walls
I’ve been pretty excited about the possibility of this new house.
It’s about four blocks from my favorite coffee shop, and four blocks in the other direction from a three dollar movie theater. There’s a bakery nearby that sells tiny little muffins that taste more like biscuits and are stuffed with fresh fruit. It has a garage with big barn doors so you can do projects and feel like you’re outside.
I was feeling fabulous about the location and about the luck I had getting my bid accepted, and about all the possibility of such a new adventure. And then I talked to my mom.
My mom and I don’t talk often, and sometimes I forget why. I feel like I ought to want to talk to her. Friends are often surprised, given my general tolerance for and even attraction to difficult people, that I’m so impatient with my mom. They are right. They are right and I should do better and I know it. But every time I try to do better, it fails miserably. Case in point.
I call up my mom to tell her about the house. I call her at what seems exactly the right time: I have navigated all of the tricky steps in the homebuying process with, if not skill and grace, at least passable competence. I have found a house that is both a good match for me and a good investment. And in general I have done something expected and conventional – qualities my mom has been encouraging me to embrace for years.
I found a house! I say to my mom with enthusiasm. Yes? she responds with caution. And I remember that this is how my mom greets any decision I make: wary cynicism. I press on. Yes, a great little house. Little? she says. Yes, I say, very close to downtown. How much was it? she asks. And I tell her – a number at the low end of my range, a range I told her about months ago. A number for which one does not find a house in this neighborhood, ever. A number with which my friends in Seattle and San Diego and DC might be able, with luck and connections, to purchase a well-located parking space.
That much? my mother asks. She sounds surprised. I can’t anywhere in my brain imagine she’s surprised about how high this number is – since it is, after all, a house, and since I don’t live in North Dakota. I decide that she is perhaps surprised at how low the number is, which is the general reaction I have gotten from those who might be considered somewhat In The Know like, for example, my broker and my lender. It’s a fixer! I explain. And this is where the shaking lumbering conversation derails altogether.
A FIXER? she asks with horror. Have you gotten Estimates? On how much all that work is going to Cost You? Which actually, I have. It’s a lot more than she thinks. I mean, I haven’t even said the words “sewer” or “furnace” or, God forbid, “asbestos.” All I said was Fixer. Her horror is probably just coming from the thought that I might have to paint something.
How many bedrooms does this “fixer” have? she asks, and you can hear the quotes around the word fixer. Two I respond, naively, because that is, in fact, how many bedrooms it has. And because I have no idea of the gravity of this answer. No idea that this answer will bring about The Sound.
The Sound is her specialty. It’s kind of a deep grunt / sigh, summoned up from the depths of her tortured and weary soul. The rough translation of The Sound is this: “I hope you realize that through your selfish and stupid actions, you have contributed considerably to my perpetual suffering and eventual untimely death.” The Sound was my mother’s major at Jewish Mother School.
She pauses and makes The Sound again. Twice in a row is really quite exceptional – though it’s happened before, in response to phrases like “hitchhiking in Africa” and “my girlfriend.” I say, quietly, maybe we should talk about something else. She is speechless. Pause. More pause. Finally: Let me put your father on. And she hands off the phone.
And that there kills my house spirit. When I run into a friend the next day at lunch, I hardly want to mention it. It’s a fixer, I say while wincing. And he says: Of Course It Is.
Of course it is! What, like I’m going to buy some Pottery Barn house with carpets and landscaping? Like I’m going to buy some sprawling two-storey out at the end of the bus line? I hate living in big houses. I hate accumulating stuff and I hate dusting that stuff and I hate living in fear that people with less stuff will come steal mine. And I like tearing things down and rebuilding them. I like learning how things work. I like daunting projects that I have no idea how to start.
And it’s no news to the world but somehow it’s shocking how direct a line a parent has to what irks you. It’s just confounding, that someone who has known you so long can know you so poorly. And I wish I could find peace with that.
What I found instead was the home improvement section of Powell’s, and I sat there on the floor for two hours reading Plumbing for Dummies and the Black & Decker Complete Guide to Home Wiring. And fuck. I am psyched about this house.
Birds have been entering the attic.
