Impressions of our new house

The wonderful part about owning a new home is the impressions that you get when you walk into it for the first time as an owner. The final walk through for our home was conducted last week and as we walked through the living room replete with vaulted ceilings and beautiful oak floors, we popped open a bottle of a 1963 bottle of Viognier and....Wait, that never happened.

On our walk through the owner was still unpacking the house. It made it harder to imagine the house as our own because someone else still had stuff in it. And the air fresheners. My god, the woman had those plug-in air fresheners in every available outlet.

Conversation after the walk through:
S: How did you like it?
M: It seemed kind of small.
S: Yeah, it did seem a bit small.
M: I can't believe we just spent our xthousand dollars on that small house.

Luckily we closed that afternoon and were able to go back over to our new little chateau. We walked up the small hill to the extraordinarily dark house and concluded that the empty house was actually quite large. Unfortunately, we also both concluded that the house was likely haunted. S actually had this impression when we saw the house the first time, but I pooh poohed the idea. What a strange saying.

S: How did you like it?
M: It seemed bigger.
S: Yeah, it did didn't it.
M: It also seemed like it was freakin' haunted.
S: Really.
M: Oh yeah, we've definitely got some child ghosts living in that place.
S: That's comforting.

But now those days are gone. I no longer believe the house to be haunted. I believe the house is a place where you go to do hard work on hardwood floors.

S: We'll have to get fabric to cover the bottom of all the furniture so it doesn't scratch the floor. Oh, and we may have to buy one of those plastic things or we'll have to get rid of the office chair because it will scratch the floors.
M: So we paid x for these floors and now we're paying even more to not use them?
S: Sort of.
M: Seems like a good purchase.

Obviously I'm kidding. The only reason we got those hardwood floors spic and span is so other people in our age range can come over and admire the exact same hardwood floors they have in their house and compliment us on seeing the unique beauty of the old wood. Then we'll talk for a while about the grain of the wood. And someday when we're selling the house some young couple will come in and admire the nice floors and not realize how much hard work went in to making them that way, so I'll carpet over the floor again to teach them a lesson. I'm not sure they'll learn it, but sometimes it's good to just try and teach a lesson, even if it means you can't sell your house and you've got piece of shi- carpet all over your nice floors again.

Other highlights of moving in. While I was raking in the back yard I noticed that the neighbors behind us had a dog. Mind you, I hate dogs. Luckily this particular dog upon seeing me did one of those guttural snarls that communicates, "Not only am I going to kill you, but I'm going to eat your unborn children someday. What? You say that's not humanly possible? Well I'll make it happen buddy, just you watch me." Note: The dog had a very expressive growl. Thus, I decided that the leaves in the front yard probably needed more attention, and I left the dog to blissfully growl to himself while considering various ways to escape from behind his fence and murder me.
I'm thinking that privacy fence is sounding like a good idea! We're glad to be a part of the neighborhood, just not glad enough to want to see any of you!

So yes, it may be a small haunted house with a bloodthirsty dog and floors so hard that you can't actually ever picture being comfortable on them, but dammit it's ours!

Is that varnish I smell?

I've been trying to put together a video montage of our housing search complete with some songs and sepia toned pictures and a sad clown. However, windows movie maker is refusing to download to my blog at this point, so anyone reading this blog will just have to imagine how amazing and epic that video might have been. We're talking like the Epic of Gilgamesh epic. Although, perhaps I just haven't finished the video because I'm too lazy to deliver good content to this blog/most things in my life.

At some point around midnight on Monday night I realized that I was living through a nightmare, which more to come on those vis a vi scary movies, as I was painting the lower part of the wall on our hardwood floor. For those that don't know, I have the fine motor skills of a severely impaired chimpanzee. Thus, painting in a very small area with the ability to stain the floor with copious amounts of paint is not my idea of fun.

Notes on hardwood floors. I want to give a word to the wise. Hardwood floors have a big downside. They are hard. Granted, I probably should have known that from the name, but I wasn't sure just how uncomfortable they were until I was sitting on my cartilage ravaged knees trying to keep my roller from dripping paint. I failed. I can see why the previous generation wanted to put carpet over hardwood floors. They all realized what a pain in the ass they were to be on. And now we need to buy area rugs to cover our new floor and buy little fabric for our furniture. Nothing like paying money for something then covering it up/paying more money for it. On the bright side we can have people over now and talk about how nice the floors are.

M: I really like how you can see the grain of the wood. Are you seeing the grain?
Guest: Yes, well, C and I have been having a good time at work of late
M: Sorry to interrupt, but look at that area rug. Are you as excited about that area rug as I am Bill?
Guest: Yes, they are very nice.
M: Look at the subtle amber.
Guest: Coat please.
M: I'm just glad we don't have parquet.

Over under on the number of times S will mention Adirondack chairs before actually putting them on our front porch.
8.
Feel free to wager heavily on this.

Hell, I spent some of the best times of my childhood huddled over a floor heater on a beautifully carpeted living room. If it was hardwood I probably wouldn't have done it. I'm thinking of talking out the hardwood and putting in a nice red shag carpet. At the very least a bear skin rug is going in my basement dammit! Mark my words! Mark them!



New and improved conversation with guest.
Note: We're both now lying comfortably on the bear skin rug and swirling our glasses of wine.
M: I just love the feel of dead animal fur against my bare skin.
Guest: Where did your shirt go?
M: Nothing beats it. Are you a good foot masseuse Bill?
Guest: We probably need to go.

Okay, so it ends the same, but think how much more comfortable we both were during that exchange.

And at some point during the weekend extravaganza the surprising thing is how you start to feel like a competent home owner. You suddenly realize that with the help of at least three other people you might be able to take on some home projects yourself. Hell, you might even save yourself some money. Then you realize how much good television you'd be missing and you start asking friends around the office for the number of a cheap handyman.

Did anything interesting happen to me today? Answer: no. That's probably the toughest part about consistently writing a blog, my life isn't interesting enough. Maybe you'd like to read about how I killed a cricket? No. Oh well. Note: If any Janeism folks are reading this please read "killed cricket" as humanely put beneath a glass and released into my back yard with good wishes for future serenades.

Painting

Shortly after buying our new home walking in and deciding that it looked nice, we decided to change a bunch of stuff. I think we decided to do things like paint all the upstairs rooms and rip out the carpet because we wanted to make sure that if the housing search hadn't driven us completely insane perhaps ripping apart said house could.

Naming. I've had to change the name of my blog as we've actually gotten a house in D.C. now. Though I think S would have preferred the name to have been the Silver Spring housing blog. Zing! Thank god she never reads this. I guess that's something she has in common with the rest of the known world. Zing! Zing!

Excerpt from our house at least once a week:

M: (Insert punny/funny joke here. Let your mind go free. Think of the funniest off the cuff thing that someone has said to you in the last month then make it at least five times less funny).

S: Do you think our furniture will match that color of paint?

M: Did you hear what I just said? (Note: Remember to insert hilarious joke here).

S: (looking at me vaguely).

M: It's like pearls before swine in this house. I give you gold and you give me dross.

S: But like a really high quality dross right?

M: I'm so depressed.

