My wife came home exhausted from a field trip—teachers, middle schoolers, the whole traveling circus—and she asked me to stash her suitcase in the garage. I slid it into the cabinet beside its scuffed, veteran companions and felt the familiar itch: wouldn’t it be nice to replace this tired lineup with a set of glossy, overqualified luggage, the kind that looks like it has opinions about first class? I love the look of expensive luggage—the clean lines, the quiet arrogance. The only problem is that I hate traveling. I admire the gear for a life I avoid like a delayed flight.
The same contradiction sits on my wrist. I’m drawn to beautiful watches—polished steel, disciplined dials, the small theater of timekeeping—but I live like a polite hermit, rarely entering the arenas where such wrist presence might register. I want the props without the stage, the costume without the performance.
It dawned on me, as I closed the cabinet on my battle-worn luggage, that I suffer from Ornamental Displacement Syndrome: a condition in which one’s appetite for beauty and refinement is outsourced to objects that require a public stage, even as one retreats from that stage, leaving the objects to perform in private, a one-man show with no audience and impeccable production values.
Cinemorphosis 
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