If you’re a dooce reader (and near as I can tell, most of the country reads dooce; she has a following that the rest of us bloggers can only dream about) then you know that she and her husband just moved into a new house, and that they’ve turned the attic of that house into an office.
It’s lovely, their office, filled with light and nice furniture, with interesting photographs on the walls, and shelves displaying cool objets. Their renovation project was sponsored by Verizon and although as a former Verizon user I think of them as Satan’s phone company, if they wanted to sponsor my renovation, I’d toss my scruples right out the window, thank you very much.
I daydream about a home office that isn’t a desk wedged between Caleb’s Lego Central and the dining table. Dooce’s shelves aren’t crammed with old office supplies and curled-edge snapshots; her couch doesn’t look like it’s been clawed on one side by an angry cat (and yet, oddly, we don’t have a cat, which means those claw marks have been made by…my werecat children?)
Looking at dooce’s office made me realize what it is I need: a curator. In fact, I think I’ve stumbled across an entirely new profession: “personal curator.” This person would serve as a lifecoach-decorator-therapist-decluttifier; she would make your house insta-spiffy, turn your sad old sweaters into nifty throw pillows, help you bid adieu to all those holiday cards from people you no longer know…
Curate seems to be the verb du jour—it’s not just for museums anymore. Everything is curated: those cunning little shops that I walk past on my way to pick up Caleb at school on the Lower East Side—you know those stores, the ones with exactly three little blouses hung on industrial pipe, two pairs of tiny-legged pants draped on expensive hooks, maybe one lightly distressed bag ever so casually tossed on a table and nothing under $400 bucks? Those stores? Curated. Magazines with almost no writing in them but lots of pictures of gaunt women with asymmetrical hairdos wearing clothes so au courant they seem to be from Jane Jetson’s closet? Curated.
My needs are simpler: I’d like to curate the lego collection; curate the Yu-gi-oh card collection, curate the Tupperware that multiples overnight in the cabinet, curate my fifteen-year-old wardrobe, curate this cluttered website, curate…well, curate my life.
I’ve even come up with a catchy song to articulate my needs (with thanks to Joey and the boys): I wanna be cur-ated…hurry hurry hurry before I go insane…I wanna be cur-ated…