Anyhow, I've got to change the name to something suitable. I'm starting with the D.C. house blog, but I've considered others including:

The D.C. raking blog.
Description: A blog strictly dedicated to first time home owners who are gaining experience working in the yard. This blog will feature reviews of rakes from all of your major appliance stores as well as trash pick up dates for yard waste removal in the Brightwood neighborhood of D.C. This blog will also feature new ways to rake your leaves every day including the subtle sweep (this involves sweeping the leaves off your porch and onto the top of your shrubs thereby avoiding the need for removal. Note: Best performed when sig. other is not watching and judging. Note Note: I came up with that way before Vince Vaughn. Steve will vouch for that. Vouch Steve.

Unfortunately the D.C. raking blog might have a limited appeal and the if you say the name too fast or mess up one of the letters you could offend some people/remind me of S's classic meltdown when I suggested we buy in D.C.

The D.C. painting blog
Description: this blog is dedicated to people who are painting a room for the first time and who are put off by discovering that periwinkle and endless rain are both colors and not words made up by the fashion industry to make us less intelligent. Note: Yes they are. This blog will feature us painting rooms until one in the morning, having conversations about things like primer and whether a second coat of paint will be necessary. This blog will also feature discussions about the validity of the bright colors make spaces seem bigger debate and whether our bedroom should have been a slightly darker shade of blue even though it makes the windows pop. Oddly specific that.

The D.C. housing blog

This blog will focus on me continuing to look for a house every weekend even though I have one. I'll try out various real-estate agents and torture them with questions about cabinet space and closets only to tell them after three months of looking every Saturday that I already have a home. It will be like that show punk'd on MTV except way better because it will be about real people who will probably take me to court for libel afterward. Which of course leads to the D.C. I'm getting sued blog and so on.

Random thought about moving out. At some point this morning, perhaps when I was pouring water over my bowl of Kashi Go Lean cereal, I realized that we are neglecting some priorities like buying food as we're moving between houses, and that I'd like to be out of our old apartment soon and into our new home.

Recommendation: The water on Kashi is at least a four star breakfast.

And now a song from this guy who grew up about a mile or so from the new house we're buying.

We bought a house today we look different now

I woke up at six A.M. today with a light in my eyes and a giddy-up in my...Edit: I never wake up at six A.M. with any sort of light in my eyes. My eyes are deadened, like something that crawls around on the sea floor and then dies and is used by some other weird looking thing as shelter. That's the color of my eyes/tenor of my attitude when i wake up at six in the morning...step ready to jump into the day that I would become a home owner.

At 9:15 after acquiring a searing sinus headache from oncoming swine flu or waking up too early, we traveled over to the house to do our final walk through. There we found the seller busily moving her stuff out of the house. Which was great, except that she was supposed to already have it all emptied out.
Seller: Do you want some old kleenex?
M: I guess.
Seller: Do you want to keep these curtains?
M: I could wrap myself up in them like a babe swaddled in a blanket? What does swaddled mean?
Seller: so you could use them?
M: Sure. Why not?

We then preceded over to the title company and spent a somewhere between one hundred thousand and four million dollars on a home. S has asked me to not divulge our financial information as she fears identity theft like I fear a shark attack in the bath tub after watching Jaws. S nodded dutifully at the guy who was asking us to sign away our lives while I tried to work on perfecting my signature. C- in third grade. Terrible cursive.

S: I'm glad we saved x amount of dollars. That was a good catch.
M: Do you think my B could have more flair? Does it have enough flair?
S: You do realize how much this costs right?
M: Should I end with a flamboyant line in place of the last few letters?

My vague headache disappeared as we stepped out into the warm air and hustle bustle of Friendship Heights.

M: We bought a house! Said with fervor.
S: What did we just do?

Highlights from our celebratory dinner. Passing a flashing sign that was advertising sconces in Cleveland Park. It wasn't quite neon, but it was the sort of thing that I associate with sports scores, news, firecrackers, or live nude girls. Not exactly sconces. And no, I'm not exactly sure what a sconce is. Maybe it's the sort of thing that belongs in semi-neon. Maybe that just shows how much I still have to learn about the world. Is it a type of hat?

Highlights from day two of yoga:
Instructor: Keep doing those sit-ups. It's eight months until bikini season.
M: Continues dutifully doing sit-ups in a class with an 11-1 female to male ratio. Mentally trying to picture myself in a bikini. Not flattering.

On the bright side my yoga teacher handled the delicate subject of my age with masterful aplomb.

Instructor: You're not a student are you? Said with slight question that implies it wasn't really a question.
M: I'm actually staff.
Instructor: I thought you looked a little more mature.
M: It's suddenly like I'm fourteen years old again, and I've just been told that I don't look twelve anymore. She's taken my age and turned it into a compliment. That's tough to do on a college campus. Genius.

The funny thing about the day that we bought a house is that it felt like any other day except that we bought a house. I woke up, brushed my teeth, went to work and came home. Nothing really changed. And when I say that I hope that any reader understands that what I really mean is that I became a man today. It's the middle class white protestant bar-mitzvah, the day you buy a house. But really, it has less impact right now than if we'd bought a television, because at least we'd be watching the television. Our house is sitting empty and across town while we sleep in our usual bed. How strange that we'll have a new place to call home in eight days. A place where we can spend all the money that we used to spend on trips to Europe....

Packing!

Listen, their are two types of packers in the world, and I can't distinguish between them. Damn, that sounded punchier when I had something to go along with it. Essentially, S is the first type of packer. This type of packer carefully labels every single box. They wrap each item delicately in newspaper and place it in the box as though it were a baby bird being returned to its nest. Though, as we all know, that mother bird smells dirty human on baby birds, resents the fact that dinosaurs have been superseded by mammals and commences pecking holes in the baby bird's eyes. At least that's what my science teacher told me. Thanks Mr. Corey! (Aside: I give thanks to Mr. Corey for nothing. He was the single worst teacher I ever had. Though, as seventh grade crushes go, if anyone knows Gail Strickland tell her I say hello).

Back to packing. S's type of packing is not necessarily efficient in terms of saving time up front, but she insists that it saves time on the back end. (Please insert the office joke here).

I'm the second type of packer. A ruthless and efficient packer. Like if packing was a jungle, I'd be the f-ing panther or lion, or dominant species of gorilla that rules the jungle and also raises little orphan boys. I just throw sh-t in boxes and say to hell with it. It will all get sorted out in the wash. And yeah some things might get broken in the move, but the things that don't break will be the things that really wanted to stay with us. They'll have gained my trust.

Math, of which little has been written about.
If you look at the problem below where x is the amount of time that S spends packing and y is the amount of time that I spent packing and z is the amount of time that it takes in sum total,

x-z=
y-z=

you can clearly see why I failed all of my math classes after the sixth grade and got a Masters degree in the Fine Arts.

Does it really save a lot of time to have boxes neatly labeled? The answer: no. The real reason that S, and presumably all women label boxes, is so that they can then direct the men carrying them various places. "Oh wait, take that box to the kitchen. Uh, that one goes in the basement." We all know that it's really just to make the men feel stupid, as though they couldn't read what it said on the boxes. Why not just do a rush job and plunk everything down in the living room? Let's be honest, it's a nice central place where you can send all of your belongings out into your new home, like some kind of giant octopus. (In this scenario other people are your arms). So now you're packed up in half the time with half the hassle and you half-assed the job. What could be better?

Honestly, as S was packing up tonight after I little while I grew tired and confuses at her method and just sat on the couch watching football. I suppose that's what comes of being the male lion in charge of the pride. When you have nothing to do, you just kind of laze about in all your power while the females run off and kill and elephant Planet Earth style.

