The new neighbor: My year in listicles

My name is Angela Gunn, and I’m your latest guest blogger for Karl’s Summer of Love.

Listicles have ruined journalism, and journalism has ruined me (my good nerve anyway, and my fondness for writing), and so there’s nothing to do but offer you a listicle as my contribution to festivities. I always thought that when Karl got around to making me Empress Of The World, I’d be more… I don’t know, proactive?… with the gig. In this as in so many things, I was wrong.

3 Things I Have Been Wrong About Lately

- I’m still in journalism. I got laid off from two journalism jobs in as many months last year. Sensible people would take that as a hint to find a more honorable and durable line of work — whorehouse piano player, for instance, or diplomatic envoy to North Korea. I was in fact on the verge of slipping out of the old racket and into a new one, but someone had the weird urge to offer me a job writing. Finding it frankly bizarre that anyone anywhere still had journalism jobs to offer, I took it, much as one takes the last piece of pie at Thanksgiving to keep it going to waste, and with much the same bellyache ever since.

- This journalism gig gets sweeter as the days wind down. I’m in a dying industry, and not dying all pretty like Nicole Kidman in Moulin Rouge, either. I was at the big Seattle Zombie Walk last week and I swear the deadest men walking there were the poor humps covering the event for our local papers. I told myself that this last job — because I am sure this is my last journalism job, not only because the industry’s dying but because in journalist-years I am older than God’s babysitter — would be a nice valedictory, a victory lap on a track that’s got just a few more laps for me before it’s too rutted to round. (Be advised, BTW, that this is the only reference to rutting that will appear on Secondhand Tryptophan today. I know, very confusing especially after the previous post, but you are in the right place. I swear it. In fact, let’s just leave it at “I swear,” a fact which I expect to become rather obvious in the following paragraphs.)

- I could get used to suburban life. At some point during the past twelve months, I signed a two-inch-high stack of papers and became the co-owner of the house of someone else’s dreams. (Actually, I know exactly when it was; it was 10 minutes before the HR office at my old job called to tell me I was getting laid off — second of the two jobs of that Summer of Layoff. How’s that for timing? Took the call sitting in front of the escrow office.) The house of someone else’s dreams has a yard and a garage and a Dispos-All and no sidewalks in front of the house. All these things indicate to me that I am not in New York, which makes this definitely The House Of Someone Else’s Dreams, not mine. Any dream house of mine would provide for easy access to eggancheeseonnaroll (breakfast of champions) on the way to the subway (transportation system of champions).

5 Things I Dreaded About Home Ownership

- Yards. Grooming them and weeding out the bad stuff and worrying when they aren’t doing well — yards are like flat, mute children, and I see why Dad always talked about pouring concrete on his. (You parse that sentence your own self; I am not going to help you.)

- Dispos-Alls. I’m aware that many people like the convenience, but if I wanted a sharp-toothed, groaning, stinky maw built into one of the rooms, I’d hire Sam Raimi to do it right.

- Knowing things about sump pumps. Seriously, civilized places have staff for that.

- Becoming my parents. No more fun, no more mobility, and no more travel — even though the goal of buying this house with another person was to free up resources to live elsewhere for a third of the year — somewhere with subways and eggancheeseonnaroll and my hairdresser of 15 years on speed-dial.

- Finding the apartment of my dreams (non-NYC division) right after signing the lease. High ceilings, high windows, a neighborhood with sidewalks. I know it’s out there, just waiting for me to turn my back.

5 Things I Neglected To Dread About Home Ownership

- Knowing enough things about sump pumps. The little fuckers don’t like pine cones, did you know this?

- Finding the apartment of my dreams… and discovering the price would have been extremely affordable on either my old or new salaries. Half a block from my old place, and when I remember who told me that units in that building were “oh, easily a few thousand a month” I’m going to stab that person right in the eye.

