Things I have in my room, things I don't have in my room.

[magistrate]

1. On one of my windowsills, I have a line of small plastic cases filled with coins, carefully sorted by denomination. I tend not to carry coins around with me, so anytime I paid in cash, I'd just get more and more change and take it home and dump it into my little plastic cases.

I haven't interacted with them in months, now. It's strange. The city is generally urging people to use contactless payment methods, and at work we tend to only have one or two registers which are even open for cash transactions.

There are, of course, issues related to economic class regarding who uses cash and who uses cards, or smartphone tap payments, or whatever else, but I wonder if we're beginning to see a larger move toward the obsolescence of physical currency. Most of my transactions, at least, are virtual; during this pandemic I've stopped using cash and have hardly noticed.

So it's strange to notice the coins on my windowsill and see them not as a resource but as a potential historical artifact.


2. Since college, I've drifted farther and farther away from acquiring physical books. The shift isn't an actual desire; it's more a combination of getting used to moving over and over and over again, having to put things into storage when housing arrangements got shaky, and going through periods where the cost of a physical book was prohibitive. (I'm still getting used to being able to buy ebooks at full price, rather than opportunistically sniping them when they went on $.99 sale.)

But now I have some physical books which I'd like to read, and I realize that I don't really have bookmarks.

By which I mean, the bookmark-as-art-object sort. Bookmark-as-collectable. Because, really, probably anyone who's grown up reading is familiar with the "random envelopes, Starburst wrappers, receipts, scratch paper, sticky notes, other books" model of bookmarking. I also grew up a dog-earer. But there's something fascinating about bookmarks-as-designed-objects; it's a kind of declaration of intent not only to read but to ornament your reading. There's something very specifically bookish, or at least bookworm-ish about them. A subcultural cant.

I do have a tin of book darts, which I adore, but those are more in the line of providing long-term annotation rather than ephemeral place marking. I really should get some nice bookmarks.

Comments

[sholio]

You know, with physical books becoming so much less of a thing than they used to be, it's really interesting to me how bookmarks as art objects have become even more of a thing than I remember them being, say, 20 or 30 years ago. I mean obviously, attractive bookmarks as objects have always been around, but I feel like buying paper books has become a sort of ... not luxury thing exactly, but something where people who buy paper books are also more likely to want fancy little status symbols and/or self-pampering objects to surround them with.

[magistrate]

Maybe it's something to do with physical books becoming a conscious choice instead of an unexamined default?

[brainwane]

I used to collect bookmarks -- like, it was a hobby, to collect purposely-made-to-be-bookmarks bookmarks. I hope you are able to get one or two soon since they are nice to have!