I guess the main point I wanted to make is that the wilderness is a pretty crazy place. And that we should probably cut the whole damn thing down. The wilderness that is, and all the creatures therein.

Watch this video. Yeah, it's eight minutes but it drives my point home like a hammer on a nail. If only that was a saying...And if you can't convince me that you don't have eight minutes to watch your childhood fantasy of animals of varying species in a death match. Don't you dare not click on the video. That bowl of cereal/morning/evening shower/ is not more important than what this video says about how we should chop down the wilderness. Okay, I guess I'll ease up now. The wildebeest charge just kind of got me fired up.

This is some crazy shi-.




boxes and bags.

Closing Time!

Remember that song Closing Time that played about every five seconds in the late nineties? Me too. After a while, it really sucked. However, as it will be our first time actually closing on a house on Thursday we're pretty excited. Excited enough to have conversations about contractors, painting days, and to start the playlist for the eighties montage. (Video below. Why is that one guy shirtless? further below).



That's right. After seven months, (it was probably shorter but who really wants to count) we are finally going to own a lovely home in the Brightwood district of DC. Look forward to an upcoming profile of the clown and balloon store in the nearby neighborhood. I believe the motto is, "Just when you thought we couldn't turn a semi-seedy downtown district any worse." I think they should have gone with something like, "Guns don't kill people. Clowns kill people." Or, "do you like that balloon animal that I just made little Jimmy, because I'm going to haunt your dreams for the next seven years of your life. No that's not booze you smell on my breath...it's fun!" All this to commence before turning into a spider.

Samples from my first day of yoga.
Instructor: Now breathe into your heart. Now breathe into the place where all of your kindness resides. Feel yourself at one with the kindness. You are feeling warm and kind.
M: I can't believe people call this new-agey.

In the end what really matters is that we did something. Sure we didn't build a bridge or land on the moon, or feed the hungry, or shelter the homeless, but I think we can safely say that we did something much more important. We spent a great deal of energy/time/financial resources on buying ourselves something. In the end, isn't that what life is about? (Yes, Howard's End, and all of the homes that we grew up in as children argue against this sort of rhetoric. It's not that a house is meaningless, it's that in the end the rather self-focused search for one is exhausting. Not that we've shown that we're capable of much more in general.)

Because poetry is good for the soul:
Desmond O'Grady Pillow Talk

And, out of the light's agony
leaving behind all past destruction,
let us lie down again on that old bed
steadfast under the bamboo and seaweed ceiling,
opening glad white arms to one another.

Then let me tell you all that story
That's the skill of survival in the daily struggle:
the blow's given, the beatings taken,
of wandering for years and of wins and losses
in the search not to end a destroyer.

While I watch over you, let down your long hair
to shadow your shoulders before sleep
for all this place shall break
and fall apart should you go absent.


Conversation:

M: Go to your heart center S I think you'll find some kindness there.
S: My heart center is just angry.

No more apologies. We bought a house and we're going to paint the bedrooms blue. We're going to cut holes in walls and polish floors. We're going to talk about the potential of the bar. We're going to get older there. We're going to watch the years pass by without realizing how quickly they leave us. We're going to sleep in a quiet blue room. We're going to sit in the yellow room and look out the small window while it rains. We're going to watch our dreams come to nothing without every realizing we had them. We're going to paint rooms bright colors so that we forget that we're sad. We're going to sit in blue rooms in blue moods. We'll paint the walls of small rooms in bright colors so that we won't feel them closing in on us. We're going to watch the dreams of others from just beyond the doorway. We're going to talk about moving. We're going to read Island of the blue dolphins to our children in blue rooms. We're going to watch the newly finished floors begin to change back again. We're going to read that strange section in "To the Lighthouse" in the basement below our blue rooms. We're going to be the same as everyone else. We're going to buy a house and fill it with things. We're going to talk about the proper place to put a bookshelf. We're going to take our shoes off at the door to preserve the new floors. We're going to talk about children, and realize how strange it is that we can remember our own childhoods. We're going to put up a private fence and shut out the whole world. We're going to sleep in a big bed beneath heavy blue dreams.

I hope to see you all there at the house warming party. According to S that will be sometime in the next century when we're finally feeling settled. Eighties montage clean up time.

The future? It's hot.

I'm hoping that this week we actually get to become owners. We're tantalizingly close to the eighties montage painting scene that I've already got a pair of jeans with paint on them. I'm encouraged by the vague promises of as of yet uncovered paper trails that we shouldn't have a problem closing sometime in the next millennium.

Kidding. I actually think we'll be closing soon enough. So soon, that in addition to the paint stained jeans, I an also already hear S's voice coming down the stairs. "Honey, can you come help unload the dish washer?" And I can already see my hand going over to the remote and turning it up ever so slightly to avoid all exterior noise. Basements are awesome!

I've also been suggesting that we paint the brick on the exterior of hour house. Apparently one of the great things about owning a brick house is that you don't have to paint it. However, the vague idea, reinforced by seeing well-coordinated painted brick homes in Dupont Circle, leads me to believe that it is a good idea. Mind you, I've no intention of ever actually painting the bricks myself, but I look forward to pestering S with the idea for the next seven years and pointing out during that time every house with painted brick that looks good.

In other news I tried to put together a video montage of our housing search. This video would have consisted of a bunch of pictures of cabinets, closets, and me looking vaguely displeased in various spaces. The blog however did not allow me to upload the fancy windows movie maker video. And, as I know next to nothing about technology (what is it?) I have forfeited my right to post to the blogging gods. I think it's fairly safe to say that an elaborate system of blog gods will probably be formed in about 200 years or so. Give or take a nuclear fall out or two. (You must forgive the dire tone of the above entry as I've just started watching BSG. The future looks pretty damn bleak. Though we're all either old and grizzled capatins or hot. Needless to say, the future can't come soon enough.

Friday night lights!

Nothing like a forty degree drizzly day to perk up the spirits. I might as well live in London if this is the sort of fall weather we'll be in for. I celebrated not closing on the house by dressing up for work today. Since my job is pretty much casual every day, I think I'm going to institute not casual Fridays. Quite frankly, I think my idea is way cooler than casual Friday's. Not casual Friday's encourage people to dress nicely and impress their co-worker's who probably mistake them for a homeless person the other four days of the week.

8:30-8:48 A.M. Alternatively tuck and untuck the collared shirt underneath my sweater wondering what looks the best. If I let it hang out in the front does it look casually cool or like I'm wearing a skirt? Skirts are really comfortable though. End up tucking the shirt in and deciding to roll my sleeves up a little. Can I wear grey shoes with a red shirt? I don't think so but it's counteracted by this black sweater. Note: It was about this point in my getting ready ritual that I determined not causal Friday's to be a colossal mistake. The other four days of the week when I don't think about what I'm wearing at all were far less stressful. Once I start thinking about how I'm dressed I pretty much turn into a teenage girl. That's why the t-shirt and jeans look is always the best for me. It helps me keep my sanity.

9-3 P.M.-Walk around work noticing that not everyone got my e-mail about not casual Fridays. Perhaps because I didn't mention it to any of them. However, I still hold it against them on principle. Their is nothing more annoying than someone not doing something that you haven't even told them to do. They should have intuited it.