- Becoming my grandparents. It took me several months of living in the new place before I realized that the layout and interior styling were almost exactly like my maternal grandparents’ home. That’s fine, but now I’ve thrown myself into working the whole midcentury-design thing, while Head Housemate is still attempting to decorate for the Craftsman-era bungalows that didn’t pan out in our search. This is somehow worse when one party actually knows the difference between midcentury and Craftsman (and won’t pay for crappy design in either), while the other is a fanatical shopper whose approach to home-decorating issues is modeled on Pickett’s charge at Gettyburg — wave after wave after hapless wave, in this case, of poorly thought out late-Deco lamps. And I was dead on with the no-travel thing; I’ve gotten back to NYC once. My hairdresser of 15 years heard the saga and gave me one last cut, then fired me as a customer — “you’re a Seattleite now!” I swear this development was harder on my nerves than either layoff.

- Mortgage brokers. Was previously unaware that there existed a species that extracts its oxygen from bullshit. That’s the only possible explanation for some of these people.

- Other people. And me a good Sartrean in college, too.

7 Things I Didn’t Fully Appreciate About Living Alone Until They Were Gone Forever

- Saturday mornings. Whatever else the week had done to me, there was the beauty of waking up on Saturday to NPR playing and just breathing while the day began. Now it’s more about people shouting to ask IF YOU’RE AWAKE CAN WE TAKE YOU OUT TO BREAKFAST, AND DID YOU MEAN TO BE AWAKE BY NOW, AND DID YOU KNOW YOU FELL ASLEEP WITH THE RADIO ON AGAIN?

- Order. Once upon a time, foodstuffs went in cupboards, dirty clothes went in the basket, mystery liquids in the bathroom were wiped up promptly, and random toys and bits of food that hit the floor were retrieved and deposited in trash receptacles. I thought everyone lived that way. How wrong I was.

- Non-derailed trains of thought. Did I mention my new housemate comes with additional mini-humans? And that apparently children these days don’t ever go outside or play games quietly and are aghast at the idea of not sharing every thought and action with a grownup? AT FULL VOLUME? OR LOUDER IF THE ADULTS ARE TALKING? I have taken to categorizing my days on the Owl Scale; a good day is when all four house denizens have a match to one of the owls in this video, and a bad day is when we have three of the chattering owl in the back and one of me drooping low and occasionally shaking my head.

- The comfort of being sad. Kurt Cobain was right.

- Refrigerator space. Things I eat: Hunks of cheese, hunks of meat, pasta with strange and complicated sauces, Greek-style unflavored yogurt, odd foods I thought I might try. Things Housemate and Mini-Humans eat: Hot dogs, flavored yogurt, things that need cooking, things that are absolutely familiar and in addition have no flavor or spice lest the younger mini-human think he might be having a new culinary experience oh noes!

- Television. I like TV. There, I said it. I don’t tolerate a lot of dreck, but I like The Office and 30 Rock and Iron Chef and MSNBC and Dead Like Me reruns and things with Ian McShane in them, and I reserve my God-given right as an American to fall asleep in front of the TV watching baseball of a summer evening. One housemate finds this almost as peculiar as my habit of reading books; the other two think that if the set’s on I’m just waiting for someone to come ask, over and over and over and over and over, I WANT TO WATCH ON DEMAND. (Yes, that’s the prevailing form of request. The next generation is a foreign country; they do things differently there.)

- The bathtub. I used to love a bath (rather than a shower) once a week or so — gather a book and a big bottle of cool water, fill the tub, soak and read. It had not occurred to me that this was predicated on being able to take an hour without someone demanding that you observe their new videogame skills, or on not always requiring a good 20 minutes beforehand to scrape god-knows-what out of the tub itself.

6 Things I Neglected To Take Into Account About Living With Other People, Particularly Children

- Noise. Seriously, you breeders out there have to get on the ball about evolving future generations to include a volume control.

- General stickiness.

- Impertinent questions. Yes, my dad has been dead a long time. No, I do not know why the guy next door stares like that. Yes, the lady walking along Aurora Avenue in the heels and miniskirt is very friendly. No, I will not give you a quarter. No, I will not give you 50 cents. Yes, I have a mother. No, I don’t know what the funniest Calvin and Hobbes cartoon ever is, though I’ll bet it’s different from the one you said was the funniest Calvin and Hobbes cartoon ever about 15 minutes ago. No, I do not have children.

