So, any store with materials for people about to go off to college probably sells these weird grid squares. Assembled, they should look something like this:



I have no idea what their proper name is. I have a bunch of them.

When I first bought them I had a tiny tiny closet - when I opened the door, the clothes would burst out, screaming for the light, like a bunch of stoned people who had filled a VW Bug way over capacity. It was not only useful, but essential that I force as much use out of the space as possible.

Now I have different closet, and it is not as tiny.

But I still have all these stupid grid squares. I tried to assemble them for a picture, but it was frustrating, and because I knew that I would not actually be using them and it was only for illustration purposes, this is pretty much what happened instead:



Let's just say that most of them live in the back of my closet, and the rest I am using in a way they were not intended to be used.

I'm not a big jewelry-wearer. I always lose rings when I take them off to wash my hands, bracelets make me feel I'm trapped in something and should gnaw off my own arm to escape, and while I do wear earrings I don't think I've changed them in... maybe two years? Perhaps eventually my ears will just reabsorb them entirely and I will be able to take a picture for the Disobedient Nature Task.

But I do wear necklaces. They glitter, and unless I've somehow become upside down, they usually stay on without any effort on my part.

The thing is, once you've accrued a number of them, storage becomes an issue.

You can buy a little jewelry box, but that can only hold, what, ten necklaces? Necklaces are my jewelry, man, and given that I have no compunction about buying cheapie cheap ones from Target or wherever, I have a lot of them.

So my choices are pretty much to start putting more than one of them in each jewelry box cubby, or leave them lying out. Both of which lead to tremendous problems - when you do either of these things with necklaces, they will have necklace seks. Like two snakes getting it on, their chains luxuriously tangled, pendants tapping gently against one another, the necklaces are not swiftly, nor easily, pulled apart. Also I expect that on some kind of meta-plane, they're probably really pissed at you when you do so. I mean, what if you were in the middle of sex and someone burst in because they needed to wear you for twelve hours?



For years I struggled with a solution to the problem of my jewelry's tendency to orgy when left alone. Then it came to me - hooks! Hooks on the wall!

But in an apartment, making several dozen tiny holes for nails to hang necklaces on would not only irritate the landlord, but possibly bring the neighbors over carrying torches as well. Then one day my gaze fell upon the pile of stupid grid squares, and brilliance struck.

I got some paper clips:



And hung them at the interstices of one of the stupid grid squares:



Being sure that the long end of the paperclip was bent outward:



And spacing them evenly along the grid:



Then nailing it to the wall:



Then, with no further ado, bringing it fully into service:



The necklaces never get tangled, I can see all of them at a glance, they're easy to pull off the grid and put back on, and I am still tremendously, ludicrously, self-satisfied about this entire thing.