M: People don't like it when I blog about depressing things. Don't people like to read about the way that rain falls from trees.
S: People like it when you are funny.
M: Yeah, but life isn't like that. Mostly it's kind of boring and then you have these moments when you realize what an absurd theater it all is.
S: I like it when you're funny.
M: I'm so depressed.
S: Say something funny.
M: You're just like that old lady on the bus who Lee K. Abbott told us about who doesn't give a crap about what story we "need" to tell. What he didn't mention is that that lady is an idiot.
S: When are you going to be funny? You're about to lose a reader.
M: I'm so depressed.

Conduct conversations with contractors about refinishing the floors of a home that we don't own. I think as a good faith gesture we should just have the floors redone for the seller. Perhaps that might help her sell it a second time when she actually has the title. Zing!

Other things that upset me. I don't like it when we buy expensive milk from the dairy and then S drinks it. S points out that this is for all intents and purposes insane and that we actually bought the milk in order to be consumed. I on the other hand, consider the milk to be a precious commodity to be doled out sparingly like a woman arriving at a miner's camp. Thank you fourth grade history class. If you find yourself craving a nice glass of milk with your cookies, why not try water? It's almost like fat free milk.

S: Everyone poops.
M: Yeah, but not everyone eats their own poop.
S: Good point. Wait, what the heck are you talking about?
M: I wish I knew.

Closing! It's nice to set goals

I was told as a youngster that it is good to visualize your goals. To picture them and really see yourself attaining that goal. Ergo; I'm picturing myself swimming in money in the future. That reminds me of the time my fifth grade teacher recommended that all the girls in the class date me and my friend Tommy because we were smart and probably going places. If only Mrs. Weiss knew I'd go on to get an MFA in Creative Writing she'd have changed her tune. Anyhow, I'm picturing myself swimming in all that money. And for good measure I'm also picturing myself as a duck. I don't want to make things too easy on myself.
Author's note: I could look at pictures of Scrooge swimming in money all day. Sigh. I miss the Disney afternoon.

I never imagined the incredible excitement that would arise within the depths of my being on the eve of being a first tome homeowner. A grown ass man as my friends would put it.

8:00 A.M. Arise from bed feeling ready to be a home owner in a mere twenty four hours. Eat Kashi cereal. Mentally congratulate myself on eating a healthy breakfast. Attempt to buy plane tickets from priceline to CA. Realize that Priceline is designed to hook you in but then not deliver the goods. I believe the word is fishtease and it originates in the small reeds of Northeastern pools where a fish jumps from the water but never takes the bait. Or something along those lines.

9:00 A.M. Walk to work on a day where the temperature is in the low forties and the sky is pissing rain. Attempt to do a rendition of Singin' in the Rain but realize that I've forgotten my umbrella and tap shoes. Walk to work in not feeling so hot.

9-11-Process loans while occasionally attempting to buy tickets on Priceline. Fail to buy tickets. Process lots of loans.

1:00-Take a lunch break to celebrate a hard days work. Walk outside. Feel the beautiful forty degree weather blowing gently against my face and walk back inside to the staff lounge.
Note: I generally don't eat in staff lounges as a rule. I don't like eating there because other people who I work with might also be eating lunch there. In general, whenever I get the chance I'd like to get away from the people that I work with. Note: this is nothing to impugn their character, but rather my need to disassociate from the mild soul-crushing that is inherently a part of any job. In fact, if I could somehow have an out of body experience so that I didn't have to sit with myself at lunch either I'd do that instead.

1-1:30-Finish that book of essays I've been reading for a month. The last of which is a list of 100 things the author intends to do.

1. Buy a house
2. Kill the chipmunks in the attic. Do so with war paint.
3. Bring up CA and surfing whenever possible.
4. Never learn to surf.

2:00-4:30-Try to contain giddy (I don't really mean giddy obviously) feeling of painting walls all sorts of greens and blues. Attempt to work but become overcome with the thought of new maple cabinets in which we can put oversized pots and pans. Pass out from giddiness.

4:45-Receive a call from S that we are not going to be settling the next day. The lien is still on the house and a paperwork trail must be uncovered for us to buy the house.

5:00-5:45-Go to the gym and think up contingency plans in case the house falls through.

5:45-Come up with nothing save a vague distaste for Behr paints. Wonder if it's Behr or bear. Conclude that it's probably Behr despite the company logo. Desist in wondering about trivial things. (Obviously a lie. The author is always concerned with trivial things, which typically leads him to conclude that that human existence is some sort of bizarre accident that we delude ourselves into attaching significance to in order to keep going). Note: the author does not think that this conclusion precludes the existence of God.

7:00 P.M.-Come home. Realize that my zest for cooking zucchini and pumpkin bread has been dulled by the rain. Heat up old soup and sit in the dark. Imagine what it will be like to one day own a home. Conclude that though my location, proximity to work, et al will be different that I'll probably be the same. Unless some sort of characteristic that is intrinsic to home owners will be thrust upon me.

8:00-11:00-Try to conclude what the super power will be/get estimates from contractors on doing floors/pass through. Conclude that super power will be hemorrhaging money. Not sure that it is actually a super power.

Theoretical housing fight

The best thing about owning a home is engaging in theoretical house fights. You can pretty much create a theoretical house fight over almost anything.

M: I want to paint the roof like the Sistine Chapel.
S: Are you serious?
M: I think we could do it. It would look good hon.
S: How could you think that would look good?
M: I've got an MFA.


M: I actually really like the detachable sinks. I'd be kind of upset if they were affixed to the wall.
S: You're joking right. You must be joking.
M: I just don't want to spend the money. I'd love to fix it myself, but I've got this thing I need to do Saturday.
S: What?
M: Football??
Insist that you prefer these types of sinks. Make a Power Point presentation on how the sinks make your life easier. Include pictures of yourself as a child in the bath to illustrate how cute you are. Ignore any questions about the relevance of said pictures.

The great thing about a theoretical housing fight is that you don't even have the house yet. It's somewhat akin to having an argument about how well we're going to get along when we colonize Mars. Yeah, it's going to happen, but let's cross that bridge when we get there.

I suggest theoretical housing fights to everyone who is thinking about buying a home. Just bring some random thing up to your significant other like how you really enjoy wall paper or a HeMan themed room and watch them go ballistic when you stick to your view. Become violently insistent that light colors are for sissies and that you'll be damned if your living room is anything but a deep blue. Then make some kind of comment about how you don't think parquet floors will be in style when your grandkids are trying to sell the house to collect the inheritance.

Conduct a long diatribe about how you don't want that no good (insert name of theoretical grandchild) getting even a penny of your money. Insist that you'll only buy the house if you're allowed to bury the money in the backyard to hide it from the made up grandchild.

This can pretty much be used to instigate anything. Claim that you'll only mow the lawn on Tuesdays. Make sure to work late every Tuesday and claim that your lasiks surgery makes it impossible for you to mow at night for fear of shearing off a toe. Shear off a toe to prove the point. Get it reattached quickly. Obviously you won't be sticking to this, but nothing is better than a theoretical housing fight...nothing.

You can also use theoretical housing fights in other facets of your life as well like, child labor laws.

M: I actually think that we should reinstate child labor laws.
S: Yeah, that's a great idea.
M: I'm just thinking those little fingers would be great at getting things out of heavy industrial machinery.
S: I know you're not serious but it's sort of irritating.
M: Losing the tip of a finger builds character.
Stick to this point for an hour using made up statistics about teen pregnancy and be certain to mention violence in video games as corroborating evidence for your "put the children back to work plan. Call your sig. other Hitler at least once during the exchange.

