A friend and colleague of mine writes a wonderful blog. Laura Faye Smith is one of the top actresses here
in Portland. Her blog is called “Finding Lagom,” but it’s not about acting. You
can read her explanation of the term “lagom” on her site.
In brief, Laura’s blog is about overcoming her shopaholic
tendencies (a history of assuaging anxiety and insecurity by feeding “the Want
Monster”), her efforts with her husband to clear up their consumer debt over
the past year, and getting rid of piles of clothing, cosmetics, candy, cleaning
products, and lots of other things she saved “because I might need it someday.”
Beautifully honest and vulnerable (not to mention very funny
at times, and usually illustrated with plenty of photos), the blog has featured entries
with such titles as “In the Clutches of the Want Monster,” “Why I Don’t Feel Guilty for Spending $75 on Shampoo,” “All the Stuff I Didn’t Buy This Weekend,”
“Why Am I Keeping This?” and “Learning to Love the Want Monster.”
If you want a summation of what “Finding Lagom: One Woman’s
Attempt at a Simpler Life” is all about, just read “Pretty Much EverythingAbout This Photo Depresses Me,” an early post that encapsulates what Laura left
behind to become a full-time actress … and then one of her best stories, the
recent “Because I Don’t Need a Daily Reminder of What a Bitch I Can Be,” which
is a fairly savage but hilarious self-indictment and a goodbye to a dream pair
of woman’s heels.
I hasten to add that, as bad as she might come across in her
blog, from my personal experience, Laura is unfailingly gracious and warm in
person, and an utter professional on stage or film set.
So what is all this doing here, you might ask. Besides
entertaining me for the past year (Laura’s first post to “Finding Lagom” was
dated Jan. 12, 2013; just today she posted an excellent look at what the year has taught her), and illuminating a portion of a colleague’s inner
life that I knew nothing about, her blog made me think … and what more could a
writer ask, right?
On the surface, it might be difficult to discern any
similarity between the obsessions Laura describes and my life. I grew up in a parsimonious,
even anti-consumerist, family. My mother told me that she and Dad believed a
good education should train a person to live on less. I didn’t bother to get my
first credit card until I was 30, I don’t have a history of shopping to
suppress anxiety or discontent, and my wife and I have carried zero consumer
debt for years.
Yet I suspected there were similarities … somewhere, deep
down. How am I like “crazy” Laura, I asked myself. Compulsive buying and saving
are ultimately, I suspect, an expression of fear of mortality. We acquire,
store, and pile up stuff because we don’t like the notion, deep down, that
someday we will die and nothing we are or possess today will remain under our
control.
I’ve always known I have a massive fear of death. Apart from the many other signs of it throughout my life, I’ve gone through various expressions of “packratting,”
though by necessity they didn’t usually entail significant outlays of money.
From ages 8 to 13 or so, I collected, organized, and traded
postage stamps. Starting about age 10 and continuing into my 20s, I clipped
newspapers: news stories, cartoons, advice columns, photographs -- thousands
and thousands of clippings that I tried to organize into files … but for what
purpose? An attempt to organize (that is, control) events and ideas in my head?
Then my acquisitive instincts turned to books. Our home had
always been full of them when I was a child: My parents read aloud to me, and
grandparents and family friends often gifted me with books, but I didn’t start
buying them for myself until college. Then I purchased used (and a few new) books
… hundreds of them, undoubtedly more than a thousand. They filled shelves and
boxes, gathered in piles on the floor of bedrooms and apartments.
When I returned to Oregon after 10 years in Boston, I had to
give most of them up. They were too big and heavy to carry, and I couldn’t
afford to ship them. I sold them back to used bookstores and donated others to
the Boston library system. My system was to keep the very few I could never
give up (The Annotated Sherlock Holmes,
The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S.
Eliot, my collections of John Fowles, Harlan Ellison, and Jules Feiffer), as
well as others I knew from experience would be extremely difficult if not
impossible to find again.
Partly from reading Laura’s blog, I realized that my
acquisitive cravings have largely moved into my laptop and mind. Carole and I
live in a tiny, 667-square-foot “shotgun studio” apartment. There are
bookshelves stuffed with books, but I only rarely add a volume to them. I read 140 to 160 books each year, but nearly all of them come from the local
library (which, handily, stands three blocks from our apartment). Books we do
acquire are much quicker to go back out the door after they’ve been read, to
Powell’s or Title Wave, than they used to.
Instead, I “collect” a lot of reading notes. In my 20s, 30s,
and 40s, those consisted of handwritten passages in commercially purchased paper
notebooks. Today I note passages I want to save on a slip of paper used as a
bookmark, then type them into the computer. This eats up hours I could have
spent doing something more obviously productive, such as writing my own stuff,
working out, socializing with other people, or reading other books!
What will I do with all this verbiage? Who knows? It’s just
like the stamps, and the newspaper clippings, and the books I used to collect. (I
threw out the clippings, got rid of thousands of books, but the stamp albums
are still tucked away in storage.) There’s no real discernible purpose to all
this activity, except just to be doing it, but it also gives me some sort of
psychic comfort.
The same is true of the list of books I keep of what I’ve
read (on the desktop of my MacBook Pro, of course). This recordkeeping was
partly inspired by Steve Duin. A staff writer for the Oregonian, Duin started a “reading contest” more than a decade ago,
mostly to encourage people to read books rather than for the purpose of a
heated competition. A few modest prizes are offered for most pages and books
read, and the best essay about the past year of one’s reading. I posted my essay about my 2012 reading here on American Currents a year ago.
I’ve never won the contest. I’ve usually come in
somewhere between 15th and 20th on the roster with my annual 140
books, and 45,000 to 50,000 pages (though by adding in playscripts, my public
readings, etc., I can rack up a little extra; last year I came in 11th). I
don’t really set out to win, either, though I’m enough of a regular that Duin mentions me in one way or another nearly every year. I just discovered this morning that I rated a passing mention in the reminder for this year’s contest, on Nov. 29.
Keeping a record of the titles and steadily toting up
the pages on my desktop gives me a psychological lift. I don’t think I read many more books
than I otherwise would have (since the beginning of high school I’ve probably
always read at least 100 books a year; and now about 40 or so are dictated by
the three book discussion groups I belong to), but it does give me an extra
incentive to finish books I’m not enjoying that much (so I’ll get the credit!), and tackle “just a
few more” to boost my totals.
My wife would undoubtedly call me a pack rat, but I think my
tendencies are reasonably under control. We have a storage closet that’s
stuffed to the gills with books, scrapbooks, filing cabinets of financial
records (and my writings and press notices) -- reduced from two storage closets
with the unwelcome encouragement of a flooding incident (on the seventh floor!)
back in 2009.
My “work desk” is covered with papers and books so I mostly type
and compose on my laptop at the dinner bar -- sometimes sitting on a barstool,
often standing up. I prefer not to sit for long periods of time. (See the essay
“Arsebestos” in Neal Stephenson’s collection Some Remarks.) And there’s typically a pile of books and papers by
my side of the bed, as well. But otherwise, my “stuff” doesn’t really take over
the rest of the apartment, I think I can say.
But this is how I express cravings like Laura’s: collecting
titles, keeping records, and toting up the numbers. Some might call the rather obsessive reading of books and taking notes on them a higher
activity than prolonged television viewing, compulsive eating, or reflexive
shopping.
But I’m not convinced that’s the case. It is a lot cheaper,
though.
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