- Shift in topics of conversation. I was unaware of how much discussion mini-humans engender — planning, analysis of earlier statements, coordination of homework and school projects, debate over whether the younger one understood why the lady in the miniskirt went around the block three times being friendly. Conversely, children that don’t go outside and only socialize on “playdates” requiring slightly greater coordination than the TARP bailouts are, not surprisingly, fairly weak conversationalists, especially if you don’t give a rat’s ass about Pokemon or Transformers or hearing the plot of the show you just watched together recounted in excruciating detail interspersed with the words “AND DID YOU SEE IT WHEN.”

- Other people’s restaurant choices. All-you-can-eat Chinese buffets? Old Spaghetti Factory? I don’t know whether to be more disturbed that I’ve now got go-to dishes at those places, or that I see (especially at the latter) so many very young-but-grown couples eating there as if the entire world of dining wasn’t at their feet. I’m not saying I want to haul my housemates to a four-star restaurant to give them the appetite for it — anyone dining at a place like that when I attempted it would be quite justified in kicking me in the head — but dammit, a person needs higher dining aspirations than “I hope the waitress doesn’t give us a pack of only green crayons for the placemats this time.”

- Pack-rattedness. Head Housemate has a great fondness for thrift-store shopping, both for general household items and for stuff for the mini-humans. Which is great, but after paying the mortgage for a year, I sort of thought all of us would have all our stuff moved in by now. Instead, we’re still awash in boxes, and I wince every time someone asks if we’re enjoying the new house. In two days, a plumber will come here to make a non-emergency repair, after Head Housemate spent two weeks purchasing tools and materials to fix it only to decide it was too great a time sink. When the plumber asks how we like our new neighborhood, I swear I’m not gonna cry. Out loud.

5 Surprisingly Good Things About Living With Other People, Particularly Children

- General cavorting. It’s not all bad. As Karl knows I’m kind of an agoraphobe, leaving my house very rarely, and when I do leave I’m not much for random acts of expressive joy. Housemates are having none of it. Housemates think we should go to the local Zombie Walk and check out the Steampunk Swapmeet. Housemates want to know what I have against camping, and are disturbed when the list is identical to the reasons they enjoy it. Housemates expect grownups to occasionally sing in public. Housemates are happier when everyone’s laughing.

- Renewed attention to whereabouts of ice-cream truck. Mirabile dictu, despite all the screaming, they all have excellent ears, used primarily for locating the whereabouts of their popsicle fix.

- Sensation of being in foreign country, with concomitant sense of perspective. I know a lot about Pokemon’s marketing push but can’t tell the monsters apart; I have a bookcase full of DVDs but have never seen Ice Age or Monster House or any Transformers movie. Their astonishment at this is palpable, and causes me, however briefly, to wonder if I have already begun that steep slide into cultural isolation, where none of the pop-culture references make any sense anymore. (And wait ’til you tell mini-humans that you hate Scooby-Doo.) On the other hand, YouTube has enabled adults of a certain age to end long discursions on Mr. Bill or the Marx Brothers with “…and you can look it up online.” The mini-humans go around the house squeaking OH NOOOOOO! for a few days, but it’s totally worth it.

- Other people cooking. Head Housemate loves to cook, and will without provocation whip up a rack of ribs and a brace of sweet-corn ears. For my part, I sit in my office reading and staying out of the way. It’s a very good system.

- The barking-spider effect. Anything you might be embarrassed to admit to other grownups you like, you blame on the kids. Nintendo Wii with all the trimmings? Pucca in heavy rotation on On Demand? Don’t look at me, pal. And I have no idea how that string cheese got into the fridge, either.

5 Most Disturbing Neighbor Behaviors (in ascending order)

- Baking things. A New Yorker by temperament if not by birth, I like my neighbors of the friendly-and-chatty-but-not-labor-intensive type. A few days after we moved in, we were greeted by not just baked goods, but by an apology for the baked goods being store-bought. I’m ashamed to say I still have no idea what to do about this. Should I have sent over a baked good of my own? Should it have been homemade, since that’s apparently an issue? How long do I have to unpack my pans and cookie sheets in a situation like that? I heard much later that the householder in question is diabetic; should have taken that into consideration had I pulled myself together to do anything at all, which I didn’t? There was an entrance exam for suburban life, and it was written in chocolate chips, and I’m pretty sure I failed.

