Archives for June 2010

Even your emotions have an echo AKA The House, pt. 3

June 4, 2010 by krisis

Last you heard E and I were driving back from the Realtor’s office minutes before midnight on a Wednesday, having just put in a bid on a house on the craziest day of my entire life.

It was all so unreal, the idea that on day two of our leisurely renewed search we might have found our new home. While E was excited, I was my typical logical negative – there was already a bid on the house, and our offer was abrupt and left a scant 48 hour window for response.

Knowing our seller lived in Europe, my body seemed to assume noon would be a reasonable time to hear from them, so it began my Thursday by waking up at 5:30 a.m.

While I was logical negative on the outside, I was all tenterhooks and carbonation on the inside. I was exhausted, and felt like a carcass, but my insides were saying “gogogo.”

So I jogged into work. And when I got there, before the lights in the office turned on, I did a few minutes of situps. Just to defuse the energy.

Another early-rising co-worker found me that way on Friday.

“Peter, is that you? Why are you here so early [walks into my cube] and why for fuck’s sake are you lying in the middle of the floor doing situps?”

I didn’t have a solid explanation for her. While my brain was being a guarded pessimist, my heart was already living in a new house, becoming a new me – ready for a recording studio and a jogging route and all of those either ideal-life things I have been waiting forever for.

E and I were desperately trying not to pester our Realtor – I think we checked in a single time on Thursday, even if we were pestering each other with constant questions and doubts. Without an answer by noon on Friday (7pm in Paris, where the seller might live, I thought) I was beginning to despair.

Oh well, logical negative me mused, it was a great learning process, but I guess the house just wasn’t meant to be.

My phone buzzed at 2:23 p.m. – our Realtor’s number flashing across the screen. I regarded her name coolly, trying not to betray the butterflies, hummingbirds, and other arial creatures buzzing in my stomach and poking at my esophogaus.

I picked up.

“Peter, it’s Lynn.”

As in all crucial moments in my life, seconds turned to epochs. I swear, I do not just write that all of the time for clichés sake – I really do go into Matrix-style bullet time when I’m awaiting a major decision that might alter the course of my life. I could pin a fly to the wall with a thrown push-pin, while in the roiling depths of my ribcage my tiny OCD Godzilla is surely growling the interminable music they play on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire while awaiting the correct answer.

Is that suspenseful enough for you? Do we need a cliffhanger? No? Okay. Approximately three quarters of a second later, she followed with a second sentence.

“You got the house.”

I let out a war whoop and talked through some details before hanging up the phone to call E to share the news. After that the surreality set in – one bank would trade our house to another in a process that had kicked off less than 72hrs before – a timeline so brief that I had literally told only four people face-to-face that we put a bid in!

Naturally, bursting to tell the good news, I turned to Twitter:

We have a house. WE HAVE A HOUSE. omg.

That was four weeks ago today. Two weeks from now we will be completed moved in, repaired, and ready for a weekend of unpacking.

That isn’t quite the end of the house story – I have fun details and perhaps some advice to share about mortgages, inspections, and contractors. However, I think I need to wait for a few checks to clear and papers to be signed before I disclose some of the other bits.

paint chips, forks, and vomitoriums

June 3, 2010 by krisis

The non-extreme portion of Memorial Day weekend found E and I in Home Depot, contemplating paint chips for a redress of our new dining room. Or, rather, E was contemplating paint chips while I idly examined the paper quality and die cuts of the paint brochures.

“What colors do you think the dining room should be?” E queried, fist full of colored slips of high-end paper.

“You know me – everything spartan.”

(I pronounced “spartan” as “spahttan,” a Buffy in-joke about Faith and her seedy apartment.)

While reductive (and an in-joke), as a statement it’s essentially true – the colors I like in a home are white, hardwood, and bricks. That’s it. When pressed for a choice I will always pick the bluest option, unless it’s navy. Oh, and I enjoy stainless steel, where applicable. That’s about the extent of my home decor color preferences.

(Not coincidentally, our wedding colors were sapphire and platinum.)

I continued my careful examination of the paper samples for a moment, at which point E perhaps shot me a look, so I reluctantly joined the color browsing and continued the conversation.

“Well, the wood in that room is pretty blond, so there’s that to keep in mind. Not everything goes with that. You don’t want to pick something that would turn it into a vomitorium.”

Pointedly ignoring my last statement, E produced a deep purple chip. “What about this?”

“No, that would make me vomit.” Here the older couple standing next to us at the paint display began to eye me with caution.

“Can you possibly describe the qualities a color could have that would make you vomit?”

“Well, really there’s two different facets of vomitous colors.”

Having long since grown familiar with my peculiar brand of insanity, E braced for impact.

“First, there’s context. Like, when I was a teenager my mom had our back bedroom refinished for me, and I picked this seafoam-ish green for the walls. It had context – it was part of a palette with the ceiling, the hardwoods, and my area rug. But when you live in a room you’re not always seeing the entire palette, or looking at the walls in the context of the rug. Sometimes you are just staring at the wall and you realize it’s not ‘seafoam’ so much as ‘mint,’ like mint chocolate chip ice cream and, while it made for a beautiful palette, it’s not necessarily the most pleasant-to-look-at color all on its own, but now you’re surrounded by mint chocolate chip ice cream for the next three years.

