Welcome!
Thanks for checking out episode two. This round, listen to me chat with Jenny Mitchell, creative extraordinaire. She’s an incredibly interesting, intelligent and genuine podcast guest and was fantastic to interview. This episode, despite being the second, is the first that I recorded. Jenny turned my okay questions into insightful answers and took our conversations in directions I hadn’t even thought of yet. I learned what feels like a lifetime worth of hosting tips within 40 or so minutes of talking. But more than that, the biggest reason that interviewing Jenny was so rewarding was that she kind of embodies the lifestyle that I’m trying to live. While we were talking about our collecting habits and numerous hobbies, I was internally marveling that an adult, a real adult, with a career and children and years of experience at being an adult (most of my life I’ve been quite young and small), was still collecting.
I had grown up in a “you have too many things, starting getting rid of stuff or I’ll be coming around with a garbage bag” kind of household. My mom and my sister chat about their latest purges and books on minimalism, and fight about having the exact same taste in Ikea furniture (literally. My sister will go to Ikea for a new shelf and two weeks later, my mom has it too). I had thought, for a long time, that being an adult meant it was time to stop collecting. Of course, I had no actual intentions of ceasing my en massing of material items to a level just short of reality TV hoarding, but I was disappointed anyways that I seemed to be the only one who enjoyed having every possible artistic media, odd vintage furniture piece, or non-fiction book on obsolete subjects like Astrology’s unseen role in WWII. But talking to Jenny, I realized I’m not as unique as I thought I was. In a good way. It was comforting to know that even though I was walking the slightly cluttered path of maximalism, I wasn’t travelling alone. Folks like Jenny are paving the way.
II. Jenny Mitchell and the Magic Golden Bus