That’s my favorite sentence from the forty six page long home inspection report produced about a house I have made an offer on. Other highlights include, “The framing under the bathroom was not well installed and is sub standard.” Also, “Roof – continued.”
The Kitchen section begins like this: The counters are damaged and need to be replaced. The cabinets are damaged and need to be replaced. The flooring is damaged and needs to be replaced. This flooring may contain asbestos.
When I began the house-finding adventure a couple months ago, it felt mostly hypothetical. I guess I’ll look for a house, I thought. I’ll look, and see what happens. Julie got me a little blank book and I filled it with lists. Top Five Qualities. What To Do Next. I found a broker, which was harder than I expected. She started sending me listings.
I was looking for something very particular that was basically all about location. I like my quick bike ride to work. I know that a longer ride would mean that on rainy days I’d take the bus. And my daily bike ride changes my mood and my outlook and how well I sleep at night. I have also learned, from living in two different places in Portland, that being just a few blocks from commerce significantly shifts my lifestyle for the better. I need to be able to walk to good things – things that are open after ten.
But close-in neighborhoods are more expensive, so I paraded through a series of comically awkward houses – houses so bizarre in one way or another that they were right in my price range. Tiny houses next to highways with awful floorplans. Dark houses on busy streets. Houses with ominously sloping floors.
I found one favorite, but it had an offer accepted on it just hours before I went inside. So I wrote a backup offer. Weeks went by. I looked at a few others, but given my budget and my neighborhoods, it was mostly about waiting for the right thing to get listed. I figured I could wait a while.
And then, last Monday, my backup offer got bumped into first place. For whatever reason – probably having to do with the outdated sewer or electrical or plumbing systems, or the leaking roof or the leaking oil tank, but who’s to say – the earlier buyers walked. And in the space of five days I found a lender and had an inspection and had a tank locate and got a sewer bid. And now it seems like I might be buying a house.
It could still fall apart, of course. But at this point it’s looking pretty good. And so now I’m staring at forty six pages of what I’ll be up to for the next couple years. I’m not exactly sure why I’m doing this. I guess it’s another piece in my grand experiment in staying put. I guess it’s a good way to learn about circuits. And flooring. And birds.
weak in review
I’ve been sick for six days with this achy fevery mess of a thing that went around my whole office. On the first day I denied it, because Jules had come through Portland on her way back from New Zealand, and it’s better to be well if you’re going to eat orange-flavored French toast and look for wooden boxes in old junk shops. That night it knocked me over. But I downed some Advil and propped myself up and went to the opera. I’m glad I did. I love the opera.
Sunday I don’t remember, except that I got myself soup and missed Elise’s baby shower. Sigh. Monday was a holiday so I just stayed in bed. By nighttime I made the unwise choice to grab dinner with VDay Boy, because my temperature had taken a promising dive below one hundred, and because he was about to leave for a two week trip. I didn’t want him to forget me, you know.
Tuesday I took a sick day, read and watched videos when it didn’t make my head hurt. Wednesday I went back to work. My boss looked at me skeptically. He’d had this, so he knew. At noon he said I’m going out to lunch, and you should be gone when I get back. He’s a good boss.
The fever’s gone now but the coughing part has arrived, and I don’t remember being sick for this long since college. It hasn’t been a bad sick – most of the time it’s felt like a totally manageable sick, the kind of sick you can work with. But every time I try to pretend I’m fine, it alters and comes on a bit worse.
So today I’m staying home, even though it hardly feels necessary. I’m going to lie here in my messy bed surrounded by books and empty Gatorade bottles, watching movies and instant messaging and thinking about the eclipse. I think Winter just wanted a little attention.
A VDay Play in Five Acts
Prelude.
Read the next post.
Act I.
A girl returns from work, high on blue sky and the table of chocolates and pink punch that was set up for bikers on the Hawthorne Bridge. The girl picks through the recently arrived package from her ex, sweetly assembled but a reminder nonetheless that done is done, and she cries just a little bit and listens to Glenn Gould. She considers the options for her evening: mac n’ cheese with the Jane Austen dvd ominously chosen for her by Netflix, or getting the fuck out of the house at all costs. She chooses the latter.