- Lurking. The home office of the guy next door, a two-story workshop built right on the lot, looks directly into my own office windows. The neighbor himself seems often to be lurking just on the other side of the fence. Doesn’t seem dangerous (calculates the former New Yorker), and he was a peach when the previous owner moved out and left her cats to the mercies of the neighbors and whomever moved in here next (story for another time), but Head Housemate and I agree that something’s a bit… off.

- Being unrecognizable. I have a neurological condition called prosopagnosia (face blindness), which means I don’t recognize the faces of people even if I’ve met them repeatedly. This makes it difficult to recognize my neighbors unless they stay in their yards (so I know where they “belong.”). And trust me, you only need to not-recognize someone at the local grocery store once to get a reputation as a rude and unneighborly asshole. Head Housemate is fortunately quite social; I, on the other hand, am finding it easier to stay the hell indoors, ignoring the doorbell, in my semi-surveilled home office. Remind me again how standalone single-family homes are more private and relaxed than condos?

- Criminal element. Head Housemate, again being social, had made the acquaintance of the other next-door neighbor and his caretaker, so HH was able to recognize the caretaker when we came upon him late one night sabotaging his client’s van. Turns out we’d happened across an interlude in a sustained assault against the neighbor, whom the caretaker had decided was cheating him out of money in conjunction with a second caretaker, whom he also beat up that night. Head Housemate nearly ended up testifying in court over that mess. Turns out the police, when they visit a little neighborhood like ours, stay long and take many reports, hoping some respectable citizen saw something.

- Suicide. But no one ever sees anything, really, do they. No one saw the next-door neighbor with the workshop drag his barbecue grill in the house a few weeks ago and tape himself into the bedroom with it. And no one saw him for a week after that, either, and we didn’t think anything of it until his girlfriend came around and checked to see if he’d picked up his mail lately. And after that we saw a lot of official vehicles, and we smelled some things we didn’t want to smell, and now we have some flowers on his porch and we’re all watching for the neighbor’s ex-wife and brother from California to come deal with the house, after which we expect more realtors, and the new-neighbor cycle will begin again. I suppose this time it’s my turn to bring the baked goods, trying again to make the neighbor thing go right.

4 Moments Of Transcendence Anyway

- Serendipity, pack-rattedness and the perfect couch. It’s early spring, and Head Housemate thinks I need to get outside for the first time in a week, and where better to go than Goodwill for some early-evening thrifting? I doubt this, but can amuse myself meandering around wondering why the hell middle-class Americans buy the crap they do, and how they know when they’re done with the useless crap they’ve bought and need newer crap.

And then there it was — the perfect, spotless, curvy, Googie mid-century couch for my box-filled, underdecorated midcentury house. (I swear on Karl’s life I heard “Some Enchanted Evening” playing when I saw the pretty thing across the crowded room.) And Head Housemate was no one to stand in the way of fate; I got no argument at all, not even when we drove it home balanced on the roof of HH’s Volvo and had to carry the thing in quickly before the rains restarted. Even covered with the blankets necessary to guard it against the mini-humans and the inadvertently adopted cat, it’s still beautiful. (The part where it’s a $1799 couch that cost me $250 doesn’t hurt, frankly.) Without the housemates, I never would have gone to Goodwill, or had a way to haul it home, or had a home to haul it off to, but somehow everyone in the house still agrees that it is “my” couch — though the mini-humans seem to have an endless stream of excuses they should be allowed to fall asleep on it while the grownups talk nearby. I’ve even got one of them learning to like baseball.

- Now and forever, shelves. Head Housemate may be baffled by my insistence that reading is fundamental (to me not killing everyone else in the house), but as a packrat he’s got books, and we thus have shelves everywhere, shelves bolted to walls so they don’t seem tippy, for books I could literally go my entire life rearranging and culling and never putting in moving boxes again.

- Did I mention the cooking? At any moment, an omelette could appear right next to me as I write this. And Head Housemate and I both like our bacon very lightly cooked, and no one has to explain a thing.

- Yard work, when the push mower’s making that snick-snick sound and the roses are all blooming like they owe the neighborhood a show and the old guy across the street, who looks exactly like he did the last time I saw him standing in his yard, is making jokes about me chasing away the rain by rushing to mow the lawn before the storm starts. Go fucking know.

Filed under Guest Post | Comments (6)