Saturday, March 19, 2005
Repurposed
Here's an excerpt from Friday's James Lilek's Bleats (Whew!, lots of "s" ending words there, hope you didn't spit on your keyboard as you were mouthing the last part of that sentence)
" Today. Oy. Today we cleaned out the toy closet, a difficult task. The toys that stay go here; the toys to be repurposed go here. “What’s reporupused?”(sp) It means they will go downstairs, where you will forget about them; I will sift through the bag in a few months, extract the items that speak to a particular era, like the toy you had in the home movie made on 9/11, and give the rest to the thrift store. The key is to absent the child from the process, because they don’t want to part with anything. Toys that have been ignored for months are suddenly items of intense interest – wax lips, dry pens, fragments of Happy Meal promotions. Faced with the parting eternal, everything becomes precious. It’s a metaphor for life itself. For that matter, everything in life is a metaphor for life. Except life. Life is probably a metaphor for metaphor. If you know what I mean, he said, half a glass of wine away from going face down on the keyboard." (emphasis added)
The copyrighted definition of "repurposed" is:
"re·pur·pose (rē-pûr'pəs), -posed, -pos·ing, -pos·es.
To use or convert for use in another format or product:
Ex.; "They repurposed the book as a compact disk."
This past week, I've been busy repurposing most of my personal possessions. CD cases have made great beverage coasters. Books, if carefully piled up, offer total darkness opportunities when placed in front of windows. Favorite t-shirts with minimum hole-age are quite artsy when placed within each other, as long as the holes don't match up. Snow sleds, beat up by ever heavier sledders, are great burglar detectors down in the basement (just have to check my coverage to make sure that severed head intruders cannot sue me for lobotmoies or sew-ons). The one component of the current living arrangement that I am woefully without that would increase my repurposing capabilities is a garage. A three car would be fabulous. With that space, I see myself as the da Vinci of Repurposing.
Or so I've maintained in my campaign on the ever-loving (& life's detrtitus discarding) wife.
Just an aside here: To those folks who regularly peruse Bleats, is it just me or do you sometimes shudder when you read of whom he's writing about? As a person (and a Slavic person,at that), I tend toward suspicion of my fellow human being, to begin with. As a parent, I register way over to the right on the Paranoiameter. In some of his pieces, Mr. Lileks (IMHO) provides too much access in the information department. Specifically, when it comes to talking about his daughter, Gnat, who he is so openly crazy about. I actually thought that she was a figment of his very fertile imagination. Well, I had hoped she was, for his own piece of mind. Then, last week this headline. Man charged in plot to kidnap Letterman's son. Mr. Lileks must have a huge amount of faith in his fellow man/blog reader. I admire and I cringe simultaneously.
Here's an excerpt from Friday's James Lilek's Bleats (Whew!, lots of "s" ending words there, hope you didn't spit on your keyboard as you were mouthing the last part of that sentence)" Today. Oy. Today we cleaned out the toy closet, a difficult task. The toys that stay go here; the toys to be repurposed go here. “What’s reporupused?”(sp) It means they will go downstairs, where you will forget about them; I will sift through the bag in a few months, extract the items that speak to a particular era, like the toy you had in the home movie made on 9/11, and give the rest to the thrift store. The key is to absent the child from the process, because they don’t want to part with anything. Toys that have been ignored for months are suddenly items of intense interest – wax lips, dry pens, fragments of Happy Meal promotions. Faced with the parting eternal, everything becomes precious. It’s a metaphor for life itself. For that matter, everything in life is a metaphor for life. Except life. Life is probably a metaphor for metaphor. If you know what I mean, he said, half a glass of wine away from going face down on the keyboard." (emphasis added)
The copyrighted definition of "repurposed" is:
"re·pur·pose (rē-pûr'pəs), -posed, -pos·ing, -pos·es.
To use or convert for use in another format or product:
Ex.; "They repurposed the book as a compact disk."
This past week, I've been busy repurposing most of my personal possessions. CD cases have made great beverage coasters. Books, if carefully piled up, offer total darkness opportunities when placed in front of windows. Favorite t-shirts with minimum hole-age are quite artsy when placed within each other, as long as the holes don't match up. Snow sleds, beat up by ever heavier sledders, are great burglar detectors down in the basement (just have to check my coverage to make sure that severed head intruders cannot sue me for lobotmoies or sew-ons). The one component of the current living arrangement that I am woefully without that would increase my repurposing capabilities is a garage. A three car would be fabulous. With that space, I see myself as the da Vinci of Repurposing.
Or so I've maintained in my campaign on the ever-loving (& life's detrtitus discarding) wife.
Just an aside here: To those folks who regularly peruse Bleats, is it just me or do you sometimes shudder when you read of whom he's writing about? As a person (and a Slavic person,at that), I tend toward suspicion of my fellow human being, to begin with. As a parent, I register way over to the right on the Paranoiameter. In some of his pieces, Mr. Lileks (IMHO) provides too much access in the information department. Specifically, when it comes to talking about his daughter, Gnat, who he is so openly crazy about. I actually thought that she was a figment of his very fertile imagination. Well, I had hoped she was, for his own piece of mind. Then, last week this headline. Man charged in plot to kidnap Letterman's son. Mr. Lileks must have a huge amount of faith in his fellow man/blog reader. I admire and I cringe simultaneously.
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