Act II.
The girl heads down to a poorly named local coffee shop she loves – a shop always full of people sitting alone together. The sort of place where being alone on National I’m Not Alone Day will not feel conspicuous. She orders food before realizing that half the seating has been cordoned off for a couples dinner, which seems really unkind for such a single hipster haven, like closing AA on New Year’s. The girl grudgingly enjoys her smoked Gouda panini with caramelized onions and thinly sliced pears.
Act III.
Questioning her earlier resilience, the girl beelines towards her bedroom. Two blocks away she realizes the enormous potential of some dramatic loneliness. While not actually a masochist, she often prefers feeling bad to feeling nothing. She does a one eighty and heads back to Belmont. She sits on a stool at a bar and drinks a drink and giggles to herself, I am drinking whiskey alone at a bar on Valentine’s Day. I wish I had a cigarette. She notices a guy sitting alone nearby and asks How’s your evening going? and he says FineYours?, just that, and looks away, and leaves to smoke out front. And she thinks, You are an ass. You are the only person sitting alone at this bar on Valentine’s Day and a cute girl in tall pink-striped socks comes in and sits right next to you and throws you this opening, and you’ve got nothing. She clinks the ice around in her glass and downs the rest and leaves.
Act IV.
Giving up yet again, the girl is on her way home when she passes another coffee shop with an open mike in progress. She stands staring in the window when a man coming out stops right in the doorway and says What a winning smile. He is not hitting on her. He is fifty at least and he smiles back and heads down the block. She realizes that she is smiling, and that she is in fact having a fairly good time overall. That may be the high point of my night, thinks the girl. She is wrong.
Act V.
After sipping tea for the last few open mike performers, the girl feels she has given it a valiant effort. She goes home at last. In her living room her housemates are assembling to hit a club. She banishes any lingering plans for Persuasion. She puts her phone and her ID in her skirt pocket and gets on her bike. At the club she is being introduced to friends of friends of housemates when she spots a guy at the end of the bar. He is alone and sipping a drink in a familiar way, but he doesn’t look unhappy. I really haven’t been uncomfortable enough times yet tonight, thinks the girl. Who are you waiting for? she asks the guy. Coworkers, he replies. An answer we can work with. She asks more questions and he answers more, and then he asks questions too. Where are your coworkers? she asks after time has passed. They’re probably here because my phone has been buzzing in my pocket for a while now, he says. This, thinks the girl, is a lovely answer. Do you want to check? asks the girl. Not really he says. This, thinks the girl, is a lovely answer too. Then he asks her to dance, and this, thinks the girl, is brave. And they dance till the bar closes. And this, thinks the girl, will do nicely.
(i wrote this yesterday before going out, and shelved it to work on later)
For Valentine’s Day I got a package from Operaman with all the stuff I’d left around his apartment. I don’t think he timed it like that on purpose but still. Unhf.
Last year at this time, right here on this blog, I wished I was in love. And I realize now that I wasn’t specific enough.
Dear Universe, please allow me to amend my earlier wish, which you were gracious enough to grant me and it was nice being in love so I certainly don’t mean to sound ungrateful so let’s just give it another go with a bit more precision on my part. I would like to be in love with someone who loves me back.
Thank you. That is all.
slide thru
Last night I went squaredancing. You can learn a lot about someone by how they squaredance.
I remember reading a few years back about job interviews during which the interviewer would “unexpectedly” need to run an errand, and the interviewee would be asked to drive. The driving would bring out all sorts of qualities for the interviewer to observe: patience or hostility or composure. Squaredancing is like that.
For those of you who haven’t squaredanced since fourth grade gym class (and in fourth grade, squaredancing was my favorite unit in gym) a squaredance goes like this. A bunch of people show up, some in couples and some alone. There’s a kickass band with a violin and a bass at least, and there’s a caller who runs the whole thing. At the start of each dance everyone chooses a partner – traditionally not the one you came with, and a different one every time – and the caller does a quick rundown of how the dance goes. There are basic steps everyone knows like promenade, and special steps for certain dances you learn right there on the spot.
Then the music starts and you just kind of wing it. You try to listen to the caller and follow your partner and generally not knock anyone over.
