The objects we love and live with

A catalogue of wonderful things

My son when he was little looking at the inside of our piano. Things are so much more interesting when you can see how they work.

"We think with the objects we love; we love the objects we think with."
—Sherry Turkle, Evocative Objects

Hey y’all,

The irony to keep in mind while reading this letter is that I’m writing it on an iPad. Out of necessity, not choice: My Mac Studio fried out last week and I’m still waiting for it to be repaired or replaced. The day after I dropped off my computer with the “geniuses” at the Genius Bar, Apple debuted an ad for the new iPad that brought a wave of disgust from artists and creative people, myself included. (They later apologized.)

The ad is called “Crush!” And we get to watch as the following items are crushed by a gigantic compactor: A metronome, a record player, records, a bust, a globe, a trumpet, a digital clock, an old-fashioned alarm clock, a dress form, a level, an arcade cabinet, an artist’s model, a drum set, an architectural model, an easel with an oil painting, a TV, a typewriter, toys, an acoustic guitar, guitar pedals, art supplies, paints, studio monitors, a digital audio workstation, a chalkboard, lamps, desks, tables, cameras, paper notebooks, and probably a few more things I haven’t catalogued because I don’t want to have to watch the ad again.

The thought I had when I watched the ad was, “Wow, this is everything I’ve intentionally filled my house and my life with.” Going back over the list above, I could only find three items we don’t have in our house: the dressmaker’s form, the trumpet, and the bust. (Though we do have a sewing machine, a woodwind instrument, and a few sculptures.) Literally everything else we have at hand.

Because I love to start with something I hate and turn it into something I love, I thought it would be funny to catalogue the items in the ad that I own and think about what makes them special to me.

A few years ago, I realized my kids’ dresser was basically a museum of technology — the Casio and the Sony Dream Machine were both possessions from our own childhoods

“The objects we possess… They tell us things about ourselves that we need to hear in order to keep ourselves from falling apart.”
—Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

The first piece of furniture I had moved into our house was our piano. I believe strongly in having a piano in the home. Before our first son was born, I went out and bought a piano — it was really important to me that he grow up with a piece of furniture he could walk over to and play his feelings on.