Kidless in Suburbia

Two businessmen walking

2010-04-10T10:10:00.003-04:00

down William toward Wall Street at lunchtime. One to the other:
"I think it's only because I'm...slightly older and less sure of myself now..."
No hint of irony in his voice!

Change is the mother...

2010-02-06T06:50:00.009-05:00

of innovation. I believe that the saying is actually "Necessity is the mother of innovation." Or maybe it's "invention." But this is my blog, so I'll mangle quotations to suit my purposes.

Life change has brought out my creativity. Not that I'm writing much. But I'm making stuff--lots of stuff. Here are some more pictures.

Back

2010-01-30T19:55:00.011-05:00

I'm back. I'm still kidless, but I'm no longer in suburbia. I'm living in Brooklyn again after almost a decade in CT.

The world outside my bedroom window is always awake. Two bars across the street spill noisy drunk people out into cold night at 3:30am Wednesday through Saturday. It doesn't seem to matter how cold it is. They mill around, screaming and laughing and sometimes, fighting. About six weeks ago an argument bulged out of control and I heard a woman scream, "put that shit away," and I've not been gone so long that I didn't know that she could only be referring to a weapon. So I pulled away from the window and immediately heard the shot. I knew that I should stay away, that people innocently watching TV or knitting by the window are killed by stray bullets, but I crept back nonetheless. I watched the two men wrestling in a sloppy, drunken way that almost looked like making out. Then there were five patrol cars all at once, lights and horns blaring, and I watched as four cops kicked the larger drunk man into submission and then almost politely settle him into the back a police car.

I could have done without that bit of urban theater. I've wanted to call the cops several times because of the noise, but the image of that man curled up on the ground being kicked from all sides stops me. Better to invest in a high-tech sound machine, like the ones psychiatrists use.

But I logged on after so much time not to complain about city life. How could I? I am back from suburbia, back where I belong. For better or for worse.

My apartment is a 15-minute walk from my parents' house. My mom and I have found a neutral zone: crafting. I've discovered that we don't annoy each other or make snarky comments (as often) when we are making things. So I thought that I would use this blog as a place to show off our work. We've been doing decoupage--boxes, tissue box covers. Next week I think it will be napkin rings. I have a new respect for art therapy. Below are some of my mom's tissue box covers. The idea came from not wanting to make anything that would add clutter to her home. There are already hoards of Costco brand square tissue boxes all over the house for my two nieces' ever-flowing noses. So we figured, why not make them pretty?

Returning to the metropolis has made has revived my creativity. I've been drawing with colored pens and pencils on graph paper and reproducing the images for cards and stuff. Here's a picture of the customized card and CD that I made for a friend and mentor at my new job.

Yale Student To Bring Her Own Little House To Campus

2008-08-12T08:17:00.002-04:00

This young woman is building her own tiny house in the style of Tumbleweed Tiny Houses. So inspiring. I'm trying to get some pictures.

read more digg story

On some good advice from fellow blogger

2008-08-11T06:54:00.008-04:00

Orchid64, I decided to haul out the four extra-large boxes of family memorabilia. Orchid had encouraged me to throw away what didn't truly matter to me, and scan or take pictures of the things that did sort of matter (then throw them away), leaving me with a nice manageable collection of things too nostalgic or meaningful to toss.

The boxes sat unopened in my spare room for a few days. I shut the door so that I wouldn't have to look at them. Finally, yesterday, going through the boxes seemed like a pleasant alternative to helping my husband strip wallpaper in the kitchen. So, I opened the first box. I had already known that the journals would be a problem. For many reasons, I can't bear to read them, but throwing them away would be like reaching inside myself and ripping out a vestigial organ. Sorry, that was gross, but it's the best analogy I could make. I set the journals aside.

I had more success with the camp stuff. My sister and I wrote what seems to me an extraordinary number of letters to our parents and grandparents from camp. The letters were typical—funny and quirky, and included incessant requests for gum and stamps. But among the camp letters I found something unexpected: letters written by my great-grandfather, Isaac, to my mother and her twin sister during the 1950s. He spent his summers in Miami but kept in regular touch with his granddaughters in New York City. There's a stack of letters, all written in neat Slavic-looking English. By Slavic-looking, I mean that the lettering looks almost like it wants to be Cyrillic.

The letters are animated and playful, like this one from December 26, 1956:

Dear Elaine and Marian,
Surprise! I've come to an important decision--from now on I shall address both of you in the same letter. Reasons: (1) Economic—I save a 3 cents stamp and 0.9876 cents in stationery, ink, and general overhead. "A penny saved, a penny earned.” "Waste not, want not." I must warn you though that if you adhere too closely to those proverbs you won't have much fun in life. (2) Health—When I have to write one letter I lose sleep. If I have to write two letters I get a nervous breakdown. You don't want me to get a nervous breakdown every two-three weeks? Or, do you? Explain yourself. (3) Variety—If I write to Marian that the weather is fine, I cannot write exactly the same to Elaine. I must vary the letter. So I write to Elaine that the weather is fine but it rains cats and dogs. One of these statements is false. It's a sin to lie—unless you must, in which case it ceases to be a lie and becomes a prevarication…

Some of the later letters were in Russian with English translations. At first I assumed that he was just making sure that my mother and her sister understood the letters. But then I began noticing a trend. In a letter dated February 14, 1958, Isaac wrote to one of them (it’s addressed in Russian and I no longer recognize the symbols well enough to even sound them out), he wrote:

…You have a brain, but it won’t help you if you cannot stick to one thing and master it. I was very happy with your choice of the Russian language. I believe it will [be] more and more valuable, especially when those that master the language are native born American. You see, the government of U.S. does not trust us, Russian born. They suspect that I and your other grandfather are likely to sympathize with Russia. We [do] not, but our government is not taking any chances. And that’s where you come in. I planned, when I come home, to give you regular lessons and help you along to overcome the difficulties of the language. And that’s what I am going to do! So don’t dare stop. Go along slowly, but do not stop. Imagine what advantage you will have, knowing a valuable language! Now, once more do not stop, or I will wring your neck. Love, Grandfather.