Some people really don’t get the whole “partner” thing. With squaredancing you dance with lots of people and you’re friendly with them all and you look them in the eye, and all it means is that you’re dancing. But Americans aren’t generally well practiced at that. So sometimes you get a partner who is clearly trying not to look at you or touch you excessively, and who doesn’t smile too much. And it’s hard not to lean over and say to them, We’re dancing, so I’m not going to misread it if you hold my hand.
And some people are really bossy dancers. Sometimes they’re good and sometimes they’re not, but either way they think the goal is doing it correctly. They whisper things like Left when you step right. They watch the floor for skilled partners to ask next. They are often frustrated with the appalling level of squaredance incompetence. And I empathize with them, because this is how I was brought up. But somewhere along the line I was lucky enough to get the newsflash - Technical Mastery: Not The Actual Point.
And my favorite people to dance with, of course, are the ones who are having an unreasonably good time. They know more or less what they’re doing, but when it doesn’t go quite right they make something up. When you head in the wrong direction they put their hand just so, and suddenly you’re going the right way. When they mess up they just come find you again. And they know how to spin their partner, which is hands down the best part of squaredancing. Nervous and bossy dancers make terrible spinners. And without spinning I’m not sure why anyone would squaredance at all.
The Five Stages of a Pop Country Fan’s Breakup Grief
(call me 4.3)
1. Denial. What Kind of Gone, Chris Cagle
Well there’s gone for good and there’s good and gone,
there’s gone with the long before it…
is it whiskey night or just a couple beers?
2. Melodrama. Watching Airplanes, Gary Allan
I'm just sittin' out here watchin' airplanes, take off and fly
Tryin' to figure out which one you might be on
And why you don't love me anymore…
3. Creepiness. More Than A Memory, Garth Brooks
When you’re dialing 6 numbers just to hang up the phone,
Driving cross town just to see if she's home…
4. Coping. Get My Drink On, Toby Keith
I'm gonna get my drink on
I'm gonna hear me a sad song
My baby just left home
I'm gonna stay 'till the money's gone
If it takes me all night long
I'm gonna get my drink on.
5. Acceptance. Brand New Girlfriend, Steve Holy
I picked up what was left of my pride,
And I put on my walking shoes,
And I got up on that high road,
And I did what any gentleman would do..
I got a brand new girlfriend.
metathesis (reaction)
My friend sent me a book for my birthday called Eat Pray Love. The author Elizabeth Gilbert goes city to city and she concludes that every city has a word, and every person has a word, and to truly feel at home you must find a city with the word that matches your own.
And when I read this I liked the idea, but I thought, Every person has a word? One single word? Just one? But that’s what you get in this game: One Word.
I’ve played out the exercise with friends where we list what we’re looking for in another person with the shortest list possible. Because many of us start with things like Plays guitar and Curly hair but in the end of course there are more essential qualities that stay, and they are few and they are indispensible. My list until this point was Joy and Bravery. My list was too long.
And sometimes I worry that my list needs some fleshing out. Sometimes I look at my recent relationships – at where I was willing to go and what I was willing to do, at how quickly I adapted – and I worry that I am like Julia Roberts in Runaway Bride, in that scene where with the thinnest of metaphors she realizes that she had always liked her eggs prepared however her various boyfriends liked theirs. She has no taste of her own, so adopting someone else’s suits her fine. Sound familiar?
Canada: Ok. Casual: Sure. Kids: Why not.
But actually? I know exactly what I like. I took a very long time, which we could affectionately call my twenties, figuring this out. In my twenties I did basically whatever the fuck I wanted to – lived where I wanted and studied what I wanted and acted how I wanted, significant other or no, frowning parents all the while. It wasn’t the most generous period of my life but I learned a lot.
For example. I like to travel. I like words. I like dancing. I like to grow and make and eat good food. I like getting sweaty outdoors.
But more importantly, I know what matters to me. And how my eggs are prepared doesn’t make the list. Scrambled, poached, overeasy, whatever. It doesn’t mean I lack a sense of who I am - it means I don’t need to negotiate every little detail in order to assert who I am. It means I know when I can say Ok, Sure, Why not - and really mean it.
