I'm building a habitat for myself.

For the past three years I've been a devotee of College Student Things, by which I mean Christmas lights and sticking pictures to the walls. I mean, I guess I always liked Christmas lights and I started with the pictures a little bit in the last few months of high school:



But then when I went to college, it all just sort of exploded out of me, like this:



Maybe you can't see the best part of the wall papers:



That part is photocopies of album covers and comic books, but the main thing that started to happen to my walls was that I put absolutely everything on them. I used tickets and receipts and little pieces of candy wrappers to fill in the inches of space between pictures and postcards.

Bizarrely I can't find that good a picture of second year, but that's okay because it wasn't that good, I just tried to recreate what I did in first year, which was kind of stupid. It takes a really long time to do this, and it didn't really help to try to follow a picture of what it was like the year before; it maybe even made it worse. Also, different stuff feels important at different times so I feel like part of my wall was on life support and was full of things that didn't feel important to me anymore.



Then when I went home for the summer, I finally decided not to live in my old room anymore. It's really big and it has really bright wallpaper that I thought I wanted for a minute when I was fourteen. It's just hard to concentrate or feel anything in that room. So I moved to the room I lived in when I was a baby; I didn't want to do stuff to all the walls, since I won't be living at home much longer, so I just put up Christmas lights and did the closet:



I don't know why I never took a better picture of it. Anyway, I understand that this stuff will be sort of obnoxious and hipster-y once I stop being in college, but I can't help it, I have a feeling I'm always going to live in environments like this, until I have kids who might trip over the Christmas lights and tear the pictures off the walls--AND ONCE I LIVE SOMEWHERE THAT I PLAN TO LIVE IN FOR SEVERAL YEARS, I COULD DO ALL THE WALLS!! EVERY INCH!!

I just got back to school and so far I have this:



And I forgot to bring BlueTac, but I didn't want to wait last night, so I just stuck things up for now with duct tape:





Obviously, this is revolting, but I can't help but be sort of thrilled by how little time it took, and wonder if maybe I don't really need to do a super precise pattern with no blank spaces.

I mean, I probably do. I'll fix it soon.