On happiness

I forgot to tell something important about Tours: I'm happy here. I take great pleasure in simple things, like going to IKEA and the supermarket, and buying all kind of items that please me. Every simple acquisition gives me joy, that profoundly human joy of possession. I feel so very much attached to my things. Clothes, books, little stationary items. I wouldn't give any of my books to the library now. 
The Tribal Wife spent a month among the natives, and another problem is removed from her mind. She saw things, got shocked and shaken, reflected. Curiously, I miss Lisbon now; I look back into my Tribal Wife's adventure there, and I cherish a kind of ethnic shawl in red, blue and violet I'd bought in the Mouraria, the shawl that covered me in the Portuguese national library across the last winter. Now I have a new item, an ivory coloured sweater in very soft polyester knitwear. It's quite a common material, it must have a specialised name, but I have no idea how it might be called. Chenille yarn, as far as I could find it on Google.
My life is so full of everything, since I left Warsaw, it starts to be more than a year ago now. So many travels, so many experiences, so much work started and done. So many new items to put in my CV. I thought I was a CV-maniac, till I saw one guy from the Jagiellonian University who is also a fellow here in France. That one opens his mouth for nothing but to give you some more items from his CV, just to keep people fully aware of what kind of excellent scientist he is. Only the gist of his research has somehow escaped me...
But this post is supposed to be about things, not people. About chenille yarn and the happiness it brings about. One of the best things your CV can buy is a sweater in chenille yarn.
But I've also bought a hole puncher and yet another pack of coloured ball pens. Stationary items are my perdition. I possess hundreds of coloured ball pens, both in my old home and here. They were one of the first items I packed, and still one of the greatest temptations when I stroll across the Auchan supermarket. I suppose such an obsession is not unknown to the psychiatric medicine; it must be rather a common kind of madness. But does it have a deeper meaning? What do those pens actually represent to me? Are they a lasting shadow of a lack I suffered in my childhood? A symbol of my dearest longings and aspirations? What I remember from my childhood, is the dear possession of many colour pencils, perhaps a set of 36 colours, which was a great luxury at that time. And the desire of felt-tip pens, which were even greater luxury; but I actually stopped collecting them many years ago. Contrary to what happens with books, I'm not a real collector of pens; I don't really care to have different marks or rare colours. I often collect exactly the same, Chinese type of jelly pens, and just several types of common ball-pens. Even if, indeed, rare colours tend to attract me more than common ones. Perhaps one day the Tribal Wife will get down to this.