Last night I ate dinner with my folks and a couple of our family friends over at their beautiful Arboretum home. While I sat on the couch listening to the conversation and half-watching the football game, I spied this fascinating little book called Living in Small Spaces and spent much of the evening paging through it, enthralled.

Given my intended educational track, I'll be living in "small spaces" for the next decade or so, and yet the ingenuity required to live comfortably in such a space makes me think again about ever buying a larger-than-average home*. It's akin to the phrase "brevity is the soul of wit" — if you only have so much space to put your shit, you've got to figure out how to store it intelligently. A small home (or apartment) also lends itself, perhaps counter-intuitively, to entertaining; parties, gatherings, and soirée's ought to bring people together, and a large room only encourages wall-polarity.

* As a kid, I used to tape about six sheets of white construction paper together, and lay out a rough blueprint of my future "house," which generally had at least two swimming pools, a baseball stadium, a McDonald's, a theme-park, a mall, and a bedroom or two. I also usually drew in Great White Sharks circling the premises, hidden in the depths of my moat.