From January 30, 1958:

Dear Marian,
Your last letter to me carried some surprising as well as painful news. It also horrified me! Your remark in that letter that you are happy to be through with science was like a knife through my patriotic heart. How could you feel that way, when, so far, we failed to send aloft even a baby Sputnik! How can we ever catch up with the Russians when you and the rest of the kids refuse to study science? Please, go on with science a little bit longer, until we put into an orbit, if not an adult Sputnik, at least a teen-ager…

There are more letters with seemingly light-hearted references to beating the Russians. The letters were written when McCarthyism was still going strong. Both Isaac and his son (my grandfather) had thriving medical practices. I wonder if he feared blacklisting, or worse. Did he suspect that his letters were being opened and read by the U.S. government? I wish that I could ask him.

Well, only three more gigantic boxes to go...then onto the monstrous filing cabinet. But I will spare you the details of that adventure into 1o-years-old vet bill receipts and statements from banks that no longer exist.

I think that it’s safe to say

2008-08-01T16:58:00.012-04:00

that my grandmother’s style of communication was inquisitive. As would any good investigative journalist, when we spoke, she first wanted the basics: Who did you go to dinner with? Actually, she would have said, “With whom did you go to dinner?” But that’s a different topic.

“We went out with Dave and Meher and Carlos,” I’d say.

“Where?” she’d ask.

“To that Asian fusion restaurant on West 82nd Street, Rain.”

“It rained?”

“No,” I’d say. “The restaurant, it’s called Rain.”

“Vus? I don’t hear.”

“The restaurant is called Rain,” I’d holler into the phone.

“All right, I heard you. So, what did you eat?”

“Let’s see…spring rolls, chicken satay, cucumber salad with garlic and sweet chili dressing,” I’d recount, then throw in what the others had eaten, for good measure.

“Very nice. What time was the reservation? Late?”

“No, we had reservations for seven, but Meher was late as usual, seeing a client. We had a nice bottle of Sauvignon Blanc before she arrived. From New Zealand.”

“She came in from New Zealand?” English was her second language, so she liked her modifiers in place.

“No…the wine, not Meher. She was on Long Island, stuck in traffic.”

“And how did you get into the city?” She’d want to know.

“We drove to the station in Fairfield, then took the train to Grand Central. Very easy. This way Mark could drink a little.”

“Tell me, why the get-together, a special occasion?” She liked to know the reasons for things.

“No…well, Carlos’s birthday is next week and we won’t see him because he’ll be away visiting friends.”

“Does Carmo have a wife? A girlfriend?”

“Carlos. No, Carlos is gay.”

“A boyfriend, then?”

“I don’t think so,” I’d say, worn out.

She liked to “drill down,” as people often say now at the office. Drill down from the basics to the specifics. Where do Dave and Meher live? How old is Carlos? Is he good-looking? Why doesn’t he have a boyfriend?
She was exacting; she didn’t stand for equivocation. I learned that early enough: speak up, enunciate. If you don't want to tell her something, say so. Don’t evade. Don’t mumble or mince words; it will only elicit an exasperated, “What??”

I’d just say to her, “I don’t want to talk about it,” which might have resulted in an additional question, “Why not?” But asserting, “I just don’t,” would usually end that particular line of questioning. This is not to say that she wouldn’t phone my mother later to see if she knew the answer, but Grandma knew when to stop asking me. She was practical in this way: glean as much information as possible, but know when to cut your losses and move on.

Why did she do this? I didn’t question it; it was just Grandma. I suppose it used to bother me. But as I got older, I saw it differently. It was a pleasant, reassuring routine. Who else would want to know so many insignificant details about me? But maybe they weren’t insignificant. I think that in that magnificent database in her brain, she filed those tiny bits of information to maintain a composite understanding of my life. It was how she knew me. Throughout my life, she made a point of knowing me.

Sometimes I would turn the table on her, ask her questions. She was willing to talk. I wish I’d asked more.

For Ray Goodside
July 4th, 1911-August 2, 2006

And the answer is...

2008-07-27T08:21:00.004-04:00

...donations for a bark park. There seem to be more dogs than people in Provincetown, Cape Cod this year. Not that I'm complaining.

Can you guess what this is?

2008-07-25T17:58:00.003-04:00

I'll let you know tomorrow.

The Truth of Wall-e

2008-07-24T05:39:00.010-04:00

I'm not sure how the writers got the storyline of Wall-e past the Disney marketing execs. If you haven't seen the movie, I won't spoil too much of it for you.

Here's the premise: One giant superstore has taken over every aspect of life on Earth. Its products result in so much garbage that humans have to be jettisoned into space for what is supposed to be a five-year, supersized, automated luxury cruise while robots at home compress the garbage into neat cubes and stack them up into garbage towers.

It takes the robots a bit longer than expected to clear out all that garbage, though, and the space cruise is still cruising 700 years later. Aboard the ship, humans over the generations stop walking or moving or interacting directly with each other. They become almost boneless, brainless, and blob-shaped. It was starting to remind me of an especially bleak J.G. Ballard or Ray Bradbury story, but Disney-ness, thank God, kicks in eventually and saves the day. That made me feel good.

I came out of the movie theater into a vast parking lot lined with big-box stores. I looked around and noticed that nearly everyone was obese, including the children. They struggled up into their Chevy Trailblazers and Ford Expeditions, panting. Although the endless asphalt glittered with heat, I shivered.

