IKEA! yum

Big doings today. We went to IKEA and invested in turning our perfectly functional apartment into an appealing living space. We've got proper boxes in three colors to store our clutter. We've got lighting fixtures from the 21st century. We've got organizers. Next step is (possibly) some creative but nuanced wall painting and, one day, some art work.

It's fun to play the interior decorator. When I was under my parent's financial umbrella, I was too caught up in deliberately not impressing anybody to care about decor. When I left that umbrella, I was too poor to indulge my wife's desires. But our landlord is looking to sell this place and she's underwriting the dressing up. She's providing the means, Meghann is providing the will. Pictures will be posted when it's done.

I'm growing older. I'm beginning to abandon the more severe philosophies of my youth and, whatever is left, I'm sealing away in concrete. Never to be revisited, never to change. Obviously, I won't ever be able to admit this if confronted. But the truth is that my most fundamental beliefs (God has a personality and loves humanity, he came in and lived a life like mine but crappier, everybody is crippled by pride, money provides temporary bliss, the secret to happiness is not to learn how to get what you want but to learn how to want what you have) are axiomatic. They are not based on bodies of replicable evidence which directly yield specific conclusions. They are based on non-replicable experiences and assumptions about the way things work. These experiences and assumptions cannot be constructively critiqued because nobody understands them like I do.

I'm growing older and I can tell because my beliefs are not changing anymore and I no longer have the passion to earnestly revisit them. It's fun to play the interior decorator because it's more than just pandering to a crowd. It's an easy way to practice taking my aesthetic out of my head and putting it in the world.