015. WE JUST LOVE MATERIAL THINGS.
Object remembrance. Are we just magpies or materialists?
What they say about small suburbs is right- everyone knows one another and you’re bound to run into your past some way or another. Three weeks ago I had been housesitting for my parents out in Henderson, it’s just 25 minutes away from mine and Sam’s place in Mt Albert - a brick one story house with an open wraparound garden constructed much to the delight of my landscape obsessed parentals. It’s a house I’ve called home since I was 12 years old, I remember my sister and I standing on a mound of dirt celebrating with a grape juice box in my new school uniform as my parents celebrated being able to build their dream home. The copious amounts of messages back and forth with the builders over the details- the pipe work, the positioning of the blinds and their tracks over the windows, the paintwork near the upper corners of the ceilings in the rooms; I remember it all, the conversations on details that seem to haunt me even now staring up at them all. I stood in the kitchen yesterday and couldn’t help but be annoyed by the centimeter gap between the cabinets under the kitchen sink- yet another by the builders. I found myself opening and closing these cupboards with concern, thinking I could somehow tug them closer together knowing that these cupboards wouldn’t budge. It’s funny how I could persuade myself that it would be ‘fixed’ if I tried - I guess that could almost allude to so many things in my life looking back where I felt like I could just ‘try’, expecting the best outcome. Looking to the universe by promising myself I’d accomplish something if I could just see a sign - “If the light flickers again, I’ll text him” , “If the next thunder boom sounds in 10 minutes then I’m just overreacting and I need to let it go”. God I spent so much of my youth hoping and wishing for signs, thinking that destiny would enact its full force and show me the way.
I spent so much of my teen years here hoping for a way to leave home and live that sense of independence every teen girl longs for - days spent re-watching movies where the career girl takes the corporate world by storm, living in her own apartment, falling love with men and not boys that treated us like shit. Walking into my old bedroom still brings back so many memories - the mattress may be upgraded and the room now filled with my sister’s need to transform it into her own office when she flys in occasion from Wellington, but ultimately, its still the same old room. A light switch adorned in stickers from Glossier- I made my first YouShop purchase when Glossier graced my screen, I was obsessed with the branding, the minimalist packaging, the ease of use, the name, everything. I guess you could say that’s how my love for beauty was born- the absolute rush in scrolling that ‘Shop All’ tab, reading the product descriptions with awe, googling ingredients and their benefits and weighing the cost to benefit analysis in my amateur mind. I was obsessed with brands in my youth, a culmination of societal pressures to fit in with teenage girls - teenage girls that bodycheck like crazy, the side eyes, that longing to fit in, to just get through a day where your own interests weren’t ridiculed because they weren’t ‘cool’ enough. I spent days invested in reading Into The Gloss and poured over the skincare routines of anesthesiologists and facialists, noting the products they declared they couldn’t live without, fingers poised to open yet another tab that would direct me to a range of overly priced skincare products.
I fell hard for beauty marketing and still do - maybe its something about the glossy packaging that gets me, the glorified product description, ingredients using key words such as vitamin c and niacinamide and hyaluronic acid; numerical data boasting that “90% of women noticed a reduction in skin pigmentation in 2 weeks*” - i’m a sucker for any product that combines scientific data with top of the line lifestyle shots, somehow the thought of having a skincare product routine with all products looking the same and via the same brand made me feel like things were consistent. Put together. Acting in unison. Even though my life wasn’t quite following the plan.
Staying in my childhood bedroom was a bit confronting - it wasn’t the stickers on the lightswitch or the desk still in its corner, or the cane chair I remember purchasing for $45 from a hospice shop years ago with my ex, it was the old makeup storage units still housing the same makeup palettes I used all those years ago that brought back all the memories. A 20 pan eyeshadow palette with nude rosey shades I barely touched but only used for the odd date here and there with my ex. Old beauty lipgloss brands that still smell like grape Hubba Bubba gum. Old eyeglasses from my first eye test that kept slipping off my nose (and still do). Thin fluro tabs from my ‘barely there’ tabbed quotations era.