Satire takes a beating when truth is so ridiculous | Freep.c

2008-07-19T09:08:00.002-04:00

Not currently in possession of an original thought, I will let Leonard Pitts Jr of the Detroit Free Press speak for me today. He got it SO right...and look at the comments readers made. Irony piled up upon irony.

read more digg story

A woman walked into the

2008-07-16T21:11:00.004-04:00

tutoring center today. I was doing some administrative stuff and saw her when I came into the reception area to get a student file.

The woman was old, but not desiccated-old. She was tall (well, anyone over five foot one is tall to me, but she was quite tall) and well-dressed in neat cotton slacks and a summery plaid blouse. Another tutor was giving her directions, drawing a map on a yellow sticky pad. As I passed by, I heard snippets of the conversation: walked to the library...can't remember just exactly...son will kill me if he finds out...

Having recently lost my mother-in-law to dementia, my senses are now more finely tuned to signs of a deteriorating mind. I interrupted and asked the woman if she would like a ride. Oh yes, she said, with delight and relief.

As I drove her home, she told me that she lives with her son and his family. Her daughter-in-law doesn't like her to talk to the neighbors, she told me, because she doesn't know them. This is a strange way of living for her, she explained, because up until her memory started to fail, she'd been a registered nurse. She was used to...she couldn't find the words.

Dealing with the public? I offered.

Yes! Exactly! She exclaimed, pleased.

When we got closer to the street marked on the yellow sticky sitting in my lap, she asked me to drop her at the corner. It sounded more like a plea than a demand. I asked her why.

If someone is home and they find out that I've been...lost, they'll be angry, she said. They'll keep me in. I was reluctant to leave her wandering down a street, but she seemed desperate.

Can I watch you go into your house, just to make sure? I asked.

She shook her head. Please, they might see you.

I stopped the car at the corner of her street. She thanked me quickly, pushed a five dollar bill into my lap, and almost leapt out of the car. I tried to give the money back, but that woman was making tracks. I put my car into reverse and inched back behind a bush, and watched her walk purposefully down the road.

I'll just watch, I told myself. Just to be sure. But she turned around and spied me and made an urgent "go away" gesture with her hand. So I made a K-turn and headed back toward town.

If it were in me, I would pray to have her determination should I face such indignity in the future. But as it is, I can only hope.

Nothing

2008-07-14T20:20:00.005-04:00

important happened today
(or words to that effect).

--King George III of England, July 4th, 1776

Ditto.

--Liz Stone Abraham, USA, July 14, 2008

My husband is an orphan now.

2008-07-13T07:26:00.002-04:00

Strange indeed.

So here's what happened...

2008-07-11T07:56:00.006-04:00

One day a few months ago we noticed that the family living in the corner lot on our street was cutting down trees on their property. No big deal, everyone cuts down trees around here. We do it, too. The guy who developed most of the homes on our block back in the late 70s had a penchant for planting oaks and maples right next to each other. Or maybe they planted themselves. In any case, 35 or so years later, those trees vie for sunlight and room to spread their roots and branches.

Carl, the craggily handsome, chain-smoking arborist, cuts down the less fit trees so that the others may thrive. (He quit smoking for a stretch last year and I discovered that his thick grey hair and mustache was actually vibrant blond. Then he picked up again, and he turned back to grey. But that's another story.)

The family on the corner lot cut down all of the trees. Every single one—30 or so, maybe more. The suddenness of the massacre got peoples' attention. Even the mailman almost ran into me as he craned his neck to stare at the lot while pulling out into the street. Next, a CAT logger appeared on the denuded grounds. The man who lives there drove the CAT around for a few evenings in a row, resulting in several neat stacks of logs piled up at the edge of the property. The logs disappeared, and an excavator replaced the logger.

We all waited and watched as the guy dug a wide, shallow pit across the lot. Oh great, my husband and I said to each other. He's going to put in a hideous 6-car garage. Or maybe they're planning an addition to their workaday cape? Perhaps a great room with cathedral ceilings and Palladian windows? A grand, Victorian-style solarium? Maybe an in-ground pool with a slate patio. Well, whatever he had in mind, it would be on display for all to see now that the trees were gone.

More waiting and watching. As I rounded the corner one day I almost drove off the road. I had to stop the car for a moment to make sure I'd seen it right. Yes, I had. The entire gouged-out spot had been seeded. With grass seed. The man had cut down his forest and built...a lawn.

A lawn? Why, why, why would he want more lawn? Lawns are the scourge of suburban life. To be a good neighbor, you're expected to water, feed, and add insecticide and herbicide to your lawn. And mow and mow and mow until you drop dead. More than half of the people here have tractor mowers. We don't. Nor do we perform most of the other lawn chores that we're supposed to do to be a good neighbor. Lawns—dare I say it out loud in this land of short green grass-worshippers—are stupid.

There, I said it. That was my one brave thing for the day.

Check out this huge

2008-07-10T16:20:00.014-04:00

...thing. Challenged by my friend Rowena to do something brave everyday, I decided to pull into the parking lot of this forbidding-looking local quarry and take pictures. I've been wanting to do it for some time, but I was afraid that someone would arrest me for trespassing. Or yell at me—that would be worse. A guy in a big truck gave me a friendly nod as I drove in and he drove out. Other than that, I didn't see anyone. I got out of
my car and wandered around a bit.

The place has a distinct air of disuse. Maybe it's the vegetation climbing all over the equipment, or the rust. I peered around the corner of this boxlike structure at right. What I saw next was a massive contraption that was definitely whirring and humming. So, apparently this quarry is still in operation.

What's weird is how little I could discover about this place online. I found the company website, so I know that the quarry produces "Hot Mix Asphalt." But there were no news stories about this particular plant. I thought that quarries were the object of scorn by environmental groups. Don't they dig up natural resources and leave gaping holes in the landscape when they're through? Don't workers get beheaded operating the machinery and end up as ghosts haunting the plant at night, rattling chains? This place, for all its hulking bulk, barely seems to exist.