You can also use this for naming children.

M: I've always wanted to name our little ones after the Chipmunks.
Follow this up by calling the little girl Theodore for the first three years of her life just to prove a point. Claim that your children would be stars if your wife would stop holding them back. Feed them acorns and dress them in lettered shirts.

Or buying a car.
M: I've always kind of wanted a tank.
Follow this up by making repeated calls to the armed forces and leaving pictures of tanks on your spouse's desktop. Keep mentioning how you could drive over all the other cars despite your sig. others insistence that such a path is stupid. Drive home your point by rear ending other cars while you're driving and mentioning how the gd bumper wouldn't look so bad if you had a tank.

Devise a large scoring system for every item in the house. Ask your sig. other to grade out the importance of each item. At some point during the quiz accuse the Russian judge of giving out low scores. Take away the score sheet and attempt to burn it by turning on your television and putting in a video of a fire. Insist that the house was a waste of money and that you were lied to about the fire place.

Or where you stand on the rights of animals. Claim full hearted support of every quadruped but insist on flatly denying rights to everyone else. Accuse your spouse of not knowing what quadruped means. Insist on a dictionary reading of the term. Leave the house at some point during the argument and come back with a completely different opinion.

I'm not sure what the point of this was now. Oh yeah. The point is that it's really easy to argue about something like how many hours you plan to spend on a given Saturday three months from now in the yard, but it doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense. Perhaps the real point is that having an argument over the theoretical amount of time you'll spend on a housing project (on a house you don't yet own/not actually have any information on) is a bit daft.

I haven't been awake for days

I do not know what to make of the dark spots on the sidewalk.

Tepid black shapes. A circle of some kind. Emily Dickinson used to talk to guests through her closed door.

I do not know if they are the scars of leaves in the cement. I have a thing for the scars of leaves. I want to write about them for pages and pages. Emily Dickinson used to invite people over to play the piano for her. Her sister would escort them in and they'd play to an empty Emily-less room. Part of me loved typing Emily-less.



I do not know if they are the last vestiges of gum that has been ground down into nothing, like bones turned to ash. I've been reading essays lately that sound like poems. Many of them talk about bones and ashes. Emily Dickinson and I both enjoy the word slant, though I'm prone to overuse it in conjunction with light without ever really getting anywhere.

I do not know if they are the low places where water gathers and eats away at asphalt. In no way shape or form am I comparing my own writing to Emily Dickinson's. I would say that I'm something closer to Richard Jobson. The last sentence is patently untrue. One of the sentences in this post is the closest approximation to truth.

I get depressed whenever someone says, "I need to take a vacation from my vacation." Repetition is both the mother of memory. And the rain that beats relentlessly at a child's window while he dreams of playing in the yard. (Here's where if I was writing a piece of fiction I'd include something about rust colored leaves).

Sometimes, when I am alone, I am still scared of the dark. I've no earthly clue if Emily Dickinson was scared of the dark. It seems unlikely. I imagine that people in previous centuries had a different relationship to darkness.

I am often wrong.

If the world was flat we'd have to worry less about resources.

In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue. His arrival helped to spawn the European incursion that pretty much killed off the native people groups. We never said the latter part in school. It's not as pithy.

At some point in the past I read a few poems by Emily Dickinson.

A teacher once told me that I was stupid to not consider titles more carefully. The title of this post is ostensibly inexplicable.

Emily Dickinson did not title her poems.

Emily Dickinson got people to play piano to an absent host. She was not stupid.

There's a certain slant of light,
On winter afternoons,
That oppresses, like the weight
Of cathedral tunes.

Heavenly hurt it gives us;
We can find no scar,
But internal difference
Where the meanings are.

None may teach it anything,
'Tis the seal, despair,-
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the air.

When it comes, the landscape listens,
Shadows hold their breath;
When it goes, 't is like the distance
On the look of death.

Emily Dickinson

Brightwhere?

Admission. Apparently the reason I couldn't find a lean on a house is because it's actually a lien. Kensington Blue comes from the color of the palace in London etc. The great thing about blogging is the constant reminder of how often I'm wrong about things. My readers, (hi mom and dad) demand excellence, and I strive daily to fall fairly short of that mark and am almost always successful.
Quiz: Does that make me a success?
Quiz 2: Without looking above is it successful or sucessful?

I've decided to take a yoga class after having a heart to heart with the fitness instructor who assured me that I would not be the only male in the class and that it was mostly made up of faculty and staff. Apparently she must have mistaken me for a staff member instead of the senior in college that I am. I feel a bit strange taking yoga but talking with some of my friends helped assuage my doubts. (I think the word fear is often used in conjunction with assuage. I apologize for using doubts).

M: I'm taking a yoga class on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
MK: You are so in touch with your feminine side.
M: (I'm not sure this is helping).

Highlights of the day unrelated to housing. It was a balmy fifty degrees in DC today with overcast skies. Thus, the library had the AC cranked to the arctic wind setting and the vents blasting directly above my desk. Believing myself to be in danger of suffering hypothermia I used scotch tape to affix pieces of ripped cardboard over the vents to shut off the air flow, which would be appropriate for Chilly Willy but not ideal for non-penguins. Yet another cartoon that I loved. Did that little guy even talk? Why did I have such fond feelings towards him? Did he just sneeze?


S: Look what I found?
M: A house from Monopoly.
S: (Moves towards packed boxes).
M: Are you really going to unpack that entire box just to put away one monopoly house?
S: (Begins unpacking box).
M: Just put it in a plastic bag.
S: We'll never be able to find it.
M: Listen to me. Do not unpack that box. I'm the voice of Christmas rationality.

I think it's time that I used this space to promote the Brightwood neighborhood of DC since 9 in ten people don't even know that it exists. One of the first features of our fine neighborhood that I noticed is a child care center called Quicky Becky's located on Georgia Avenue. We'll talk about beautiful Georgia Avenue some other time.

As far as I can tell Quicky Becky's child care will be an ideal place to send the little ones that we'll be populating the earth with in an attempt to overtax resources in the near feature. Besides the awesome location, right on a busy street, Quicky Becky's has an awesome name. I'm not sure what it makes me think of more:

A) That your kids are getting an oil and lube job while they are at the daycare center. Sort of a jiffy lube of child care.
B) Becky is doing everything quickly and in a slapdash sort of way that is going to put your kids at risk.
C) It's your one stop bordello and child care center. Because somebody has to watch the kids while you're occupied.
D) Some combination of all of the above.

Pictures to come.

Aside: Remember days ago when Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize and some people were happy and other were up in arms? Me neither. But, on the off chance that anyone does, I'd like to propose that holding both views simultaneously is probably the sanest way to view the award. I think that people who believe that he didn't actually do enough to earn the award are completely correct. I also think that people who view the award as a hopeful sign that our current president can reverse the trend of the last eight years of military build-up and wide-scale aggression are also right. I read a Salon article that sort of proposed this idea, but I had it first. I was just too busy watching my DVR to blog about it. What is so wrong about holding both of these views simultaneously? Aren't they both true? Does one truth necessarily have to outweigh another?

