Nothing About Me Has Changed Except Everything

Helloooooo I am enjoying a cool and rainy few days after last week’s heat wave. I went to the beach and swam in the ocean 10 times.

I bought this excellent 100% linen shirt in the most beautiful brown.

I realllllllllly enjoyed this episode of Interior Motives with John Early and Kate Berlant.

Im trying to resist these stunning candles, perfect for my summer dinner table.

I have been listening to “Meditations in Music” by John Carroll Kirby while I do my work. It’s spa-music esque and very chime-y.

I’m on the hunt for throw pillows, and I’m inspired by these very cute ones which are all on sale.

I can’t stop watching Disney adult vlogs and cruise vlogs (and their demon spawn, Disney cruise vlogs…)? Is there a name for this disease? Can it be cured?

I ordered myself a second pair of these super comfy poplin pants.

The other day, my phone decided to show me this picture of my second apartment in NYC, an itty bitty rent stabilized studio on the south side of Tompkins Square Park. The picture is ostensibly of my very cute old cat Hercules (RIP king, he was so beautiful and sweet and above all chunky) but also featured a pleasant tableau of one corner of my apartment.

My life is basically the opposite of my life then. During the time this picture was taken, I was a gal about town, drinking 11% IPAs and taking pictures in the bathroom of the dance bar. I was working as a PA on a tv show nobody watched, and my job one time involved going to barber shops all over the city and asking for bags of their old hair. I could regularly be found sharing a chocolate Oreo milkshake from Ray’s Candy Store with Liam at 2 am.

Now I work out of my converted attic in the forest, go to bed at 11, and make my own granola bars.

But if I’m such a different lady, how come we both have the same stuff?

How has it been nearly 10 years, and I still love these pieces the same?

What is different about pieces that I have left behind over the years?

The dresser

This is a teak dresser I bought on Etsy for my first apartment, which I shared with a roommate on East Houston. It’s a secretary dresser that has a tambour door close on the top. The dresser is in a bit of disrepair in the 2018 picture, since I could not be bothered to go to the hardware store for screws to re-attach the handles. I kept my makeup in the top right drawer, and kept the top of the dresser as full of girly ephemera as possible. My perfume at the time was “Midnight Fleur” by Nest, and my favorite blue hair clip was from the design museum in Copenhagen.

This dresser is currently in Liam’s office, where it holds his sweaters, random electronics tools I don’t understand, and some math books.

The couch

This couch is a steel-frame loveseat by Florence Knoll. One of the arms folds down to be a kind of sleeper sofa. The fabric is a pink twill, and you can see in the picture that Hercules had a habit of clawing at it that I dealt with by laying an old sweatshirt over the arm. I remember thinking at the time that having a pink sofa was pretty much the highest state of being, and I still agree with that. I recall researching sofas and seeing a lot of sensible beiges and greys. Respectfully I would rather die than spend money on that… My couches are still colorful— the newer (to me) ones are deep teal blue and eggplant purple.

This sofa is also in Liam’s office, and I patched up Hercules’ damage with a big swatch of vintage ticking fabric. If I wake up in the middle of the night, I can often find my cat Meatball asleep on one of the cushions.

The mirror

The wood mirror was free, something I picked up at an internship for an ad agency, where they had me in a 100 degree warehouse in Sunnyside spray painting old crap for a spray paint brand activation. My bosses didn’t like the mirror, and I asked if I could have it instead of it being thrown away. My boss said, “are you sure? It’s really ugly.” Which I thought was insane. She was not a person I respected at all. Everyone at the ad agency had a relationship to alcohol that shocked me. ME, a 21 year old who partied every day of the week. Can you imagine?

This mirror still holds a place of pride in my living room, as it has in every place I’ve lived since. I recently considered replacing it with a beautiful mod mirror from Bi-Rite, but Liam talked me out of it.

