the disposable culture

Anyone who's ever owned Ikea products know that they're not built to last. Today I picked up an Ikea drinking glass and saw it had lost its shiny clearness and gained a haze around the bottom. The glass is a few months old. I looked at it and thought, figures, that's what happens when you buy inexpensive cheap disposable houseware.

Ikea invented, or at elast perfected the disposable furniture. They are stylish and affordable, plus you get all the fun of assembling the pieces together. Like life-size Lego or jigsaw puzzles. There's genius here, a lot of it in fact. Ingenious Swedish designers have invented mechanisms and parts that go into an overall system so that you can mass-produce parts and map them to any design and then churn out the pieces so the design becomes reality. Connectors, screws, dowels, nails, and particle boards, and voila, furniture for the masses. But stylish so you can also express your individualism.

But of course there are flaws to the system. At the end of the day, Ikea furniture is not made of firm sturdy material. Not the maple, cherry, cedar of yesteryear.

Contentment and old age

Today I wished I was old.

Forget the next 30, 40 years. I'd like to skip ahead, way ahead into the ripe old age of 65 or thereabouts. I'd like to be gray-haired, wrinkled, maybe even bespectacled. But I would like light and life to shine in my eyes, balanced with a sense of well-being and contentment with life. That's where I'd like to be.

I went to the dedication for the Huntington Library's Rose Hills Foundation Conservatory for Botanical Sciences. Now that's a mouthful. The Huntington, being in Pasadena with a big garden, regularly draws in wealthy older folks from the nearby mansions. That and the garden club invites even more older women who love plants. Not only that, the dedication was at 9am on a Monday morning. So who'd have the time to go but those who don't have to work. Or in my case, those whose work was related to the Conservatory.

So there I was, 9am Monday morning, stepping on dewy morning grass amidst a sea of men and women of retirement age. Finely dressed in their best suits and outfits and sipping tea and greeting their garden club friends, neighbors, what have you.

I felt a little out of place, to say the least. But it was interesting to observe the ladies and gentlemen there. Many of the ladies look like the "ladies who lunch" type. I overheard an older couple talking with another woman--okay I kind of eavesdropped--the couple were the Clarks. She's worked for the Huntington for a number of years on a part time basis but has since retired. Her husband taught at Cal Tech and also recently retired. They seemed happy and content in their stage of life. I think they must be close to 70. They're enjoying life. They have wisdom and discernment from their many years of living, having done everything they needed to, and now they are just enjoying life peacefully and gracefully with each other. I loved that the man's name was Kent Clark: Superman's name reversed.

anyway I looked around me and felt like the older men and women all around me seemed to have this self-assured peace and contentment about them. Peaceful. Content. Happy. Enjoying what life had to offer. And I longed for that.

It made me want to skip all the years ahead--all the changes and decisions I'll have to make, all the directions my life will turn, all the hoped and dreams that will bring both disappointment and joy (I hope), or expectations unrealized, all the twists and turns the road of life will lead me. Frankly I am tired. I don't much want to move on at this point. I'd like some rest. Better yet someone yank me off the path and put me at the last stretch of the path toward the end.

I want to skip a few steps and get to the end. I want to cheat. Unfortunately I have no power to make that happen. I just want to be old. I want to fast forward through the next 30 years...