And look at the office. Really, does anyone work here?

Maybe that guy in the truck was a ghost. But he did have a head.

Bus stops are good.

2008-07-09T13:26:00.008-04:00

I passed this nifty little structure on my way to a student's house. In my own neighborhood, kids don't tend to meet in one place to wait for the bus, so the bus stops every 15 feet or so to take on passengers. If I happen to be stuck behind the bus, I yell at my windshield, c'mon kids, walk! That's what feet are for!

But I'm not being fair, because at least these kids (well, their parents) are taking advantage of public transportation. They don't add to the congestion everywhere within a two mile radius of the schools during drop-off and dismissal.

I won't slide into a rant about SUV Moms cutting people off to get their one and a half children into or out of the school parking lot. Or about the cops stopping traffic to let those SUVs in and out. Because that would be a cliché. Complaining about SUV Moms is so yesterday (not to be confused with regular moms, about whom, in general, I do not complain).

No. This post is about bus stops. My childhood bus stop was just a corner; not even a sign indicated that anything special might happen if you waited there. Everyone just knew where it was. My little sister Amy and I lived three blocks from it, which wasn't bad. Unfortunately, the last block was a steep hill. Amy had a strangely charming laziness about her that translated into, among many other quirks, an inability to get herself up that last hill to the bus stop. Every morning, weighed down with textbook-filled backpacks (those books are online now), we trudged up the hill. Amy would start to fall back, and I'd grab her hand and pull her. We'd see the bus rolling into the stop, which meant we had about 90 seconds, if we were lucky, to catch that bus. So I'd take Amy's backpack and swing it onto my back on top of my own, and with my right hand I would push that kid up the hill.

If we missed the bus, we walked—which stunk. But at least we could walk, and what a stinkin' luxury that was.

A strip mall with a view

2008-07-08T20:33:00.011-04:00

Like many rural suburban U.S. towns, mine—at its core—is a tangle of strip malls coalescing around a center. Surrounding that is a cat's cradle of wooded dirt roads dotted with 19th century farmhouses and cottages, and paved roads lined with 20th century capes and raised ranches. Fused to these are sparkling subdivisions named Dogwood Bridge Acres and Cedar Circle Woods, more than a few of which will soon devolve into Sub-Prime Mortgage Meadows and Foreclosure Sunset Farms (bringing the rest us down with them, thank you so much).

The center of our town is marked by a 100-foot flagpole, erected in 1876. Sidewalks lead in four directions from the pole. The sidewalks remind me of Shel Silverstein's Where the Sidewalk Ends. At age six or so, I remember thinking: what a funny and absurd notion--a sidewalk, ending? Sidewalks don't end! The Earth is round!

They end in my town. They pick up again, anemically, at various points in the Commercial District. But they don't lead anywhere in particular (I don't count the banks, nail salons, or the CVS). People feel sorry for pedestrians here. Look at that guy! Why is he walking? Should we call it in? Maybe he's stranded.

Even in my car, I sometimes feel stranded. Yet, I've grown accustomed to this life. It's comfortable. The truth is that when I visit my home city, I often can't wait to get back. What does that say about the suburbs? About me? Hm.

An old coal silo in Beacon, NY

2008-07-06T09:48:00.005-04:00

From the looks of things, people are starting to use coal again.

I'm too distracted by the post on

2008-07-03T17:47:00.006-04:00

Emily Magazine to write anything worthwhile. Jeeezus.

Instead, tonight's entertainment here on Kidless will be provided by Koko. If we could all just be that happy. Or bored.

This is the center of my town.

2008-07-02T17:40:00.015-04:00

Does it look like a parking lot to you? Yeah, to me too. But it’s what the local teenagers refer to as “The Center.” I tutor for a living, so I meet a lot of teenagers. For a while I thought that they were talking about the intersection on Main Street, which sports a whopping big flagpole. There’s a bucolic little general store just down the road from it where you can get sodas and ice cream. But now that I think of it, I’ve rarely seen kids hanging out there. Then I thought that they must be referring to the teen center run by the town. But I’m not that far into adulthood (okay, yes I am but) to believe that any self-respecting teen would set an Old Skool Vans-encased foot into a place created for kids by adults.

My boss finally explained it to me. The Center is the CVS parking lot. Riiiight, of course! I always have to watch my rear view mirror with extra vigilance when pulling out of the CVS lot to make sure that I don’t hit any of those…kids. What are they doing there? They can’t drink or do drugs or even make out—what with all those adults milling about, shopping. They can smoke, however, because apparently while one must be 18 in my state to purchase cigarettes, the law permits people to smoke at the age of 16...as long as someone else buys them. One of my students told me that. Okay, so they can smoke at the CVS. What else? There’s a Big Y next door (that’s a supermarket around these parts), with a much bigger parking lot. But they don’t congregate there. Is CVS cooler than the Big Y?

I grew up in Brooklyn and spent most of my free time wandering the streets of Manhattan. Yeah, I’m showing off, being superior. But when I mention this to my students, they look at me with awe. It’s like saying that I was the batboy for the Yankees, or went to high school with Jennifer Aniston (actually, I did—she was a year ahead of me. But telling people that would be plain obnoxious).

Call me an idealist, but I don’t think it’s good that the CVS parking lot will figure so heavily in these kids’ memories of childhood. Here’s the question: how does a semi-rural suburban town create something for the kids to do, a place for them to go, without adultifying it and thereby making it uncool and verboten? Even if the town council put together a team of teenagers to come up with something, the very fact that adults had initiated it would probably have the same chilling effect.

Anyone?

Emily Gould is to me as

2008-07-01T13:36:00.011-04:00

Liz Phair is to Emily Gould. Sort of. In her June 26th post in Emily Magazine, Emily wrote that she loves Liz Phair. She mused that it's a strange and embarrassing thing to love someone who doesn't know her. Well, let's not go crazy, I can hear my husband saying. Okay, fine. Maybe love is a strong word to describe how I feel about Emily. But I have my reasons. And she has hers for loving Liz Phair.

