Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

house

paint chips, forks, and vomitoriums

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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.

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

There was something so pleasant about that place AKA The House, pt. 2

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Where I last left our intrepid first-time home-buying heroes (i.e., E and I) we went on a financial fact-finding outing that unexpectedly also found a house that met all of our requirements.

That was two Tuesdays ago.

On Wednesday morning our Realtor checked in with us to share some newly-acquired intelligence – the house was being shown frequently (even within her office), and had received an offer while we were looking at it! Did we want to submit a competing bid?

Being the logical-negative (AKA defeatist) person I am in situations involving tens of thousands of dollars, I had talked myself out of it in a matter of minutes. I sent E a series of emails deflating her hopes and lamenting that it just wasn’t meant to be. Too soon, too competitive.

Being the logical-positive person I married, she pushed back – if it wasn’t meant to be, would it have been so oddly perfect for us, with its new fireplace and kitchen of butcher block and stainless steel? Did it matter that there was another bid on the table?

Her bottom line: there was certainly no harm in putting in a competing bid, as long as we were comfortable with it. But were we really going to make an offer having seen the house only once?

(Meanwhile, I was having an intense conversation with Drew via text message and one of my most beloved co-workers unexpectedly gave her two week notice. Between that and the house decision, by 1pm the day had reached a three-ring circus level of crazy.)

I had such a huge list of house-buying best practices I planned to execute – staking out the house for an entire day to observe the neighborhood, interviewing all of the neighbors, creating a photo & video walkthrough to show friends, measuring each room for potential mapping, singing and playing guitar throughout the house…

All of you home-owners out there are probably having a chuckle at my expense, but my internal Godzilla runs 24/7 on a proverbial OCD hamster wheel to generate these levels of obsessive-compulsiveness. Despite the implied rush from the frequent showings and competing bid, I couldn’t entirely quell my giant, imaginary, bipedal lizard without engaging in at least a portion of his proscribed OCD investigations.

Since the idea of all of that was crazy and the day was crazy (and, frankly, I’m crazy enough for the both of us), we decided to put the house to the insanity test – cramming as many of my Godzilla metrics into three hours as possible.

It was with that mission that we returned to the house 24 hours after our initial visit, armed with a camera, flip cams, tape measures, graph paper, my electric guitar, and Gina’s overpoweringly loud Fender guitar amp.

We knocked on every neighbor’s door and chatted up anyone we could find. We measured, photographed, and videoed every room. I sat in the attic with Gina’s amp on 8 – so loud I could barely bear to play it, while E walked down the stairs and out of the house.

Her report? Mild amp sounds in the living room, but outside you couldn’t hear a thing.

We made up our minds – a bid was going in.

What followed was exciting, but not in a recapituable way – three hours of amortization schedules, drawing on whiteboards, and eating Twizzlers – resulting in putting in our first offer on our first potential home.

The excitement did not end there, but my ability to sleep through the night did. More on that in the next post.

living in stockholm

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I just packed my first box! And packing will always be inextricably connected to blogging for me.

There is so much more to say about the house we might be moving into in 30 days, but this post isn’t the sequel to the last one (sorry, Erika, I know you are dying in anticipation).

I’m trying not to be enthusiastic or emotional about the house, because it’s not a done deal until we sign the final papers. We have friends whose house was almost scuttled at settlement because the sellers suddenly couldn’t bear to part with it!

(BTW, sellers, in case you are Googling me for bargaining leverage (which I totally already did for you; how did you like living in Clearwater?), know the same caveat goes for you. I am an emotionally unstable, stubborn, only child with a tiny OCD Godzilla tramping around in the depths of my abdomen. Don’t underestimate my pertinacious self-spite. If you are the slightest bit squirrelly in bargaining I might seriously convince myself I don’t want your house just because of that one wall plate that’s crooked.)

What I am allowing myself to be quite enamored with is the idea of not living here, because even if we don’t buy this particular house, now we know we can buy a house. Any house. We have the money and the know how, and I make mortgage people sweat when I open up my laptop and tell them their “revised” offer actually costs more and that they ought to try again.

(That was pretty awesome, actually.)

Here is hellish. It wasn’t when we got here. It was pleasant. A sunny, mostly-quiet block with the occasional midnight drug deals at the corner that mostly kept to themselves with their impossibly small plastic baggies whose ziplocks are bigger than the bags themselves

Now, not so much. Ever since the hate crime we walk briskly, park out of sight, and regard everyone with cool suspicion.

Things we used to complain about now go uncomplained. I remember when we used to shoo people off of our stoop, or call the police for screaming fights in the middle of the street.

Ever since being vandalized, nothing seems to phase us. It’s not fear, so much as feeling completely apart from a community that could sit around and drink beer while someone shoveled cat shit through our mail-slot.

It’s their home, so if the consensus is in favor of their behavior why bother caring? Tiny barking dogs that live permanently in the yard? Awesome. Blasting wall-shaking music from a car in front of our door at midnight? Go right ahead. Using the sidewalk next door as your wood shop, complete with a table saw? Totally normal.

When we walk into the new house, or any other house we’ve looked at, we always get to a point where E and I share a glance that says, “This is normalcy.” No sidewalk shop calls. A car blasting music would be a front yard away from our door instead of on top of it, and the neighbors would call the police on it in a second.

It’s like we’re waking slowly from sleep to come to our senses.

Last night, when some unidentified figure hurled a bottle at my neighbor’s grandmother as she got out of a car, I allowed myself to be phased. Other neighbors were just standing around. I called 911 and said, “Someone is assaulting an older woman on our block. You need to send several patrol cars.” And then I stood in my doorway and stared down everyone on the street until they all tucked themselves back behind their doors and window shades, stared until the cops had come and questioned and gone.

