Made in China

Yesterday, I was seized with a strange compulsion (as I often am), and went around trying to find the country of manufacture for as many objects in my apartment as I could stand. # Rarely used JVC VCR, and more frequently used Panasonic DVD player: China. # Picture Frame: China. # Comfy catbed: China. # Wire wastebasket: China. # Faux Tiffany lamp: China. # Roland Electronic Piano: Japan. # Bell Vista 200 phone (not the ultra-complex space console kind with the gigantic LCD screen): Canada - ah! # Fender Jazz bass guitar, lefthanded: Japan. # SMC Barricade Wireless router: Taiwan. # Manhattan Toys fuzzy goat doll: China. # Stainless Steel Scissors: China. It was here that I realized: if it wasn’t for China, Japan, and other Far East countries, we would have absolutely nothing in our apartments. Seriously, if we really pissed off all of the countries that make all of the shit that we slowly accumulate in our lives, they could easily say, “Screw you”, and stop making things for us. And, because we have spent so long trying to divest ourselves of the responsibility for fabricating any of the things in our lives (hellbent instead on just enjoying the act of buying, and using), we would be lost. Who knows how to make a DVD player from parts, anyway? Then we would be stuck in our empty apartments, mounds of neglected dust bunnies swirling around our feet, talking on the phone and wondering to anyone who would listen what happened to all of our stuff?