My Life is a Table

Every now and then, I get the urge to move. Move myself, move my body, move my life.

And since I know that it's not exactly practical to pick up and start a new life in Wisconsin, I respond to that urge in any number of ways. I buy a new outfit I don't need. I get a tattoo. I clean my office. I exercise. Occasionally, I move my apartment around, though there's barely room for the small amount of crap I have to be reconfigured in new and interesting ways.

Last night was one of those nights.

It started with a TV that I am "TV-sitting" more or less indefinitely from work. It's a huge TV and comes with a DVD player. I have at home already a very tiny TV that everyone I know laughs at, but that I think is helping me to develop keener eyesight as I squint to make out what those crazy kids from "Hell's Kitchen" are doing on a screen half the size of a postage stamp.

So I moved the tiny TV to my bedroom and put the massive one in the living room where I could instantly begin worrying about it falling over and crushing Baby Girl to death in a tragically ironic meeting of materialism and mass media and gravity.

But I digress.

The point is that this new monster in my living room made me feel antsy. Unsettled. The way I've felt in most aspects of my life, lately, now that I think about it.

And having no money for a new tattoo or an idea of what to permanently stamp myself with this time, I decided to move furniture. Not even a lot of furniture - just one piece, in fact. This may not seem like that big of a deal, but it symbolizes a lot, I think.

I pushed my dining room table up against my kitchen wall so that there's only room for 3 seats at it. I set it up as a desk. I put my little book-a-day calendar on it. I put my French workbook and flashcards on it. I put my little "pen pot" on it. I put my iPod dock on it to await a new baby iPod that I'm hoping the iPod stork will bring some day. I put a space on it for the new baby laptop I'm hoping the laptop stork will bring some day. I put my work in progress on it: articles I want to write, articles I want to read, books I need to do my research on. I put my bills to be paid on it.

If you're thinking that this maybe leaves no room to eat on, you're absolutely correct.

This slight change in the Space That Is Dirty Girl says these things:
1. Baby Girl and I are just going to eat at the coffee table from now on, since she loves eating there anyway (and I don't turn on the TV - I think she just likes her little chair that is just her size at the low table, and I like sitting on the floor, and who gives a fuck where we eat, anyway? She still gets her veggies).
2. I never have anyone over for dinner. I love to cook and I love to cook for people, but I just don't currently have the kinds of relationships with other adults that allow me to make dinner for them and use my matchy-matchy placemats, as much as I'd like to.
3. I have designated a space for me to exist in outside of my relationship to my child or to the TV or my bed (though I wouldn't mind fucking on my newly-defined desk).

It already works great, by the way - last night, I balanced my checkbook and drank a martini on it.