I have finally set up a chair in front of Elliott. For those who don’t know, Elliott is a six-year-old blue iMac, which Anne gave to me after she got a Power Book. The placement of the chair was harder than it sounds. I have a rather sizeable room, at least comparatively--it’s bigger than any dorm room I’ve seen, anyway--but I’ve somehow managed to nearly fill it with stuff. The bed is rather meager, just a twin bed, and the only two areas that have to remain furniture-free are the closet and the door. The remaining sections of wall are covered by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, both of which are overflowing with books. I haven’t read most of the books, and I’ve read even fewer of the books in the large box underneath my school-style desk. I’ve placed this desk behind what used to be the family’s kitchen table, until its ugliness and bulkiness caused my parents to put it in the basement. I took the table into my room when I got Elliott, so that he’d have somewhere to sit. Now tonight, as a result of a newfound desire to use Elliott for writing, I’ve placed one of the former kitchen chairs by the table. The head of my bed is right next to the smaller of the two bookshelves, and to the right of the bed is this window-schooldesk-table-chair setup. A few feet behind my chair, I have a dressing table which has been with my family since, well, since I was dressed on it as a baby. This leaves roughly three square feet of floorspace, and part of that is covered by notebooks, shoes, cords and such. I have all these things for two reasons. The first is that I am a compulsive buyer of books and CDs (which, like the books, have gone mostly unused since I got them), because they fill the hole. The second, and the reason that they’re all in my room, taking up living space, is that it is somehow more comfortable to have such restricted movement options. I suppose I have the opposite of claustrophobia, at least when it comes to my private rooms. The only time constricted spaces are a burden to me is when those spaces also contain other people. Then I begin to get antsy. That’s what it’s like at work, by the way: five people in an area only slightly larger than my room, along with eleven computers and desks along every part of the wall. What’s worse is that the people have gradually gotten more insistent about talking to me, even though I could never be real friends with any of them. When they aren’t talking to me, they’re talking to each other, which is slightly more comfortable and far more entertaining. They often discuss matters of some importance, only they’re all of average intelligence. It’s like watching people with severe cataracts compulsively running into each other in an art museum, talking about how beautiful they’ve heard the paintings are. As I write this, I'm slowly losing bloodflow to my feet, because the chair is rather high and the leaves of the kitchen table hang down rather low.