Sometimes I see walls that are painted green in Pottery barn catalogs, and I think that we can make it work. And then I saw green walls on the interior walls of a hospital in Mad Men, and I think that we're about to make a huge mistake. And in the grand scheme of things, when you are looking back over the wreckage of your life, I think that will be one of the moments that you go back to. Dammit! If we'd have painted that wall a different color everything would have been different. Amen old crazy Andrew. Amen.

I was going to put a picture of Brightwood in this place but Google doesn't know where it is either.

Disclosure: I'm sure that Miss Becky runs a fine establishment. I'm merely questioning the name choice.

Sir?

When the days are warm everyone sheds a layer of clothes.

As I'm leaving work,

M: Have a good weekend x.
L: You too sir.
M: (As I walk out the door) Did she just call me sir? Now, did she call me sir because she doesn't know my name? Was it a kind of cultural barrier thing where you call your supervisor sir just because? Shouldn't she know my name by now? Who calls someone sir? Did she actually say sir? or did I hear her wrong? Is this beard I've been growing just making me look older? Maybe she said, "You too suh." No wait, that doesn't make sense. Why the heck would she say suh? Do I look like a sir?

I do not believe in words. I believe they are the pale ghosts that we use to haunt the liminal spaces of this unreality. Sitting in front of the ocean at night is not knowing. When I sit in front of the ocean I am often scared. I do not use words like liminality. We are all between things.

M: (Holding open door for a guy entering our building)
G: Oh, thanks dude.
M: (Did he just call me dude? Is it because I'm wearing shorts now? Do I look younger? Maybe I should wear shorts to work? Why are their parenthesis around this but not around the previous section in which I was also clearly just thinking? Can I allow myself to ignore the fact that the guy was clearly balding? Despite that, I think he was younger than me. He was definitely younger than me. But what kind of a douche says thanks dude to someone for holding a door. Wouldn't I have just said thanks? Is it any less douchey that my go to term in that situation is man? Thanks man. Probably not. Unless the person holding open the door is experiencing gender confusion).

"I miss living near the ocean because it reminds you of how small your problems are."

In the fall, when it is still warm, I often forget to look at the leaves changing colors, scuttling along the street, spinning in the wheel wells of the buses that glide by. I do not look at the sky, some hue of light eighties jeans, partially obscured by a few islands of clouds. I do not see any shapes in the clouds. I see things that obscure the sun. I walk along the sidewalk listening to music and thinking about myself. About something I've said or done, or how I look or whether I should be listening to a particular song or if I should download a podcast. I stress about not listening to podcasts. I wonder if my shirt is too wrinkled to be wearing to work. I wonder if I walk too much on the outside of my feet. I attempt to walk on the inside of my feet. The sky, in all its glory, needn't exist.

I look at the drivers as I cross the street and wave to them in thanks. I wonder if other people notice me waving. Observation always changes the actions of the subject. At lunch, I eat outside the library. I look up every time someone walks by breaking the flow of my reading. I want to close my eyes and feel the sun warm my skin. I want to walk back into the library on fire. I keep my eyes open. You never know who could be watching.

When I write I miss all of the important things. I cannot create the fall of artificial light across her brow softened in sleep. I can merely play with words until I sleep without saying a damn thing.

In the morning, I awake with regrets about the smallest things. The morning is for regrets. The night is for rain streaked windows and the lights in other apartments going dark.

Where he belongs

Lean-to place your body against a structure in a restful manner. NASD.

to incline or bend from a vertical position.

cause to lean or incline; "He leaned his rifle against the wall"
thin: lacking excess flesh; "you can't be too rich or too thin"; "Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look"-Shakespeare

lean to-rough shelter whose roof has only one slope.

You can actually scroll through the various definitions that the eminent online Merriman Webster's dictionary provides and never come across the lean we are facing. Ie a home equity loan that has been taken out and not paid off in full. Thus, the person who we are buying the house from doesn't actually own the house. Yay!
We're now not sure if our closing date is going to change or if we'll be able to get contractors in in time.

On the bright side...oh wait, their isn't one. As I understand a gang of street toughs are planning on breaking this lady's kneecaps unless she pays in full.

I take back my earlier comment. The worst case scenario is that we have to leave our current apartment where we've put in notice, move into a shed/underneath a bridge somewhere and continue our housing search. I can tell you that after three months of looking for houses the only thing I want to do is look at more houses.

Borrowing from Ron White: Once you've seen the inside of once house...you pretty much want to see inside all of them.

The most likely scenario is that S and I start a musical theater group and talk the street toughs out of busting up the previous owners kneecaps and instead express themselves through dance. I pretty much use this scenario for any problem that arrives in my life.

Officer: Sir. I pulled you over because you were driving on the wrong side of the street with just your toes.
M: Have you ever done tap?
Officer: And you weren't wearing your seatbelt. And is that a chimpanzee in the passenger seat with you?
M: I bet you've got a voice like an angel. One of the ones that didn't go to hell.
Officer: Step out of the car sir.
M: To practice salsa?

Related story. We're trying to get some contractors in to take a look at our house to make some estimates as well. You know who never answers their phone? Contractors. Contractors screen calls like no one's business. You know how when you're with someone, and they say, "Oh it's just x or y and then avoid the call." And you're so happy because they screened out the call just to keep talking with you but then you start wondering about all those times that you've called them and gone to voice mail, if you were x or y and you get sort of disappointed and wind up drunk on the dock making a pass at a harbor seal? And not even one of the cute ones. We've all been there.

The point is, perhaps debatable, that if you're a friend with a contractor your call is definitely getting screened. The real crux of the matter is that we're building a lean to in preparation for the long winter and gathering all the yams and squash that we can, just like the first pilgrims. Though we won't be dispensing disease and mass death like our forefathers. We will be handing out Bible tracts.

Wednesday

Six A.M. Arise from bed to greet the day. Notice that as the seasons change six A.M. is pitch black. Get sort of depressed.
6:30-7:30-Drive my brother to his appointment. Exult in getting almost all green lights on the way back. Pat myself on the back for enjoying the simple pleasures of life. Think about someone else for a change. Somehow, my mind winds up making me the central figure in the scenario. Hard to overcome.

8:20 A.M. Awake from my attempt at taking a morning nap feeling like someone has hit me with a tire iron. Naps are pretty useless when you wake up. The benefit really doesn't come until three hours after or so. The initial feeling is that you've been drugged and someone may have made off your wallet/personal dignity.

S: I think we need to tighten our belts a little for a few months, so we can be prepared when your college loans start kicking in.
M: That whole class thing wasn't free. What a rip off.
S: No. No it wasn't.
M: I’m going to buy some cocaine and call some escorts.
S: Please don’t.
M: I’ll take your protest under consideration.

9 A.M. Walk to work on a breezy morning. Attempt to keep my headphones relatively fastened to my head as the duct and scotch tape start to loosen up.

9-4:30 Process interlibrary loans.

Q2: What would you be doing if you had enough money to do anything?
M: I'd probably be doing it poorly enough to get fired.
Q: Couldn't you just quit instead?
M: I'd prefer it that way.

5 P.M. Go to the gym and lift weight in order to try and aggravate my torn labrum enough to get out of moving our heavy furniture.

5:30-Fail to aggravate seriously, though minor pain ensues.