About eight months ago I started this blog out of desperation. I didn't really understand the blog world, with its nuances and idiosyncrasies. Or, really, why people blogged. I was in a downward spiral and needed to talk to someone. But I couldn't talk. So I started to write in this blog. At the time, I called it "My Anomie." I wrote for a short while, a week or so, about my deepening sense of isolation and lack of place in the world. Things got worse, and then everything stopped.

Zoom forward to Emily's article "Exposed," which came out in the May 25th issue of The New York Times Magazine, with the subhead, "What I gained — and lost — by writing about my intimate life online." I read it without stopping. It was so insightful, and honest, and unpretentious. Instead of a sensational self-exposé, I found in her story an explanation of Emily's specific cross-section of the internet generation. Of the personal blog that eventually led to her very public vilification, she wrote,

"I’m willing to let that blog exist now as a sort of memorial to a time in my life when I thought my discoveries about myself and what I loved were special enough to merit sharing with the world immediately.”

The blog Emily refers to, which I won't name here but is easy enough to find, still exists. However, its infamous archives are closed to the public. She learned the very hard way what not to do in the blogosphere—overshare (as she put it), and what to do—think (for at least a minute) before hitting "publish." I learned the easy way—from reading her article.

Emily is still blogging away in Emily Magazine, fiercely and humorously but not foolishly. And so, I believe, am I here in Kidless. It's fun and uniquely satisfying to share my thoughts and images with whoever might be out there. I thank Emily for explaining this new world to me.

And that's why I love her.

Think.

Publish.

I want the world to know

2008-07-01T08:47:00.004-04:00

that I submitted a story to a contest last night. I checked my log and discovered that the last time I submitted anything was December '07. My rejection slip folder must be getting dusty. Contest results will be announced August 31st. I won't say which magazine it is because I don't want anyone who might stumble upon this post to get any ideas about adding to the competition. I have sunk that low.

Desk, Bookcase, and the Kitchen Beyond

2008-07-01T07:55:00.006-04:00

Desk, Bookcase, and the Kitchen Beyond Originally uploaded by Telstar Logistics

This is a shot of the inside of Jay Shafter's home. It's 100 square feet. My palace will be 2.5 times bigger. Imagine the possibilities...

According to Tumbleweed, the Loring actually has 400 square feet of usuable living space, once you include the loft (which isn't considered inhabitable because of the low ceiling but can certainly hold a bunch of my stuff). And the cost? Jay says that the price to build comes in between $100-200 per square foot. Let's split it and say $150, so...it'll cost approximately $37,650. Not sure if I have to count the loft footage but this is my fantasy, so I'll say no to that.

It will be like Walden, only not in the woods.

I'm pale green at best, but

2008-07-01T07:03:00.006-04:00

I love the idea of having this simple, low-impact, low-cost life. My (future) tiny house sits on a tenth of an acre in a cool little town. With the house only covering 251 square feet, I have room for a front walk and backyard garden. The garden provides me with tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, basil, and catmint (for Katie). The property is small enough that it's not overwhelming to tend it. While I'm fantasizing, let's put one of Solar Lab's solar-powered rickshaws in a pint-sized car port along side the house. The drawing above is from an article in Inhabitat, TRANSPORTATION TUES: Solar-Power Rickshaws for London by Mahesh Basantani.

Solar-Power Rickshaws for London

2008-07-01T06:41:00.001-04:00

And once I get my tiny house, this will be my transportation.

read more | digg story

Loring

2008-06-30T11:43:00.001-04:00

Loring
Originally uploaded by Tumbleweed Tiny House Company

This is my future tiny house. My husband agreed that it would be nice to have one as a getaway. I guess that I didn't make it clear that I wanted one all for myself, ie, a tiny house of one's own.

Harbinger

2008-06-30T11:42:00.001-04:00

Harbinger
Originally uploaded by Tumbleweed Tiny House Company

I also like this one. Not sure about the name, though. "Harbinger " sounds like bad news.

Why I love tiny houses

2008-06-29T09:01:00.008-04:00

Maybe it's because I, myself, am small—tiny, if you will. I'm five feet tall. Arms stretched out to my sides, I estimate that I am about five feet wide. In my tiny house fantasy, I live alone. Everything in the house is designed for me. Rarely would I need a stool to reach what I need. Doorknobs, cabinets, faucets, mirrors, the toilet—all at precisely the right height for me, and no one else.

http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com/houses/loring/

I like this one by Tumbleweed Houses. It's 251 square feet. That's approximately 8 times the square footage of the guinea pig condo (not a cage!) that Mark built for Dom and Koko. Everything is big in suburbia.

My love of tiny houses extends beyond my physical stature. Who needs 2,500 square feet to heat, cool, and clean? But that's pretty much the minium size around here. I'd love to take a typical 1.5 acre lot and plop down a Loring. People would be baffled.

I'm waiting for Tumbleweed to post pictures of the inside. In the meantime I will decorate it in my mind.

This may not be

2008-06-28T19:43:00.003-04:00

working out. I spent too much time today lying on the futon in the guinea pig room, shades drawn, air-conditioner running. I read a bit from "Sabriel" but mostly I dozed. I got up briefly for an ill-timed bowl of Grape Nuts (it was 4pm, which I can tell you is a depressing time to be eating cereal), then went back to the couch.

But earlier today we joined the ranks of the granite-counter top-kitchen homeowners. Soon we will have great expanses of natural resources in the color of Green Butterfly gracing our culinary sector. Next, the linoneluem comes up and the hard wood floors go down.

Then, for sure, I will be happy.

