This blog will save your life

When you're going out to buy a rug it's important to bring your color wheel. Without a color wheel, you are shi- out of luck. It's not easy to find a carpet that really "defines the space." It's important to use terms like "define the space" whenever you are talking about your new home. Don't let anyone tell you that a house is just a house. A house is a space that you fill up with stuff. It's important to define that space. I define the large area that we have most of our belongings in as a house. However, I've always been a bit of a literalist when it suits me.

Do not ask your wife's opinion when you are going to pick out the rug. We who live in places like Washington, D.C. or New York, or the United States of America, or Russia, or... don't really get a chance to hunt anymore. We can no longer slay that fatted calf and bring it home to our sig. others. Ergo; this is our last bastion. We have been sent out into the night, with only a small hybrid car, almost incapable of carrying even a bag of groceries with this task: buy me a rug and maybe a trunk.

SIL: That rug looks fine. You don't really need an area rug.
M: I thought that was an area rug. I think I was looking for an area rug.
SIL: It looks good. It looks fine.
M: I'm not sure it's defining the space like I want it to.

One of the best things about buying our multi-colored space defining rug, though admittedly a rather small space, was carrying it out to the car in a freezing rain. I'm fairly certain that several cars carrying women probably had to stop just from the raw scent of masculinity that must have been wafting off me as I lifted that moderately light carpet into my arms and carried it into the street.

Girl: Is that a multi-colored and slightly bright carpet he's carrying?
Girl 2: All by himself?
Girl 3: He is all man!

I think that's probably a fair assessment of the sort of discourse that took place as I stumbled up the frozen sidewalks and tried to wedge the beautiful carpet/bath mat into the back of our car. In real life the role of the three girls was played by three guys who were smoking the entire time I was in the store in the freezing cold weather and who were still smoking when I came out. I'm certain they were equally as impressed, as the imaginary girls were, at my ability to choose a carpet with some mauve in it. Confession: I don't know what color mauve is? Is it green?

Dear friends, I have not even told you how I wrestled a moderately light trunk into the back of my car with the help of the salesmen.

Sales: Will you slide that seat up? This thing is killing my back.

Me: You bet. (Slides seat up earnestly while trying not to think about the fact that I am participating a bit too much in the loading process of the trunk. And trying not to think about what it means that I am annoyed by participating a bit too much in the process. Does it show that I am spoiled by customer service? Is it some sort of class distinction that I feel is being violated? The contract between store and customer? Why am I thinking so much? Did the two of us wrestling the trunk into the back of the car create some sort of bond that allowed me to nod my head at him after we finished and wish him a Happy New Year? Did he recognize in me a customer who was willing to go the extra mile. Someone who isn't just a sharply dressed (I was that day. It was not my normal jeans and a t-shirt attire)World Market Customer. I was someone who was kind of like him, a guy who had worked hard lifting boxes at some summer jobs in the not too distant past. Wasn't I?)

And then I drove home and rolled out a carpet in our living room. I put a Vinod trunk priced at 199 dollars in our living room. I sat down on our practically brand new couches and tried to decide if the space defined me. If the space was really showing the sort of person that I'd made of myself after thirty or so years on this little ball of blue. I concluded that putting your feet up on a coffee table is one of the rare pleasures and life that would now be eluding me. I considered the cost of ottomans. I tried to remember a time when I still thought an Ottoman referred strictly to the Turkish empire. I concluded that our rug was not a proper area rug but perhaps that would be all right.