Colleen's Paper Doll Book: Princess Diana

The Princess Diana Paper Doll Book has not been properly utilized in years, not even employed with looking kitschy on the coffeetable. I probably received it sometime between age four and seven from either my paternal Grandparents or my Aunt Sarah. I have narrowed it down to these two sources, owing to that it always resided at my Grandparents house until I was a teenager and brought it home for one reason or another, and the fact that my Aunt was an avid royalty-watcher (she subscribed to Royalty Magazine and took the day off from work at the FBI the day Diana and Charles got married to watch to spectacle on television). It was one of those diversions I kept at the Grandparents' house to have kiddy somethings to do when I visited Potomac from the then still-emerging suburb of Gaithersburg. My brothers' interests proved to be more tricky to pin down, and, as such, they were enticed to visit with a Nintendo 64 (which Matt and I now possess), as my parents did not allow video gaming in the house (computer gaming was acceptable) until I was old enough to not care about the oppression anymore.
While I myself have never had a fascination with the titled ones (unless you count the Western royalty mocked on www.thesuperficial.com), I remember enjoying dressing Diana up in tabbed frockery galore. Her sentimental value has only increased in the past year, as my Aunt passed away last summer from ovarian cancer.


Grade: I know this is a cop-out, especially since this is my first actual thing graded, but it gives me a sick feeling in the innards to...It is up there.

Shall I Keep it?: Yes. I am no royalty buff, but I am a sentimentalist.

Colleen_, ColleenBook_

Colleen's Introduction

Some of my earliest recollections of childhood entail playing hooky from cleaning my room through immersion in various Nancy Drew novels (running away from the tide of things to pay attention to one in particular). Even though I am now a twenty four year old married woman, the scenario is scarily similar even today: I now have 1200 square feet worth of things (marriage, I have found, is an accumulator's dream and a simple man's nightmare), and that Nancy Drew novel has morphed into an iBook/Percy novel/the odd blog focusing on one's things...
On account of coming to the conclusion that my hunter/gatherer instincts are being stifled by our mall/big box society and Target is really not the anti-depressant I may or may not rely on it to be, I have sought varying measures to control my Western urges to accumulate throughout the last several years. These include, but are not limited to, membership in a Catholic Worker community, irregular and ecstatic purges and drives to Saint Vincent DePaul (not unlike the choreographed motions of a bulemic), and being crafty toward the end of stifling Targetesque urges. Most recently, my husband Matt (it is only too appropriate that he play a prominent role in my posts, as what is mine is his...for the most part) and my housemate David have taken to urban gardening, and I am teaching myself to sew and make my own cleaning products for the bod and the house. Maybe if we do not actually call it intentional community it will become one? I am currently exploring the notion that concerted measures toward self-reliance, when it comes to the production of things, will satiate my desire for things made by others (robot and human alike) - Cottage industry of some sort. We'll see. In the meantime, this forum will be a useful mechanism for exploring the obsession/detestation with things of all kinds. Hopefully, it will serve to aid in my continuing evaluation of the relationship between the thing and the self, and maybe I will even discover who really owns who.

Colleen_, ColleenIntroduction_