The electronics

You can see in the painting my record player, and the case for my Omnichord. The Omnichord was a first paycheck present to myself I got when I started said barber shop hair bag TV show. The Omnichord is an extremely fun little electronic instrument and I’m really glad I got it, even if it doesn’t get much use these days.

The record player……. She needs to get replaced. This stupid thing is only Bluetooth connected, and relies on a very sleek but actually useless screen-less system to connect. It does not connect to the beautiful speakers Liam built. It sucks and I want a new one. I actually can’t believe this is from 2018, or even before that. It’s time for her to be put to rest!

The chair

This is a folding chair with a cane back and leatherette seat, one of two I had at the time. I had to have folding chairs because, and I cannot impress this enough, this apartment was TINY!!!! I kept one chair at the dresser/desk, and one folded up in case I had people over and needed places to sit that were not my bed. I’m not even sure if it was a queen bed, it may have been a full.

I remember being very into Apartment Therapy-esque articles about “small space living” and feeling extremely pleased at finding these chairs that were both modular and nice looking. At my most recent apartment, Liam and I would fold them up and bring them to the roof for an aperitif.

Today these chairs are in the crawl space below my house. They are not needed regularly, but could come in handy in a Thanksgiving type situation. Why would I get rid of them, where else am I gonna find a beautiful set of folding chairs?

The art

The wall art and knick knacks we can see:

• A “Kiki’s Delivery Service” Liam bought for me at an art show in the LES

• A blue wooden cat sitting on the bookshelf

• A wooden figure of a frog wearing suspenders on a skateboard

• A poster from the Louisiana Art Museum outside Copenhagen

• A print of bathing women I got at a zine fair

• A selection of Polaroid photos I took

• A postcard of chairs from the design museum in Copenhagen

• A postcard of “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg”

• A postcard from Reykjavik, about cats

• A postcard of Matisse cut outs (lol)

• A film photo of me drinking a gigantic beer in Prague

• A print of a comic strip about ghosts, bought at a zine fair

• A Studio Arhoj ghost figure

• On the opposite wall, seen through the mirror, a painting of a UFO I did in high school

Here we can really see the origins of my “more is more” design sensibility. All of my walls were like this, no section was spared from my thumb tacks and sticky putty.

I think I still technically have almost all of these, and could find them if I tried. Several of them are currently on display, including all the knick knacks. I framed the Louisiana poster and the Kiki’s painting, and until recently the UFO painting was above my bed, as it was in 2018. I want to get it framed because I still think it’s pretty good.

The cat

When I got Hercules, I thought he was 5 years old, but he was probably closer to 10. He was rescued from a hoarding situation, and had an obsessive relationship to food. Two years after this picture was taken, we would discover that he had advanced kidney disease and would give him subcutaneous fluids every day for a few months before his health deteriorated to the point where we needed to put him to sleep. He was an absolutely excellent cat who had a habit of slamming himself on the floor, knocking the wind out of himself, to roll around and ask you to pet his belly. He liked to explore the hallway of our building in the middle of the night. He was known to accompany all our guests to the bathroom.

Though he is dead, I still technically have him, in a little plastic bag in Liam’s office.

I think we can learn a few things here. First, good quality, interesting vintage pieces will take a long time to get tired of. There have been a few trendy pieces over the years that I have gotten rid of relatively quickly. The same thing goes for the art— things that I come across organically are more likely to stick around, vs things that I buy for a specific purpose. My Target TV stand and tapestry used to fill a large wall were the first things I got rid of when I had the chance. Things bought out of necessity don’t last. Things bought for their ephemeral qualities do.

Even though I feel like a different person from the 22 year old me who lived in that apartment, and probably most of the cells that created 22 year old me have died and been replaced by new cells, we both like the same things. I look at 22 year old me’s outfits and I think they’re cute. I look at the things she bought for her home and think I would buy them too. I look at her boyfriend and think, I would marry him. I look at her cat and think, we should probably get around to scattering his ashes.