….a mess. But an insightful mess! Behold: my natural habitat.
1. Meaning and Necessity, by Rudolf Carnap. My Long-Suffering Husband (LSH) is, as has been mentioned, a logician/philosopher; this book was part of my first-year wedding anniversary present to him. Underneath is a tome on non-classical logic, while further down the table one may spy works on both symbolic logic and models and ultraproducts – huzzah! Sufficed to say, I don’t read them. Unless I’m suffering from insomnia. Or, even then, perhaps not.
2. Ugh boots. These also belong to the LSH, but as they are warm and overlarge, I’ve been known to make use of them during cold Melbourne winters, or whenever I feel like clomping.
3. More logic papers. Note the extreme proliferation of Greek and algebraic symbols. Know what they mean? ‘Coz I don’t.
4. A crude communications device, referred to in some literature as a “mobile phone”, or mobilius phoney in the Latin. This one belongs to the LSH.
5. Unopened mail from my university containing this week’s lecture on pop culture. (Best thing about distance education: pausing or fast-forwarding the lecturer at your whim. If only real life were so obliging.)
6. Unopened superannuation mail, to be set aside in a kitchen drawer until such time as my father calls and asks why I still have three different providers, and when will I get around to rolling them over? As a result, I will send it to him. He will read it, make a note of the contents, file it in another drawer full of similarly uninteresting but frustratingly important data, make timely remarks about my financial future, and then all will be well with the universe.
7. An alabaster chess board, which was an awesome wedding present.
8. Pertinent reading material (mine).
9. Trashy action movie of the Brendan Fraser oeuvre.
10. Chocolatey goodness.
11. My iPod – another awesome wedding gift. You can tell it’s mine, because the rubber circle thingies have come off the ear buds and there’s a slight scratch on the screen. Contents include an amalgam of Buffy soundtracks/songs, 90’s rock and the entire Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio series.
12. Salt and pepper shakers. We have no kitchen table worthy of the name, and so end up eating in the lounge. This makes us lazy.
13. Nintendo nunchuku!
14. Beginner-sized knitting needles. I’d post a photo of the (I use the word laughingly) scarf I finished yesterday, but one of the cats is sleeping on it. There is no untruth in saying that this is the best possible to use to which it could be put.
15. Headphones. All the better to hear you with. Or not.
16. There is, I swear, some kind of God-Damned breeding factory for water bottles in our house. We never buy them – in fact, I can think of only one we’ve purchased in the past year and a half – and yet they just show up, like the creepy Mormon lady who knows my name. This one, at least, holds some actual water.
17. Nutritional sugary goodness.
18. The Wiimote. (Thinks: I wonder if I can fit in some tennis before bed?)
19. Glasses tend to accumulate on our table. There’s no real excuse. Bad Foz.
20. TV remote. Ah, bringer of entertainment!
21. X-Box 360 remote. Our DVD player died of mysterious causes some time ago, so now we use the X-Box instead, largely because it comes equipped with this handy, cordless doodad.
22. X-Box controller. The LSH and I are intermittent gamers: my addiction to Final Fantasy and Mario Kart has been well-documented, while he tends more towards first person shooters. The console was my last Christmas gift to him, so that we could play Halo together – ironically, however, this doesn’t often happen, as whenever I’m winning (most of the time), he has a tendency to drop suddenly out of the map, grumbling inaudibly about the unfairness of shotguns, swords and plasma grenades. Currently, though, he’s playing The Force Unleashed. Which is shiny.
And, finally:
23. The LSH himself. Or at least, his hip and guitar-print shorts.
What does your coffee table say about you?
shattersnipe: malcontent & rainbows 