The big rigs roaring past my window

2008-06-26T23:02:00.006-04:00

on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway are a gentle reminder that I am not in suburbia tonight. I'm staying at my parents' house in Brooklyn, the house that I lived in from 1979 to 1993. My friend John Davey once said that this house reminds him of a cave, like the Hobbit's house. I'm not sure, but I think that he said it in admiration. John is originally from an upscale suburb of Detroit, where I imagine that the houses are as large as many of the prefab monstrosities in my Connecticut neighborhood, but much more solid and stately. I bet that John would say that he came to New York City to get away from solid and stately.

I think that an 18-wheeler just drove through the upstairs bedrooms. Great beard of Zeus, it's loud here. I'd forgotten.

I hear my sister's baby, Alex, crying through the monitor that is sitting next to the computer. My sister Amy lives here now with her infant twins. I hear Amy talking softly. Now, she's making a sort of grrr-grrr noise. Alex has stopped crying. Amazing.

It's strange to be in this 200-year old house. According to local lore, this four-story brick building at various times was home to a speakeasy, a grocery, and a whorehouse. This was all before Robert Moses built the BQE, severing neighboring Red Hook from the industrialized world. Some 45 years later, Red Hook is now home to an IKEA. The Swedes even offer free ferry and bus service for car-less Manhattanites. So things I suppose are looking up in The Hook, depending on how you look at it.

This post seems to be meandering a bit more than I'd like, but it's okay because:

a) I'm writing again, finally.
b) No one is reading this.

Good night, Brooklyn.

The No Facebook Day Experiment Didn’t

2008-06-25T18:16:00.006-04:00

work, exactly. It didn’t work in the sense that I kept Facebook open all day and refreshed the homepage every ten minutes or so. I didn’t give any status updates, or upload any pictures or comment on anyone’s pictures or send anyone any banana plants or karma or sushi. But, all-in-all, it wasn’t a very successful attempt at Facebook detox. To add to my obsessive-compulsive behavior, I kept open a forum page on which people were leaving comments about a local news story concerning some teens I’ve worked with. I kept refreshing that page, too—all day. I was tempted to write in with my own comments, but my fragile sense of superiority kept me from joining the poorly-worded and spelled, nasty, and mostly ridiculous rants.

Then I remembered something: I like to read. Books.

So I got dressed, got into my car, and drove to the library. There I picked up “The Case Files of Detective Lazlo Briscoe: True Crime in Newtown 1889-1933,” by Andrea Zimmermann. Andrea is a librarian at the C.H. Booth Library. I also took out “Civil & Strange,” by Cláir Ní Aonghusa. I chose it because I liked the cover—a row of brightly colored cottages lining a European small-town street. I also borrowed “Sabriel,” by Garth Nix, recommended by the YA librarian Margaret Brown. I’ve decided to start reading some of the books that my 14-year-old creative writing students are always talking about.

My cat keeps attacking my fingers as they hit the keyboard. I think that she’s trying to tell me something.

Time to hit the books.

I may need to stop

2008-06-24T10:01:00.004-04:00

paying attention to what other people are doing. At least, such close attention. Joining Facebook has been fun, but possibly not a good thing. It's essentially Googlestalking to the hundredth power. Friends and acquaintances and people whom I barely know or haven't heard of before offer up the details of their lives to the general public. As do I. We--or at least I--tailor the information that I provide to smooth out the edges and imbue every aspect of my life with more meaning that it really deserves.

Lately I find myself sitting down to write, but instead wandering off into the lives of others. Wondering if they are happier than I am, cooler, having more fun. Eventually concluding that they definitely are.

Then I go back to the draft I'm working on, and find that it has taken on a drab hue that I hadn't noticed before. I lose focus. I lose interest. I go back to Facebook, or into the kitchen for some frozen cookies, or off to play with my cat.

So maybe what I need is a No Facebook Day.

I find this funny

2008-06-23T16:18:00.004-04:00

I finally decided to take a peek at last year's NaNo attempt. To my surprise, it contains over 100,000 words. I was sure that it was shorter. Upon further inspection however, I discovered that the last 40,000 or so words consist of this single paragraph, repeated:

TO BE CONTINUED. I said, TO BE CONTINUED! DON’T YOU HEAR ME?? I HAVE OVER 50,00O WORDS AND YOU’RE TELLING ME THAT I HAVE 49,866? NOT GOING TO WORK. I AM GOING TO KEEP TYPING RIDICULOUS NONSENSE UNTIL THE STUPID ROBOTS RECOGNIZE MY VERBIAGE.

Hm. I don't remember having trouble uploading my word count. Must have blocked it out.

If I lived somewhere completely different

2007-12-03T03:38:00.002-05:00

I would be myself, only somewhere else. Still, I can't help perusing the realtor sites looking for homes in warm places. Spanish-style homes in desert towns or near the ocean. Condos where everything is taken care of for you, no repairs. No worries.

Right. There will always be worries. Money worries, job worries. Even if I took my work-from-home job with me to live in some wonderful place in the sun, I would still be me, doing that meaningless job. Married, living with anxiety and depression. Making friends but not keeping them. Leaving nothing behind on this earth. Except for plastic bags, which according to Al Gore will be around for a millennium if not longer.

Still, what if...? What if living in this place, 90 miles from the closest major city--with its McMansions where farms used to be and strip malls housing banks, pizza parlors, dance studios, and CVS drug emporiums--is really the problem? Wouldn't that be easy. Just leave. Go somewhere beautiful and cultured and warm, and happiness will be inevitable.

This is academic. When my parents and sister and her new babies finally come back from the faraway state where they are stuck until things calm down and they can come home, I will again feel the need to stay put. But now, with them so far, and so many of my older relatives gone for good, I feel little allegiance to this region. I could leave tomorrow and few would know or care.