Probably the most fascinating thing at my job on any given day is my extreme fear of the telephone. When you work at a job in information delivery services the only time you get a call is when something has gone wrong. Thus, whenever the orange light is flashing I cringe. I'm not even sure what cringing entails, but I definitely do it. Sometimes I avoid checking the message for an hour, like a parent trying to let the baby cry itself back to sleep. Except, the phone message never disappears.
My favorite part is when I pick up the phone and hear that the message is some all campus voice mail to remind everyone of the upcoming badminton match up against a highly ranked opponent. Nothing thrills me like an all campus voice mail.

Then I always have to psyche myself up to call people back. As though I'm afraid the conversation is going to go poorly.

M: Hi. I'm Andrew Bertaina calling from American University.
Customer: What the hell is going on over there at the library?
M: I'm sorry sir. How can I help you exactly?
Customer: You can help me by transferring me to your supervisor, so I can get your ass canned.
M: I'm sorry you feel that way.

Actual Conversation:
M: Hi. I'm AB calling from AU ILL.
Customer: Can you help me fix x or y?
M: Sure. I'll send that over.
M: That was so easy.
Customer: What?
M: Nothing.

6:00 P.M. Conduct a brief argument over who is going to cook dinner.

6:30 P.M. Begin cooking dinner together. Feel shame. Compromise is for the losers.

This song is pretty. If I was wearing an eye glass and sitting at a balcony at the opera I would be hailed for having good taste in music. In fact, the song gave me chills performed live. As is, it just sort of seems like I might love Sara Mclachlan. Tomorrow I'll post some Metallica to feel good about myself. Note: I won't do that.

On Tape guns

Remember how when you were young people would ask you what you wanted to be when you grew up? and if you were a girl you said something like, "marine biologist" and if you were a boy you said, "Don Draper." Dreams don't always turn out like we want. Sometimes the dolphins get caught in nets, (Reminds me of the brand of tuna safe dolphin meat that I was trying to get started) and die whilst making cute little clicking noises. And you don't always end up as a handsome ad man who drinks all day and naps at work. I suppose the alternative would be sports star, but that's so far off the radar as to be ridiculous at this point.
Anyhow, I miss the days when those dreams still seemed like they might become a reality, Like, if I stayed out and shot baskets for one more hour maybe someday the pro scouts would come calling. Clearly they must have got their signals crossed because no one ever stopped by the driveway at my house to offer me a scholarship. It's sort of a long way of describing the difference between dreams and reality. Aside that is sort of related.

Guy: What do you look for in a girl first?
Answer: Low standards.

The dissolution of your dreams isn't necessarily painful. It has a tendency to be more mind numbing. And that's how you end up standing in the mail room cursing under your breath because someone has stolen the good tape gun. And now you're sitting there trying to complete your job with a recalcitrant tape gun that doesn't ever sheer the tape off correctly, but instead, sort of mangles it into an unusable ball, while you frantically try and cut it properly before someone else comes in and notices what a jackass you are because you can't even use the tape gun properly. And now you're sweating profusely, and tape is wound around your hands, and it occurs to you that perhaps all of your dreams have not come true. Now, you just dream of coming into the mailing room and finding a nice tape gun with a quality brand of tape wrapped around it properly.

Quiz: Is this a sad thing? or some sort of introduction into adult life that will end up being beneficial in the long run in terms of teaching you patience and the necessary rote nature of being a participating member of a productive society?

Question: Is thinking hard about things like how you spend your money and distinguishing between wants and needs a useful activity? or is it ultimately a paralyzing activity in which much is thought but nothing is changed?

Question: If you were independently wealthy what would you be doing for a living?

Answer: (Clerks) That's a bs question because nobody would ever want to pick up other people's garbage and crap for a living, but we need these people to make our society function. Paraphrase obviously.

So now I stand before you, holding a piece of worn tape in my hand, winding it slowly on a box bound across the country. And I have to ask myself what it means. I have to rationalize that what I'm doing makes a difference in the world. Perhaps the answer is that no one makes a difference in the grand scheme of things and that on the micro level everyone makes a difference. Thus, you just get to choose, which of those you are going acknowledge.

At some point I got off the subject of tape rolls, and I'm not entirely sure I intended to. I'm guessing most people have tape gun stories from their jobs/lives. The long and the short of it is that I'm going back to school to become a marine biologist to restore gender balance to the field. Flipper here I come!

I'm hoping that a major in marine biology doesn't include science classes though because I will fail out in a second and go back to battling tape gun.

Decisions, Decisions

Mondays are the busiest days. Strange in my job that college students are not up to better things than requesting books all weekend. It is a time in their life when they should be out making mistakes, doing things they'll regret later in life but remember fondly as "the good old days" because they are so distant.

Interpolation:
P: Everyone has a blog and wants to believe that they are special. Guess what? We don't need to hear everyone's opinion.
M: (Shaking head in vigorous agreement).
M: (Internally. I am a beautiful and unique snowflake).

Most of what I can remember about the weekend involved attempts at making decisions on the color/lay out of our soon to be home. We went by Benjamin Moore, (it's a paint store. I know. I know. I had no idea either) and looked at paint swaths. (Pretty sure that's the wrong word, but I don't particularly care). We then proceeded to examine fifty shades of green to determine the best one for the wall. And here's what I discovered about myself: I'm a quick decision maker. Engagement ring=two hours. Engagement=After nine months together. What to wear to work in the morning=ten seconds. Note: the above is a bit enhanced by the fact that I wear one pair of jeans to work. One. Picking a paint color for every room in the house. Ten minutes.

Unfortunately, S had other ideas. Examples of why it's good to be a quick decision maker.

Ex. of me on the Titanic.

Lowly crew member: I think we may have ice on the coming up on the starboard side.

M: Queue the violinist and full speed towards it!

I can hear your criticism already. The Titanic smashed into the iceberg and lots of people died. But let's be honest, they were probably going to die at some point anyway. At least with me as captain we get to do it with the decisive sort of dignity that helped General Custer defeat Sitting Bull.



So when I go the paint store, or the grocery store, or to buy a house, I don't waste time thinking about my decision. I think history has shown that the thinkers are not the people who get statues made of them. It's the doers. It's the men/women who walk into a paint store and say with confidence, "I'll take the provenance cream in my bedroom thank you very much" and move on about the business of the day, which might involve getting Cornwallis to surrender or watching a Michigan football game downtown. I'm a decision maker, not some pansy in a paint store.

S: Do you like the mint or the tea green?
M: I have a headache.
S: We've been in here for five minutes.
M: I think I might be done. I'll try and tough it out.

That's right. I toughed it out. Or should I have gone for moonlight yellow? Who came up with Cromwell green? Can I get a job naming paints?

After that we cruised over to the green kitchen store where I picked out our future counter top in about seven minutes.

Ex. of me on the Hindenberg

Lowly crew member: The ship is on fire!

M: All hands on deck! Full speed ahead! (I'd probably say this because of my previous experience captaining the Titanic).

Ironically, another couple was also in the paint store picking out colors for their home.

Woman: Don't you start tuning out already. We're just getting started here.
Man: Don't take that tone with me.
Woman: (Proceeds to call her mother and discuss colors while the man sits idly flipping through colors).
Woman: I wish you were here mom. You have such a good eye for detail.

Ex. of me captaining the Santa Maria

Lowly crew member: Land ahead! (Perhaps I should have used ahoy?)

M: Full speed ahead! I told you idiots we'd find the Orient and here we are! Now build a statue of me!



We have more of a tendency to make love and war. Perhaps the saying should be amended.

