This month, I will be moving back to college and into the house that four friends and I are renting for our senior year. With my other back-to-school needs like tuition, loans, and textbooks taken care of, I now find myself stuck on a new problem: furniture. Groan. I am loathe to spend beaucoup bucks on things I know I'll only need for a short time (see: textbooks), but it's necessary, right? Most of the necessities came easily enough, but one thing has eluded me across visits to Walmart, furniture shops, thrift stores, and family members' homes: a computer desk. Of course I found desks, but none that fit my needs—none that I felt I could call my own.
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I assume this is what "having a desk you can call your own" looks like.
Ease of disassembly, ease of transport, appropriate size for my bedroom whose dimensions I did not ask about when I toured the rental (the previous tenants were still at home), sufficient surface space for my rather imposing gaming computer with extra room to do book work, a price tag that didn't make my poor bank account break out into pitiful sobs: these are all important things to consider when desk shopping. I began to regret how much I took for granted the comfortable, serviceable desks at home and in my old residence hall that I was provided virtually for free.
Now, before you close this tab...
...Because I know reflections on quests for household fixtures is not the most exciting topic.
I do have a point to make in all of this. I had to embrace the absurdity of my quest in order to appreciate what it had to teach me. Many times, I had the opportunity to say "to hell with it" and just take the next piece of particle board on four legs presented to me. I started thinking about how ephemeral my material possessions are, in both the "can't become a hoarder in a one-year lease" sense and the "can't take stuff with me when I die" sense. I thought about the family friend who had just spent a week on a remote island in Canada, whose chickens I fed during that time, and whose temporary detachment from civilization I couldn't help but envy. I do like camping. I thought of Walden Pond: that literary landmark bound up in ideas of man living cheek-to-cheek with nature. I'm not intimately familiar with Henry David Thoreau's works, but his quotes on naturalism and transcendentalism are prolific:
A portrait of Thoreau, because this article was getting a little Costanza-heavy.
"As for the complex ways of living, I love them not, however much I
practice them. In as many places as possible, I will get my feet down to
the earth."
I love these words. They evoke the sensation of sinking one's feet into fresh dirt, squishing sod between the toes. If that image doesn't appeal to the child in you, that's fine. We can still be friends. Thoreau also leaves room for himself to be human, admitting that he does not adhere strictly to an ascetic lifestyle. Like him, my life is full of material possessions that I'm quite attached to, and yet I secretly wish I would be forced to give them up, just to prove that I could live without them. I think there's a word for that secret desire for life as we know it to be disrupted so we may see what really matters, though it is an Obscure one. It's what makes the post-apocalypse genre so compelling.
So it is with the desk.
A nice visual metaphor for this whole article, if you please.
Alternatives began springing up in my mind of how I could do without the pesky desk. I imagined myself arranging my room in traditional Japanese style, furniture all low to the floor, with lots of negative vertical space. I could just set my computer up on a short little table and sit on a cushion to work. I could forego a bed frame and snooze in a futon -- at least if I rolled out of it in my sleep, I wouldn't have far to fall. My posture probably wouldn't do me any favors, though. I am a notorious sloucher, and like to lean all the way back in my rolly computer chair. Tatami style seating would ruin my spine faster than you can say "scoliosis." I looked up a few DIY guides to see if perhaps building my own desk was an option. It wasn't. Too expensive to do as well as anything I could buy, but I did get a laugh out of one article (see picture below). It was starting to seem that a desk was perhaps one bit of material wealth that I shouldn't try to do without.
Something about gratuitous profanity makes DIY that much more entertaining. HGTV, give this guy a call.
I spent a lot of time nitpicking to find the perfect place to put my computer and do homework. I eventually settled on one my uncle had lying around: a Walmart Mainstays piece, black with cherry finish, with hutch, still in box. Surprisingly, it met a lot of my criteria. But I've begun to think the desk is incidental. It has been all along. What I gained through my harrowing journey over hill and dale for the ideal desk was not, it turns out, a desk. I gained an awareness. I chewed on my feelings and intentions and came up with a resolution. Like Thoreau, I know I won't be able to live in perfect harmony with nature. I love video games too much for that. Nevertheless, I still want to do what I can to lower my food waste, spend more time in meatspace, that kind of thing. And I want to break my attachments to the physical stuff I own and just treat them as they were intended: just tools to allow me to do important stuff like studying, writing, and playing.
I look forward to moving back in with my roommates and settling in before classes start. The electricity and gas won't be turned on until Monday, but it will be nice to be forced to live simply, if only for a day. The next thing I write probably won't be on desks, but it will be written on a desk.
Bonus for the lit nerds: Now that I've written on desks, I'm halfway to being like Poe, according to Carroll.
