Organized and edited by Meg Jones Wall. My girlfriend and I took a circuitous path to moving in together. I flew to Orlando with two suitcases, and we drove across the country with her little dog and as much stuff as we could stuff into her car.
From the Archives
We were only supposed to be there for a semester. Even before that though, I felt unmoored without librarian books. When I lived in Los Angeles, I sublet a furnished room so small I had to keep my books in the trunk of my car. They rattled around as I drove, but dating least they were close. We lived above an independent bookstore, and we filled the ladder-style bookcase in our loft before the pandemic even hit.
My compendium of Annie Baker plays. A very worn copy of Interpreter Of Maladies. My post-it-note-filled copy of Heartburn.
A book on lesbian erotics in writing I found at a thrift store. It just click for source another cross-country road trip, a couple months in a temporary place in Orlando, and several rounds of stressful pandemic apartment hunting before we found visit web page first article source to truly, for real, permanently move in together.
We got plants. I decorated the kitchen. The rooms filled dating came to life. Those bookcases looked magnificent. But so many of my things were still nearly 1, miles away, including my books. I saw the crowded bookcases and projected too much onto them, an anxious thought prodding at me: Was there any room left for my things?
Online dating a Librarian Is The Best Thing To Take Place To My Bookshelves | Autostraddle
For me? Figuratively and literally, there was plenty of room for me in our life. In fact, our shared aesthetics think: cozy and modern meets Florida kitsch?! And yet, I was all worked up over the books.
The three bookcases were nearly full. Would mine have to stay partially stowed away in boxes? Even if we found the space, what would it look like to bring our books together? Did they need to be separate like our closets? I know a couple that keeps permanently separate bookshelves. My books, your books. I just want our books to be able to live together, like us.
Books peacefully cohabitating, smashed together on shelves. It sounded genuinely intimate: our books, touching. We were once again on the same dating. My girlfriend was more than happy to conjoin our books, but she had some rules.
She is, after all, a librarian. I was game though, ready to be more mature and sophisticated in my bookshelf tendencies rather than just indiscriminately throwing books where they fit. A very commanding and nosey Leo, my mother insisted upon assisting with organizing our books.
Thus sparked the first tricky step of merging bookshelves: dealing with my bossy mother. I knew she loved me dating I saw how chill she was about my mom throwing our books wildly around our go here room. She still threw a random shelf in the middle of one of the bookcases just for red covers, regardless of genre.
It was easier to just let her do it and fix it after she left. When Kristen and I disbanded the red books and reallocated them to their respective shelves, I made more fun of my mother and, by extension, anyone who sorts books by color. I expected agreement, but Kristen offered something else. She said the color system probably works for my mother, a very visual and aesthetic-driven person who is more likely to remember what a book looks like than the first and last name of who wrote it.
It works for other people, too. It goes something like this: There are two bookcases in the living room. The one on the right houses novels sorted by author last name, A-R. On the left, the first two shelves https://irwingoodman.info/housewife-dating-app.php poetry unsorted by name. The next two shelves contain unsorted short fiction. The fifth shelf is the Stephen King shelf.
The bottom shelf continues with novels by authors with S-W names. In the office, two more bookcases. Andrews collection, classics, a shelf for graphic narrative and YA, plays, and vintage books. The second-to-last shelf finishes out the https://irwingoodman.info/black-white-dating-sites-free.php by authors with W-Z names.
Poetry, short fiction, Stephen King, novels by author name S-W. It sounds topsy-turvy on paper. Why do our novels break in such nonlinear dating a rich man Why does modern YA live among the classics—the spine aesthetics of those respective groups strikingly discordant?
Why organize novels by last name but not short fiction? None of these questions really matter if this much is true: We both can locate books without having to scan shelves for longer than a few seconds. Everything has its place. The system works for us, because it is ours. Each bookcase is also a home of its own. Aside from the books they hold, each has its own decor, too. Decorative pennants from one of my best friends adorn the office bookcases, and an unlit, massive flamingo candle gifted to Kristen for her book launch is perched on one, too, its coloring slightly faded by the Miami sun.
A dried rose from the rainbow bouquet I sent her on the same occasion rests on a bookcase amid taxidermy, embroidery, miniature owl figurines, postcards, and costume glasses I got at a junk shop in Venice beach when I was probably Andrews, classics, graphic narrative, YA.
So we got all our books on the shelves with minimal conflict. In the coming weeks, a new challenge arose. The bookcases were filling up. Shelf space was dwindling. Our short fiction shelves became so packed it was difficult to actually pull a book out. She calmly explained we would just have to get rid of some books to make room for new ones. We were both surprised by my reaction. I thought Kristen was asking me to make sacrifices. We all have relationship baggage, and one of the various dilapidated suitcases hauled in from my relationship history contains imbalanced sacrifices masked as compromises.
First of all, completely free dating website books would be donated. But also, if I wanted to keep every one of my books on the shelf, I could. But I needed to understand space on our bookcases was finite, dating I was clearly in denial about. If more books were coming in, some would have to go. Librarian, with her library brain, constantly reassesses which books she actually needs to keep and which she can send to a friend or donate.
But it cracked librarian open for me. Books https://irwingoodman.info/reno-gold-onlyfans.php be replaced. Parting ways with them just means re-homing them. Expanding a book collection also requires culling.
When we add new books, we shift the shelves. Room can always be made for the things we love. There will always, always be space for me in our home. I erroneously assumed Kristen would be more difficult. She must have so many rigid ideas about how books are organized and displayed!
22 Comments
I should have known better. If anything, being librarian librarian makes her more fluid and unpretentious when librarian comes to books and how to arrange them. She knows how to adapt to the needs librarian the community which, in this case, looks like our shared home. Our books, like our lives, can mesh in ways that might not make complete logical sense from the outside. So long as it makes sense to us.
Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is the managing editor of Autostraddle and a lesbian writer of essays, short stories, and pop culture criticism living in Orlando. Some of her pop culture writing dating be found at The A.
ClubVulture, The Cut, and others. You can follow her on Twitter or Instagram and learn more about her work on her website.