Nobody blogs on a Friday night

It seems like a miscalculation to work at a college when you are about turn thirty years old.

Co-worker: I thought you were twenty-five?
M: You must not have seen me in direct light.

The beginnings of the essay are rooted in aphorisms about the Spartans. Now, we have bumper stickers.

At night, all the girls in the building are wearing skirts and the boys smell like cologne. When they get off the elevator it smells like a bar: cigarette smoke and cheap booze. I get on with four loads of laundry.

The secret to getting laundry done in a building with college students is to do it on Friday nights.

At parties people tend to laugh more. The music pounds into the walls and reverberates on the ceiling where we lie on the couch passing the time until our eyes shut. A part of me yearns to be upstairs, to be amongst the spilled drinks and haphazard conversations.

Meaning has a lot more to do with our definition than we'd like to admit. Perhaps God miscalculated when he gave us free will.

The cars that pass on the street below make noise like a whirring fan as the rain spins from their tires. The occasional honk rises above the din of voices from the street level below. The kids and those damn parties. Weren't most of us kids once?

In the building across the street all the lights are turned off. It looks abandoned at night, like some ghost ship moored inland. During the day workmen climb around the exterior constantly working on the large balconies that no one ever walks on.

On Saturdays, no one reads blogs. I said something clever earlier tonight that sounded like an aphorism, but it has already slipped my mind.

Most of life is forgotten. If you're lucky, you remember the good things.

Planes coast through the dark blank sky landing at an airport thirty minutes away carrying strangers into this city where we sleep so early.

Outside a few mindless cicadas make noise, uncertain that their season has passed. How do you know when your season has passed? When the music is no longer intended for you?

I don't read on Saturdays either.

I had an incident with wine I'd like to forget. The wine helped.

After midnight the noise begins to ebb. But in the city it is never entirely silenced. A few miles away strangers wipe the drool from their cheeks and awake in a new city. This miracle of flight, imagined by Da Vinci, failed at by Icarus through pride, is just one more way of getting around.

Tomorrow we'll compare paint samples in a store, discuss the difference between hues of blue and green. We won't ask ourselves about the night before. We'll move ahead with our day, and forget about the sirens and the rain and the voices that drift down for the apartment above. Tonight, they were not meant for us.

"Out, Out - "
by: Robert Frost

The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,
Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.
And from there those that lifted eyes could count
Five mountain ranges one behing the other
Under the sunset far into Vermont.
And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,
As it ran light, or had to bear a load.
And nothing happened: day was all but done.
Call it a day, I wish they might have said
To please the boy by giving him the half hour
That a boy counts so much when saved from work.
His sister stood beside him in her apron
To tell them "Supper." At the word, the saw,
As if it meant to prove saws know what supper meant,
Leaped out at the boy's hand, or seemed to leap -
He must have given the hand. However it was,
Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!
Half in appeal, but half as if to keep
The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all -
Since he was old enough to know, big boy
Doing a man's work, though a child at heart -
He saw all was spoiled. "Don't let him cut my hand off -
The doctor, when he comes. Don't let him, sister!"
So. The hand was gone already.
The doctor put him in the dark of ether.
He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.
And then - the watcher at his pulse took a fright.
No one believed. They listened to his heart.
Little - less - nothing! - and that ended it.
No more to build on there. And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.

Prepping for my November Joe Purdy concert with a clip from season 1 of Lost.

Conferencing

Am I the only person who gets really excited about work training opportunities? Yes? Oh well. It just really gets me excited to sit in a room and be chatted up by some lady in HR for a few hours about some inane topic like how I get pay raises at my job.

Facilitator- We're going to be role playing a scenario between the boss and her under achieving employee.
M: Will whips and chains be involved?
Fac: I'm sorry?
M: Just a little humor. I'm sorry.

I have an idea that I should take a year off of work and just spend it going to various conferences and grading the material and food presented.

We had a pretty decent spread today. The vase full of oranges was a nice touch, though the flowers at the top were being pushed at odd angles by the oranges. I thought the pita chips were a nice touch. The real lemons in the lemonade were certainly a nice touch. And so on....

Actual requirements of being a good employee-Integrity, reliability, accountability interpersonal skills, diversity....Did I read that correctly?

Do I actually have to be diverse in order to have this job? How does a person go about being diverse? Do they mean like juggling a bunch of knives while delivering a lecture on quantum physics? I mean, it's diverse, I suppose. Or do I need to express myself in a multi-ethnic manner while at my job? Will I be fired for not expressing diversity? This is the sort of stuff that just freaks you out during an HR seminar.

Interesting things I learned while conferencing. I have the capability of changing my expected outcomes during the course of the performance year.

Ex: Currently: Access online articles help assess impact on workflow et al. I love sentences that include words like "assess impact on workflow." It just gets me fired up to be human being. Look at what we've created! I think when God looks down upon the mountains and the sea he's probably a little disappointed that he didn't just create a nice spreadsheet instead. He could have just plugged in a nice Adam and Eve formula and had a much easier time.

Edited version to appear tomorrow: Employee is expected to develop a mastery of all local wines, learning to distinguish, on company time the subtle difference between various grapes. The employee is expected to drink at least a full bottle a day in order to fulfill his work for this week.

I'm thinking it's a great idea to give employees editing privileges to performance tools.

Outcome vs. effort
We then ran a scenario where we had to decide whether outcome or effort was more important for PMP purposes. Though it we decided as a group that it was hard to measure. I can tell you from working over the past few years that the trophies for everyone model of child rearing generally doesn't go over as well in the work place.

Boss: Did you send those articles out?
M: No. I really f-cked them up. Sent them to like Japan or something. You should have heard the calls I was getting. Where are my articles and stuff. Do you know what I told them?
Boss: No?
M: I'll tell you now what I told them. I gave it my best effort. I tried really hard.
Boss: Oh. Then forget it, let's have a beer and talk about our weekends. Trying hard is really all that matters in the world. Like say, invading a country on a false premise. Sure, it makes you look asinine, but as long as you tried really hard to get all the information ahead of time no one really gets hurt.
M: Trying is all that really matters. (At this point we begin to simulate a European dance where a bunch of men hold each others shoulders and kick feet into the air. Oh, and also the Care Bears are shooting rainbows from out of their stomachs).

In which we learn the three most desirable things for people when it comes to jobs.
Friendly co-workers-Seems kind of obvious. Though hard to assess before you start at at a company. Besides what might be friendly to you might just be a creepy guy who won't leave me alone. How do you measure friendliness? Amount of teeth shown in a typical smile?

Desirable commute-Obvious. That's why the devil invented freeways. But then jammed them chock full of cars to teach people a lesson.
Good boss-Obvious. Michael Scott.

Shockingly important things like money were left off. And, is asking for a live in nanny too much? It just seems like the sort of thing that might come in handy at a job. Hell, I'd settle for Mr. Belvedere if I had to. Though I'd like to see him in a bit better shape if he's going to be sharpening my pencils.

What I really learned today.

I learned that when you begin yawning in excess of thirty or so times that it's really imperative to keep the jaw tight, so you can continue to pretend to be listening without your mouth gaping wide open. This is obviously also a valuable technique to learn whenever you are listening to boring people or a boring story. Everyone should conference for a week or so just to really nail the "What? me, oh no, I'm not yawning, my cheeks just tighten like that when I'm really interested" face.

I don't like cold weather. Ie, anything below 50.