“Suddenly my room had become a vomitorium.”

At this point the older couple, who had skirted me widely to continue to browse the paint colors, put down their samples and moved to a different display.

I continued. “Then, there are colors that are pretty in the short term but will be vomitous over a longer period of time. Like, see this ‘eggplant’ chip? I love this color. But I can tell it’s like ‘fork.'”

E perhaps thought she had reached an absolute apex of exasperation during my first monologue. However, here she seemed to discover a heretofore unknown height.

“Like a fork?” She said this with a slight steeliness to her voice, like she might abandon me here in Home Depot if I wasn’t the one with the GPS phone. However, I was wound up and could not be stopped.

“No, like ‘fork.’ Like, ‘fork’ makes sense. It’s a tidy little word – four prongs, four letters. But ‘fork’ is one of those words that can get weird. Like, if you say it too many times? Fork. Fork. Fork. Fork. Fork. After a while it begins to sound made up. Fork. Fork. Fork. Fork. It doesn’t seem like it could possibly have any meaning. Fork. Fork. Fork. Eventually it starts getting uncomfortable in your mouth. Fork. Fork. Why does it have to sound so quacky? Fork. That ‘k,’ it’s so unwieldy, it kind of unsettles your stomach. It kind of (fork) makes you (fork) nauseous (fork) to even say (fork) the (fork) word (fork).

“After a while,” I intoned, gravely, “you feel like you will vomit if you even see one, let alone say the word.”

“The word for…”

“No,” I interrupted, “please, don’t say it. I’ve already said it too much.”

We stood in silence at the paint display, E staring at me in glassy disbelief.

“You see, ‘eggplant’ as a color is just like f… just like that word. As a paint chip it’s lovely. In a web palette I adore it. On a wall … every day? Eventually it’s just going to wear me down. It will turn that room into a vomitorium.”

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

“I know exactly what it means, honey. It means a room that would make me vomit whenever I walked into it.”

That was pretty much the end of our browsing for paint chips.

(PS: This post is dedicated to my dear friend, SLska. Or, I should say, Master SLska.)

Seeing Both Sides of Salt

June 2, 2010 by krisis

This weekend the New York Times ran a fascinating, lengthy article, “The Hard Sell On Salt.”

The upshot of the article was that New York City and the Institute of Medicine have come out to urge food manufacturers to tone down salt content in their foods, and that this is a battle that has already been lost repeatedly in the past thirty years thanks to deft lobbying efforts from the food industry.

I’ve seen a lot of social media commentary on the article that pulls this quote:

“If all of a sudden people would demand lower salt because low salt makes them look younger, this problem would be solved overnight,” [Dr. Howard Moskowitz] said.

It’s a great soundbite, comparing the lack of enthusiasm for salt-slashing to the embraced push for lower sugar and fat.

However, the salient point that’s unspoken by the soundbit is that companies embraced the idea of lowering sugar and fat because they had a niche demand as well as alternatives that could maintain the taste and texture of their products.

Not only does low-salt lack demand, and not only does salt drive taste – it turns out salt is more than just taste. It’s texture. Witness the consistency changes when some of Kellogg’s key brands are prepared sans salt:

As a demonstration, Kellogg prepared some of its biggest sellers with most of the salt removed. The Cheez-It fell apart in surprising ways. The golden yellow hue faded. The crackers became sticky when chewed, and the mash packed onto the teeth. The taste was not merely bland but medicinal.

“I really get the bitter on that,” the company’s spokeswoman, J. Adaire Putnam, said with a wince as she watched Mr. Kepplinger struggle to swallow.

They moved on to Corn Flakes. Without salt the cereal tasted metallic. The Eggo waffles evoked stale straw. The butter flavor in the Keebler Light Buttery Crackers, which have no actual butter, simply disappeared.

Was this an elaborate smoke & mirrors demonstration for the benefit of the journalist? Partially. It’s also an example of how our nation’s bad nutrition habits are completely entrenched in our favorite brands.

Will anyone eat no-sugar, no-fat, no-salt Cheez-Its? Maybe the former two, but the Cheez-It is all about salt, and we love it that way.

The undeniable truth is that the majority of America’s culturally-reinforced consumer diet for everything – soups, crackers, cookies, and lunch meats – is built on a giant pile of salt.

Extreme Best Memorial Day Weekend Ever Extreme Recap

June 1, 2010 by krisis

As it turns out, jumping out of a plane seems a lot more insane the second time.

That was the thought going through my head on Sunday morning around 9:30 a.m. as our tiny, 12-person plane ascended into a cloudless blue sky, prepared to dump Arcati Crisis and some of our core of friends out of its side.

The first time skydiving was a purely a concept – mysterious in its execution. This time the open door of the plane winked at me conspiratorially as I sat two inches from its maw. I was going to exit that door into nothing.

Why was I doing this again?

In fact, skydiving was not the most insane aspect of our extreme band weekend. That title is easily awarded to our tubing experience.

Or, really, the experience of trying to depart our tubing experience without being murdered, dragged to death behind a car, dying of exposure, or starting a forest fire.