Now I must shower and put on a suit and get ready for my big day. I've been planning it for about two months, and expect a decent paycheck for it. I hope that there are no problems because I don't want to deal with any one's concerns, and I don't want to be embarrassed by mistakes that I might have made. But really I just don't care. It's so unimportant. The event will come and go and disappear from people's consciousness. At least those plastic bags are here to stay.

I'm not myself

2007-12-02T08:55:00.000-05:00

in most of my dreams. I think that's part of why I have so much trouble getting out of bed in the morning. I sense reality approaching and don't want it. So I stay in bed as long as I can, with the help I suspect of one of my latest drugs, until I can't stop myself from swimming up through the murk to wakefulness. I don't want to be confronted with my life. But there it is, every morning. If only I could just once wake up into another life.

I listen to the radio and wonder what it would be like to be the commentator. Is she happy? Does she have lots of friends? Does she love her husband? This first thing I do when I pick up a book is flip to the back to look at the picture of the author and read his or her bio. I am most interested in women. Where did she go to school? Where does she live? What magazines and journals have published her stories? Does she feel that she is achieving her potential?

I think about the happiness and satisfaction of others so often that when I finally must turn back to myself I want to dive back into bed and dream of being someone else.

Last night I watched

2007-12-01T08:47:00.000-05:00

"God Grew Tired of Us" about the lost boys of the Sudan. It made my own problems seem so petty and small. I went through six or seven tissues. I think that I was really crying for myself, though. I suspect that empathy is a form of selfishness.

Become a tutor instead?

2007-11-30T10:13:00.001-05:00

Before launching into my next great idea, I want to let it be known that one of these meds has increased my appetite dramatically. I do not like it. I eat a meal and then I'm hungry again ten minutes later. My overeating in the past has been furtive, recreational eating. Now, I'm hungry all the time. I got on the scale this morning and looked with one eye open and discovered that I have not yet gained weight. But it's got to happen, right? A person my size can't go on eating for three like this without packing on the pounds.

Several hours later: I just slept for about 2 and a half hours. I was up all night last night, unable to sleep. I spent much of the time wandering around Second Life trying figure out what the hell was so fun about it. I did find some pretty "places" and some animation balls that enabled my avatar to recline by waterfalls, under a tree reading a book, and in a beach chair by a calm, clear ocean. A few characters actually approached me, but the conversation was boring and never got very far. I've determined that to do anything fun in SL, you need to spend real money to buy Lindin dollars. To do unreal things.

At some point, maybe around 4am, I started getting into a sort of good but manic mood. I made coffee, started my day, did a bunch of work really fast, and then at 8am went to the dermatologist for my second visit in the three-month process required to start on Accutane. I came back home and did some more work, then went back out for a meeting about the children's fiction writing course that I'm volunteering to do again. Went shopping for food for the animals. Came back, ate yogurt with raspberries and banana, fed the animals, did a bit of work, then fell into a deep, dreamless sleep on the sofa. No lucid dreaming. Nothing.

Now I'm up and a client is waiting on an answer about something impossibly stupid yet requiring an answer, and my boss isn't getting back to me, and maybe he won't. And I care, but really, I don't care. It's just so unimportant. Except the part about getting a check.

Which brings me to the idea of becoming a tutor. There's a franchise in the area that supposedly hires tutors for such subjects as reading, writing, and study skills. I can do that, can't I? I know the difference between who and whom. I know what a participle is. I can create an outline and write a good paper based on it. I like kids. Don't I? It would mean something, wouldn't it?

I wonder how much it pays. I wonder if it pays more than bagging groceries at Stop N' Shop.

Take the plunge?

2007-11-24T09:26:00.000-05:00

No joke this time. I actually filled out a form online yesterday and hit "submit" and about an hour later got a call from an intake person at a nearby psych hospital. It's supposed to be very good, and takes my insurance. The woman was nice. She wanted to know what medications I was taking, and I told her. She asked me how long I wanted to stay. I said that I didn't know, that I'd never done this before. She said that I could come right in, do the assessment, and be admitted. Just like that. I'd be assigned a psychiatrist and would have to do one-on-one sessions as well as group therapy. I said that I'd need to get a few things in order with work, and oh right, I'd have to discuss it with my husband. I hadn't mentioned it to him.

She told me to call back when I had a date in mind. I hung up and went out the garage where my husband had been working on my car for the last three hours. I told him about the hospital idea. He wasn't pleased. What about your job, he asked. What are you going to tell ----? I said that I didn't know and started to cry. I cry a lot. It's very frustrating. What I wanted to say was that I didn't give flying fuck about my job. My only concerns are my pets, who are used to being cared for in a specific way. My husband would look after them, but not take really good care of them. There was discussion surrounding my inability to take things in stride--why do I let things stress me out so much? Like that call I got the other morning from that client who wanted to know why I wasn't on a conference call, when I'd sent him two e-mails asking if he wanted me to be on it and he hadn't responded?

I don't know, because I'm a fuck-up?

More discussion ensued about him not understanding how I was feeling. Blah, blah, the upshot was that I should go inside and figure out my calendar, when was the soonest I could go, and then call my boss and explain that I'm having personal problems and need a week off started on the chosen day. But how do we know it would only be a week? I honestly can't imagine how a week of anything could change my life. I think that my husband sees this as some sort of final solution, that if I take this drastic measure I will be completely cured and ready to sail right back into my current life.

He doesn't understand that I hate my current life.

Start with a joke

2007-11-23T08:35:00.000-05:00

Woody Allen addressing the camera as Alvy Singer at the beginning of the movie Annie Hall:

There's an old joke - um... two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of 'em says, "Boy, the food at this place is really terrible." The other one says, "Yeah, I know; and such small portions." Well, that's essentially how I feel about life - full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly.

I think that my expectations for life were set unnaturally high at a young age. I don't only blame my parents for this; I blame television shows and books and movies about happy families living exciting lives. It really doesn't matter who is to blame. Nobody cares. Why should they?