And I say these things often, because I am who I most want to be in situations that require me to give things I don’t yet know how to give and do things I don’t yet know how to do. Go to design school, learn to draw. Move to Quebec, learn to speak French. Date a father, learn to share. And how else do you discover things that you never knew you’d love? How else would I have come to appreciate Catholic mass and canoeing and reading Supreme Court decisions?
So here’s my word: Game. According to thesaurus.com, that’s brave bold courageous dauntless desirous disposed dogged eager fearless gallant hardy heroic inclined interested intrepid nervy persevering persistent plucky prepared ready resolute spirited spunky unafraid unflinching valiant valorous willing.
And if Elizabeth Gilbert was looking for a city that matched her word, I guess I’m looking for a person who matches mine. I don’t care if he likes the music I like or votes for who I vote for, and I don’t care if he has obligations tying him to one place or dreams pulling him somewhere else. We can make that work. It’s not a compromise. It’s the point.
But he better be Game. Cause I’m likely to want to do all sorts of ridiculous things it’s never occurred to him to do – sleep in our yard, adopt a couple foster kids, speak in another language for a month – and I don’t want him to be all Why would we do that? I want him to say How Intrepid of you! How Hardy and Desirous! Let me go get my Thermarest / deep reserves of openness and patience / Italian-English dictionary. Calloo Callay.
See How We Are
I woke up and stayed in bed – read and wrote and read some more – and by eleven called my old insightful friend Mo, who was still in his pajamas, too. And he lives on the East Coast.
This is how winter is, he reminded me. Don’t you remember last year? But I always thought of last year as a fluke. I hoped it was a fluke.
This is how it is to be single in winter, he said. And I felt reassured but also bitter. My single friends are newly in couples and my couple friends are newly in hibernation. Here I am alone in the rain and no one will make plans. This is how it goes, he said. He was mostly surprised I hadn’t learned this before.
We played a game called How Long Would It Take For Someone To Notice If You Died, and then I realized I better leave the house.
I went to the coffee shop. I ordered citrusy tea and a dark chocolate brownie and I tried to finish last Sunday’s crossword puzzle, but I was about eight words away. Fuck Being Single, I thought. And then, in a fit of forgetting I was bitter, I talked to the guy sitting across from me. A ream of paper, I asked, is that with an A or an E? And he looked at me like he’d won the lottery.
And that’s about where I remembered it: that I’m good at being single. That I know how to do it, and that sometimes it’s downright fun. That breaking up is hard – No Shit – and that I miss Operaman, no question, but that I am not sad at being single in and of itself. Even though it’s winter.
And then I came home and pulled on my fishnets and my Docs and on my way out the door my housemate said You should party with us more often, and I realized that at thirty one I’m still closer to twenty five than to forty. So I went out dancing with my friend from New Orleans. I drank Makers & Cokes and we danced to John Doe from X, and when he finished we hopped down the street and spun to Prince and Reba until the last bar’s lights came on.
And two thirty was too early so in honor of Mardi Gras we went for a late night snack at the Montage, down under the Morrison Bridge and all full of girls with tight shirts and denim and heels.
And still now here, home at four, I miss Operaman, but newly and refreshingly I don’t miss who I was with him. I was so focused on not hurting him and not fucking with his plans and not freaking him out that I became much smaller than I am. And not once did he ask me to do that, but somehow I fell into it – somehow I assumed that if I stayed my single self I’d constantly be hearing No. And I hate hearing No. I hate that I always hear it and never say it.
So with Operaman I did something unfair to both of us: I reeled myself in to accommodate a respectably conservative schedule and a respectively conservative relationship. I never said Let’s stay out. I never said Let's be bigger. I never said I love you and I don’t give a fuck about your problem set, because here we are both alive at the same time and what are the fucking odds. And it probably wouldn’t have worked for him anyway but at least it would have felt honest.
The point being that now that I'm on my own I remember that actually I'm a lot more kickass than that. And for my next trick I’d like to figure out how to be kickass in a relationship, but for the moment I’ll settle for just kickass, even on my own, even in winter, because Lord knows it’s been a long time gone.
