Did you ever go back and watch _Iraq in Fragments_?

[rebeccmeister]

...I do still need to watch Longley's next film, too, on Afghanistan, especially in light of what's happened since (US withdrawal; film is Angels are Made of Light).

Anyway.

Iraq in Fragments sticks in one's mind. Especially the young boy apprenticed at the auto repair shop. An image I won't forget from his life is the point where we observe a repaired metal folding chair. You know, one of those utilitarian folding chairs that's almost unnoticeable because it's so drab.

I largely associate them with coffee hours at church, growing up.

Elaine Scarry talks about chairs in The Body in Pain, a book I'd still recommend as life-changing (although it does require something of a strong stomach to read, as a portion of the book deals with torture). Although we often take chairs for granted, they are integral to how many people survive and live in this world. Given a choice between sitting on the ground and sitting in a chair, which would you choose? Clearly, there's enough value to a metal folding chair that it is an object worthy of repair, in the context of life in an auto repair shop in Iraq.

I have been vaguely shopping for wooden dining chairs for a long time, now. The "vaguely" part is because I still can't bring myself to spend the $80 or so per chair that it might cost to purchase new ones. Plus, every time I've tried to look at new wooden chairs, I've been dissatisfied with them. Too flimsy, too oversize, just plain ugly.

In the meantime, I watch the chairs that people put out to the curb to get rid of. The vast majority of chairs that are put out to the curb are broken: missing the back, legs disconnected or gone, seat gone, stained, ripped. Sometimes they look so ill-fitting that one wonders why they were ever acquired in the first place.

I still have four chairs in the basement of the Grandma House, partly disassembled after I stalled out on sanding them to refinish them. I don't love them but they were free and had some potential, although their seats are oddly wide.

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I am thinking about all of this because I can't find any 8-ounce canning jars for sale right now. Another victim of the current supply chain bottlenecks that are manifesting most painfully at the LA/Long Beach Port. Unlike the metal folding chair, canning jars are difficult to innovate out of other things.

I don't exactly need canning jars, but they would be handy if I want to eventually make raspberry jam to share with friends and family. It seems like we are perpetually buying more of them because we give them away to a number of friends and family members who don't return them because it feels silly to mail back boxes full of empty canning jars. But this arrangement may need to change, if the current supply chain issues continue to be the new norm. For now, the raspberries are fine living in the freezer. We have plenty of larger jars, too, so I could make a smaller number of larger jars and give jam to fewer people.

We shall see.

I almost would have thought that packaging shortages would cause us to start reusing certain types of packaging more, like those glass Fanta bottles that got reused over and over again in El Salvador to the point where you could see on the bottles where the rollers were wearing them out.

But it takes time and money to build the infrastructure to reuse those kinds of things, and we globalized all that away decades ago.

So here we are.

Comments

[threemeninaboat]

Send out a mass email to people nearby asking for jars.
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My final straw with why I quit Dr. Baseball was they took the chairs out of the waiting room, in a medical facility, because People Should Be Buying Things Not Sitting.
When I got to work I would steal Dr. Baseball's and the Office Manager's chair and put them in the waiting room every morning.

[bluepapercup]

We've been using these vintage folding wooden chairs as our dining rooms chairs for basically ever, and I despise them. They're creaky, too small for my butt, weirdly angled, and don't match the table. But as you note, good chairs are expensive, and I've also been unable to trashpick or otherwise obtain satisfactory used chairs.

One day we will sell the table (which I got for free in 2012 when it was left behind by a previous tenant) and buy an actual dining set. Who knows when that day will come.

[rebeccmeister]

Those chairs do sound aggravating, argh! The main chairs we have been using at our dining table are some wood folding Ikea patio chairs. They've held up fairly well and aren't weirdly angled, but they are still far from ideal. When I've had more energy to shop around, the best chairs I've come across have come from restaurant supply places. But I suspect I'm especially finicky when it comes to dining sets - I absolutely do not want anything at all oversize, but most of new dining sets tend to be oversize.