I'm trying to pinpoint the exact moment when my life stopped heading in the direction of happiness. It was probably in high school. My parents should have done something. Ha! What a laugh. How grotesque of me to blame them when all they did was try to help me. All of those psychiatrist visits, constantly watching me for signs of improvement or deterioration. But here's what I would have done:

Find out about Accutane and get me on it instead of taking me to the dermatologist every three to six months to get some new topical medicine or antibiotic that wouldn't work.
Here's where the Ha! comes in. There was nothing else they could do. I needed to do the rest for myself. Maybe if I hadn't had the acne, I would have had the confidence to get in shape, learn how to dress, how to behave in front of people who intimidated me, gotten through math, into a better college...

Okay, so I can't blame my parents. And blaming the media is a cliché. So, can I blame my 14-year-old self for the person I am today?

If there is an answer, I don't think that I will ever know it.

Lucid Dreaming

2007-11-21T07:49:00.000-05:00

I'm trying to have lucid dreams. I can't really say why they fascinate me so much. I used to have them when I was a kid. Mostly they involved climbing to the top of a building and jumping off and flying to the ground.

Recently I read a how-to article on Google about lucid dreams. It had some interesting suggestions. One was to try to have a lucid dream during day. I do succumb to naps more than I like to admit, but I don't recall having dreams at all during those. Another thing the article said was that lucid dreams were most likely to occur during REM sleep. I think that means the hour or so after you fall asleep and the hour or so before you wake.

Well, this morning I awoke at around 6am and turned off my alarm clock. I fell back to sleep and had a complicated dream involving a hotel filled with people from my past and present--and maybe future, because I didn't recognize all of them. From a window I could see far down into a courtyard, where people from my past were gathering for a party to which I hadn't been invited. I was bitter about this, but not surprised, since I have alienated more or less everyone from my past.

Then a guy showed up wearing a sort of ski hat. I recognized him as the handsome young neighbor of my parents who had moved on years ago. I realized all at once that I was having a lucid dream. I remembered that the article had mentioned certain things you can do in a dream to determine that it is a dream. I believe one of them was to check a clock, another was to look in a mirror. Neither things came to mind during the dream, but I thought I remembered the article suggesting that you ask someone to remove his or her hat. That seems unlikely to me now. But in the dream it seemed logical. The guy seemed very reluctant to remove his hat, but I pressed him. Eventually he took it off and then scampered away.

The next thing I knew I was walking along a street with a man whom I supposedly knew. He was in his 50s or 60s and looked familiar but I can't say who he was. I told him, "This is a dream, you know. You're not really here." He looked perturbed and denied it. I insisted, telling him that he may be conscious right now, but that he didn't really exist. This seemed to frighten him. I decided to prove it to him by climbing to the top of a large metal sculpture and jumping off. He and other faceless people on the periphery seemed impressed. I did it several times. There were tall apartment building around the sculpture and I wanted to go into one, go up to the top, and jump off. Something stopped me, though. Fear, laziness--I'm not sure. But I kept scrambling to the top of that sculpture and jumping off.

Some other less noteworthy things happened in the dream but I won't post them here.

In other news:
It's the day before Thanksgiving. I hope that I get a lot of work done and that no one responds to my emails so that I don't have to do anything in response to their response. What a work ethic I have.

I'm way behind on my NaNoWriMo word count: 33,597, with only 10 days left. Let's see if I can do some math...no, I can't. Okay, let me get out my calculator. Okay, I have 16,403 words left to write. Spread evenly over 10 days, that's...1,641 per day. Okay, so I'm not way behind. It's just that it's so slow. The only thing--well, the only two things that keep me going are 1) I want to feel that I've accomplished something, and 2) I remind myself that no one will read it.

I hope that I will feel less like a sinking ship today.

I feel like

2007-11-20T11:06:00.001-05:00

a ship taking on water.

I think it's sleeting

2007-11-20T08:15:00.000-05:00

Couldn’t wake up this morning. I stayed in in bed listening to sleet. Obviously, I did wake up finally. I’m pretty sure that my cousin called last night to ask me to speak at his mother’s memorial, to which I agreed. She–my cousin’s mother–is not dead yet. But apparently she’s expected to be in a week or so. I can’t imagine what I will say. She took us to the pool when we were little and I liked it? She gave us candy when my mother was the candy police?

My own parents are almost halfway across the country dealing with my sister’s problems. I’m used to them being here to deal with my problems. And I can tell you, the problems have been piling up like dirty snow since they left. I’m going to be shut in by the time they get back, whenever that happens.

I missed another NaNoWriMo day yesterday, so now I’m stuck at 32,563 words, which puts me behind. I was sailing along for a while. Then I smacked into a 50 foot thick stone wall. I don’t want to do anything. I don’t want to go pick up the car from the body shop this morning. I don’t want to do my work-from-home job. I wonder what would happen if I just let it go. Stopped responding to emails, phone calls…how long would it take before my boss figured out there was a problem?

I’ve stopped thinking of myself as an aspiring writer. I’m partly relieved, but mostly sad. The job pays okay but it is unspeakably pointless, in the cyclone-in-Bangladesh scheme of things. Not that I expect to run off and join Oxfam. I don’t even want to do that. I don’t care enough about other people.

What I want is to go back in time and start over. Make myself grow up as a different person, gather up all of the potential I might have had and do something with it. Barring that, I’d like to sneak off to the Caribbean. I’d have to steal money from my spouse, though, and it would be traceable because I don’t know anything about erasing money trails.

So instead, for now, today, I will go off into the sleet–I think it’s stopped now anyway, and pick up the car at the body shop with my husband. We’ll drive back here and I will try to force myself to do my meaningless job. Then I will force myself to work out, do laundry, dishes.

Repeat.