The New York International Gift Fair, featuring everything from crystal to paper and stretching way beyond tchotchkes into office and personal items, is happening right this very second.  So I was going to blog about file folders, which I have always loved (I'm a Virgo, as the profile says), and which are really big right now.

Then I saw the news: a bridge collapsed in China and killed at least 28.

And in Iraq, again, an ex-bridge.

In North Korea, a bridge won’t help.

In Hawaii, Hurricane Flossie is nearing the Big Island on the heels of a earthquake  south of Hilo. (Hilo’s a grungy treasure, and one of the greatest places in the universe to get sushi.)

A scientist-humanist has postulated that we are one big computer simulation, and if you are good enough at math to understand his theory, there’s no way to argue with him.

The maker of toys found tainted with high levels of lead has killed himself. Barbies are being recalled for lead, as are toys from the Cars movie. Google it, you’ll see.

At least there will soon be batteries made out of paper. And I got invited to see Leonardo DiCaprio’s new movie.

But most importantly, at least Maddox got some tattoos already. And Christina Applegate’s divorce is final or I’d be worried about her. But they have to stop calling her unmarried with no children. It’s not fair. At least coin a label: I propose: She-Free.

She-Frees take their pleasures two-dimensional and uncomplicated until they’re ready to get back in the red shoes. She-Frees sit with their hands curled around a cup of tea and think of the old days (Nintendo, 95-cent pizza slices, pressboard). And in a perfectly natural resolution to straighten up their life and get organized, She-Frees buy stationery online. The cheapest, biggest way to go: Decorative File Folders. (Ah. I made it.)

This is a great time for She-Frees because stationery, particularly decorative file folders, have made a comeback. It’s part of the Back to Tangible Artifacts movement. (Like the Back to the Land movement in the '60s, in which urban families moved to tipis in fields—or built shacks in the Hawaiian jungles south of Hilo, where they are now getting drenched by Flossie.) Decorative file folders also double as art, wallpaper, underwear drawer dividers, and even windowshades. And they come in hokey, modern, or a neo-victorian overscrolled superpattern, so just about anyone can find the right match:

1. Hokey might just make a She-Free feel like a Wal-Mart loser, except maybe if hokey is so kitschy that kitsch beats hoke, like with these horse folders. File your cowboy dreams in these.


2. Modern can verge on '80s, as in a '80s minidress for a night at a Fort Lauderdale singles bar. Chartreuse dots are so cheerful in the morning light.

3. If a She-Free is feeling in a “I’m going to straighten my hair and stop wearing my ex’s sweatpants” mood, these understated, minimalist M.O. folders might be just the thing.

Note: a slap on the hand to retro design site Office, which carries the M.O. Its graphics are designed to resemble my grandfather’s late 1940s Jersey City stationery store, and I know design*sponge gave you a nod, but saying, “Color changes are subtle as the majority of folders are in white” is a riddle standing in for an explanation. Straightforward is the new retro. She-Frees deserve the truth.


4. Life is a garden! This is a chance to cultivate it. Go Victorian, honey! If a She-Free can keep the rest of her quiet little apartment neat as a pin, these robin’s egg blue Cavallini file folders with red birds will really dress it up.

5. And isn’t it time to trade sadness for it-ness? Nothing’s more it than red coral these days (funny how things going extinct take on that extra special chic).
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Note: Just do not believe that these are Italian just because a website says so.  Cavallini is in California, not Capri. Shame on you for misleading the gullible. Instead, matronize seejanework.

6. If suddenly beset by a knowledge that she may have to be both father and mother to her inner child, She-Frees should go for unisex-ornate: dashing black toile folders by Blue Ink studios.

7. Maybe the olden days are filling her with nostalgia, though she’d keep the good stuff (like brands, or men, we know and trust) and do away with the bad (like a lot). In that case, venerable old paper merchant Mead Westvaco has come up to date with these pink and brown peony folders.

8. Confronting She-Free bachelorette hood in all its wood-paneled, crusty stove, rental heck (I don’t say hell in blogs)? Having bad dreams about wood: collapsing woodpiles, trolls smashing into logs with hatchets, giant wasps burrowed in the pulp beneath the tannic bark? I admit it: I am surrounded by wood paneling these days (and have a nefarious connection to collapsing woodpiles and axes). I am therefore drawn to things woody, like someone allergic to chocolate craves Ghirardelli (another S.F. Italian, how 'bout that) by the pound. Thank goodness then for the file-folder big brother of the woodgrain journal I blogged on yesterday from Intl Arrivals. Just means more wood to love, available this month. Paper is the new battery after all.