Guesthouse

I love hanging out at my friends' house. MJ and CJ have a cool garage, from which I am typing this and sipping wine. A dry-erase markerboard drawing of koalas playing in a band has been up on their wall for about a year. Good friends like this make weekends worth having.

The garage is full of music and the trappings of kids, but these are perhaps some of the coolest kids around. Well all my friends have cool kids. It makes me wonder if one day I'll have kids of my own, and if they'll be as cool as theirs. Some people have envy of others belongings or posessions. I have envy for my future hypothetical progeny.

They don't make things like they used to. My mom has an old Electrolux vaccuum and she's had that thing since we were kids. Well, before we were kids. It's the vacuum you repair, not replace. CJ says that's not necessarily the modern American desire, to make the effort to repair when replacement is so convenient. But its not disposable; you do with what you have, and you like it more because of the work that goes into it. You can't replace your kids, nor can you really "repair" them. I really don't like disposable culture. I don't know how a vacuum has to do with any of this, but the fact that Electrolux is the repairable vacuum means its something worth keeping. I think it can teach us a lot about how we enmesh ourselves in modern psychological value...of things. You can't and shouldn't just throw it out if its not perfect. Maybe you can just fix it up.