In antic­i­pa­tion of my third and last move this year, I was doing some thinking about my worldly posses­sions. I came to the conclu­sion that I own and love many vessels: bottles, flasks, beakers, boxes (wooden, metal, and paper), cups, satchels, etc. that serve no purpose other than to contain other objects and substances. Unfor­tu­nately none yet of the ocean­go­ing variety.

I had a similar real­iza­tion a few summers ago, when I had a job orga­niz­ing the toolch­ests of the Yale record­ing studio: the majority of them were filled with things that served as attach­ments, that is, some­thing you can use to attach one thing to another. Record­ing engi­neers are obsessed with finding clever and elegant ways to do this. The primary situ­a­tion is mounting micro­phones, which sounds simple until you ask a record­ing engineer to do it.

Objects are more mean­ing­ful when we can sort and group them, and use them in conjunc­tion with each other.

Image by the wonder­ful iconwerk.de via Flickr.