The desk came from Craigslist, fifty bucks and lunch for the great friend who helped move it. The skirt? Five dollars at The White Elephant Resale. Even the cute little red shoes came second-hand from The Gold Mine for $4.00.
I didn't always used to be this way. I grew up the oldest of two, raised by a single working mother in a two-bedroom, one bathroom house we rented from my grandparents. Mom never made more than $30,000 a year, and she was a terrible money manager with the money we had. She loved to 'live life,' as she would say. The bills would always be there; enjoy life where you can. We were pretty hard-up, living in a lower-lower middle class neighborhood. My brother says we weren't poor. That's somewhat true, I guess. We knew people compared to whom we were wealthy. But we didn't have money. We didn't have the latest and greatest whatever-is-hot-now. We didn't have a VCR until I was 16, in 1997. We never had a computer. But we were fed and clothed and mostly warm. More than what a lot of people have, really.
My mom was the oldest of 15 children, which meant that her youngest siblings were not much older than us. This was great, in that we're a very close family, which would be a different sort of closeness with a bigger age gap. This was also not great, in that whenever someone cleaned out a closet, the next-in-line would get the leftovers. Eventually, these things no one wanted made their way to us. But we didn't want hand-me-downs. We didn't want things that weren't what the other kids were wearing. We wanted new things, things that were ours first, instead of being the last stop before the Salvation Army.
Now, I'm 28. An adult; a grown-up. I have a nice place, a pretty cat, and enough money to live on and still buy some great shoes. It's strange to me now that I actively seek out used things. If I need something, my first thought is to check the thrift stores or the alleys. When did this change overcome me? Is it something that happens as you grow up? So I started wondering why. Why do I want this whatever-it-is, with a stain/dent/tear/peeling paint? Why not just go to IKEA/Target/Crate and Barrel and get a new one? Partly I want it because it has a back-story; someone, somewhere, loved this thing, and now it's out in the world. Partly I want it because no one else will have one exactly the same. IKEA/Target/Crate and Barrel are lovely places, and I do shop there pretty often, but so does everyone else. Sometimes upon visiting a friend's home for the first time, I'm disappointed to see that this fantastic and unique person has the same old shit everyone else has, nothing fantastic and unique about it. This sameness, this lack of creativity in one's home, makes me a little sad. People are willing to buy the prepackaged idea. This makes me wonder at the state of the world. What else are they willing to buy?
