05: open up

There are twenty-three hinged doors in my apartment.

For the last hour or so, I have been drifting in and out of sleep and therefore failing miserably at watching this movie that I am supposed to discuss tomorrow. It's not a bad movie; I have just been staying up late all week and my body has announced that it can't take it anymore. A familiar battle, this: the mind begging the body to forego sleep in favor of any number of activities requiring consciousness and clarity, while the body insists that both it and the mind are starved of rest and it is not going to sit idly by while—well, in fact, that's exactly what it is going to do, and with eyes closed, if you please. 

My point is that I have just slept through the last hour of the day without having written something first.

My counterpoint, then, which I may have led you to believe was my topic by announcing it at the start, is that there are twenty-three hinged doors in my apartment. 

Yes, I counted. It occurred to me as a question worthy of exploration, and so I explored. By counting. Included in this tally are closet doors, cupboard doors, a door that conceals (or reveals) nothing but a built-in ironing board, the oven door, refrigerator and freezer doors, the door to the circuit breaker box, and my printer's paper tray, which happens to look very much like a door on this particular model. 

You may think that last one to be a bit of a stretch, but it's really not so odd when you consider that I had gone on to contemplate (but ultimately not to count) other hinged items under my roof, like this pretty calligraphy box, my oboe case, CD- and DVD cases, my electric teakettle with hinged lid... And what about books? Granted, they don't have mechanical hinges, per se, but their spines do a pretty good job filling that function. The action of opening a book mirrors the physical movement involved in opening a door, and once it is open—either the door or the book—you are presented with new opportunities for exploration, in worlds which are unique in their position on that side of the door/book cover.

It might be argued that sleep is a door, behind which swirl the bizarrely beautiful and beautifully bizarre mysteries of the dreamworld. (And you thought that doors theme wasn't even my point.)

Soon I'll be pulling back the covers and gladly crawling through that door into sleep and dreams. After giving these other two movies a go, that is.