purpose is for you to find it every couple years and scroll through and that's it. Because it is really only meaningful to you.
Me: Yeah. I mean it is a relic of a lost time… the video game forum culture of the early 2000s. But it doesn't really mean anything to anyone but me.
K: Like, do you want to print them and put them up on your wall?
Me: No.
K: But you don't want to delete them because that's unnecessary.
Me: Exactly. I guess that's what's kind of cool about the digital space, the amount of things that can be stored there.
K: At one point I wanted to experiment with zero sentimentality with objects. I remember ranting at my friend having a favorite pencil. Totally normal thing, like that's just the pencil he likes. I went on and on, talking his ear off about like how "that's just so stupid and dangerous. You’re gonna lose it. Why would you get attached to this transient object that's gonna break?" And he was like, "K, it's just my favorite pencil. I still have it."
Me: Ha.
K: Okay, this is also related. In the Berkeley Co-ops we had free piles, like a whole room in the co-op house that was full of free stuff. Most of it was discarded clothes. One day I was like, what if I didn't own a wardrobe? Because that's like a whole bunch of sentimentality, we associate our clothes with identity. And I was like, what if I used the free pile as my closet and I never kept any of the clothes?
Me: Like you'd just go down there every day and pick something out?
K: Yeah I never ended up doing it, but it was fun to think about. I wanna try that. I was too scared. I'm too attached to my clothes and who I think I am in them. But I was entertaining the idea. I think it would have been powerful.
Me: Totally, it would have been powerful. To just be like, this is what I am gonna do now. It would be so uncomfortable. At least I get really uncomfortable in the wrong clothing.
K: Totally. I am really specific about clothes.
Me: What would it feel like to let go of that and let the universe decide?
K: Yeah.
Me: You could still make your selections from among the free pile.
K: Right. There'd still be my judgement and preferences manifesting.
Me: But then what if someone would take your favorite things? Then they would go away.
K: I would start hiding my favorite things. And I'd end up with a wardrobe just as I was aspiring to avoid.