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_