A light coating of spilt powder from a miscellaneous compact coats unsuspecting makeup products. Powders shifting with each open/close movement. It made me think of the amount of times I slammed those cupboards shut prior to a night out, a law stein or the usual tote bag packup when I was staying at my ex’s place for a few days. It’s funny how objects can hold so much yet mean so little to others. How in time they can mean so much to a 19 year old hitting pan on an eye shadow palette but months later, discarded for something new and shiny. Am I just what some may call a materialist or just a magpie?
When will I stop falling for the shiny bright things? The distractions from sentiment? Every time I purchase something I tell myself that I’m buying an investment piece, “you won’t need to buy anything after this” - Jesus Christ, what a joke. A sale EDM for St Agni comes through at 11pm and i’m here adding to their click rate with laser-focus precision. I find myself clicking through Sale tabs and then Shop All. I can’t help it. It’s this need to see everything on display - this innate fear of missing out as the young ones would say.
Draped on a breakfast bar stool is a leather buckle bag purchased by myself for having emailed in my resignation. I remember the day so clearly, that sense of salvation and the weight lifted off my shoulders. A voyage a long time coming. Yet on the other hand, to others this object would only be admired with a fleeting glance / an uneasy symbol of style and humanity’s precarious relationship with the material world. As human’s we’ve transitioned to this way of routinely accepting new purchases and replacing them, sweeping aside objects once loved for another- a society in which our economic activity thrives on/ the very act of buying stuff and throwing it away. This knee-jerk response in catching a whiff of that ‘culling’ bug and the disdain for the old and stuff no longer serving a purpose. And yet as snobby as I can be with what makes it to my wishlist, I have only to look around as I sit here at home to see the material things that give me joy: the merino blanket keeping me warm as I sit here on the couch, the retro art on our walls each thrifted from roadtrips gone and op shops stumbled into, or even my favourite supersized mugs perfect for miso soup.
A Chilean poet-politician Pablo Neruda who was also a passionate socialist and collector of curious objects proclaimed in Memoirs (1974), “In my house I have put together a collection of small and large toys I can’t live without…”- clearly, here was a man that understood maximalist living and living out those childhood dreams with objects reflecting all of the above in the home. I say this as i’m sitting here admiring the retro Homer Simpson cookie jar head with a broken top yet to be glued but filled with incense sticks and bits and bobs with no home. His poems celebrated objects both ordinary and unique- odes to spoons and birds, stones and socks; a door he wasn’t able to close that brought love and life, some instances of joy and sadness.
With each passing day, I find myself thinking of each possession and newly acquired with a different lens/ this sense of trying to love each one more, to cherish their origins , their meanings, their purpose and what will happen to them in the future. If as a society, we could truly cherish the things in our lives, would we find ourselves on the opposite end of the materialist spectrum? A life force operating not as a consumer but admirers and collectors?
A carelessness diminished.
A pursuit for affinity.
An accumulation of things that hold so much more than this perceived staginess - instead, there’s this incessant need to turn to objects radiating skill, knowledge, pain and sentiment. Objects of purpose, of fulfilling that need, that sense of joy in the ‘right now’. There’s no need to feel that guilt. Those feelings of the ‘what if’ - operating mindfully in a society that still believes in overconsumption, is bloody hard. I’m no saint and the one thing I seem to flourish at is thrifting — from homewares to books, the rise of Bookstagram memes referencing the demise of Amazon and their complete undercutting and blasphemy of the book industry is refreshing and inspiring. A reminder that little actions can curb our spending habits. Perhaps we may be paying more for things - that profound mantra of ‘quality over quantity’ and the process of weaning ourselves over sale items to pay more for better quality things is starting to seep into my life lately, one day at a time. These last 2 months of being unemployed and my slowly depleting savings is evidence of that.
Perhaps the future may lead to a society adopting the same lesson; it’s wishful thinking but the act of loving and cherishing things will forever remain.