I stared at the empty street and realized that it went from being home because I felt at home to being home because other people felt at home.

I don’t know about you and the stage of your life you’re currently gaining hindsight on, but it feels like that’s been the story of my recent exisistence – assimilating other people’s annoying, unkind whims just so I can say that life is comfortable.

Well, if I can stare down a mortgage agent in his own office until he lowers my rate, I can sure as hell feel at home in my own home – especially if it’s just for thirty more days.

I remember when I lost my mind AKA The House, pt. 1

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Things in my life are crazy and exploding in tiny multi-color fireworks across the backs of my eyeballs, making it hard to focus completely on anything directly in my field of vision.

Due to said lack of focus, I’ll just go in medias res here: we bought a house.

Well, it’s not officially bought. It’s bid for and inspected and on the verge of being paid for by a bank that we will in turn pay for the privilege of living in it, if it is turned over to us in livable condition.

Now that I have you hooked, allow me to flash back to last week.

Last week was the busiest, craziest week of my life, culminating in the most balls-out insane fuckery day of my life, ever. And to appreciate the insanity of our home-buying experience, you have to appreciate the week that began it.

It all began two weeks ago on Thursday, April 29. That day I went to work, went to a goodbye party for a coworker, attended a Social Media Club of Philly event, dined with Cecily and Anniemal, rolled home around midnight to sleep, shot a social video project for work, drove to Atlantic City to see Paramore (always AWESOME), drove back to Philly, kinda slept, attended MarketingCamp (during which I unexpectedly presented a session), warmed up, played a three-hour long gig with Arcati Crisis and Filmstar where we each essentially played our entire repertoires, kinda slept, was at the finish line for the Blue Cross Broad Street Run at 7:30am taking photos and tweeting, and pretty much did run-related stuff for the next 36hrs less a few bits of sleep here and there.

I finally got a decent night of sleep, and Tuesday when I got to work I was like, “Back to sanity. I love sanity!” However, we all know that is a lie. I do not love sanity. I don’t even kinda like it. I like bugfuck craziness and constant deadlines. Hello, it’s called Crushing KRISIS. There’s a reason I like the word – because I function best when I am a hot mess with unrealistically lofty goals and no sleep.

That night E and I were scheduled to look at two houses. We had no intentions of buying either. It was an academic exercise – we did an 80/20 on the range of our potential house spend and were seeing two homes priced around those landmarks to figure out if we had enough liquid cash amassed to buy a home.

The first house was the 20%. Cute, backed up to a state park, and needed a wall knocked out of its kitchen. Rooms were a little too reflective for music. An educational look at what 20% of our buying range would get us.

The second house was the 80%. Single, Tudor, blue outside – all things I enjoy about a house. Hardwood floors, I like that. Shaded side patio, very cute. At that point it was still an educational excursion. Then we saw the kitchen, with its brand new everything and pocket-door powder room and permanent wall mounted a/v system and I was like, Hmm, this visit may not be solely for educational purposes.

And, oh lordy, it was not for educational purposes. Imagine that being a first-time home-buyer is like being a virgin, so our excursion was really like learning about sex, with no intent of having it anytime soon. Working from there, if the first house was like learning about sex in 8th grade from your gym teacher in Health class, this house was like learning about sex in 8th grade by visiting a brothel with a pocket full of hundred dollar bills.

Basically, I am saying the house jumped our bones and quickly deflowered us. It had every single thing we said we wanted in a house. Like, even unusual things like radiator heat for E and her sensitive vocal cords and central a/c for me and my first world aversion to temperatures higher than 80 degrees. Oh, and speakers installed IN THE CEILING of the room that would be my recording studio.

We went home Tuesday night, reeling. Were we just enthused to be re-embarking on the home purchasing adventure, or was this the right house for us?

That was how we arrived at the apex of the most insane week of my life – the single most ridiculously intense, entirely unexpected day of my life

And this post is already too long, so let’s add a cliffhanger to my in medias res.

Living Marginally

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As I’ve alluded to in recent posts, an interesting confluence of events has lead Elise and I to begin searching for our first house a full six months before we intended to undertake such a project.

As we both combed through our finances in anticipation of applying for pre-approval for a mortgage, a certain fact about the two of us became abundantly clear: we are living marginally.

That’s not the same as “living on the margins,” a phrase you might use to describe the forgotten Americans our politicians are currently busy vying over. We are hardly teetering the precipice of hopelessness and debt. Thank goodness.

Instead, what I mean to say is that our lives just don’t cost very much to live, and by extension we have assets but not much equity.

The cost of being us is marginal. We began our adult lives by leaving college with a manageable amount of personal debt. We haven’t owned a car in years, and don’t own our own home. We don’t have any children or pets, or other family members to support. We consume uncomplicated food, and not much of it. We have a finite collection of housewares and consumer electronics that we don’t frequently expand. I quite adamantly dislike vacations, and neither of us participate in a particularly costly hobby or habit aside from music, which is at times a second career.

Essentially, in any given month after rent, food, utilities, and student loans we’re in the clear.

If it sounds like a charmed existence, well, it is. We’re living risk-free. But, that comes with a downside that’s subtly dangerous: we’re naive about how much life costs, and we’re reticent to find out. We have no concept of car insurance or property taxes, or even of paying for parking or needing a lawnmower, and it would be easy to stay this way

Yet, we can’t stay this way if we want to become upwardly mobile adults. No risk, no reward.

Therein lies the thin line between living marginally and living in the margins. You must make the leap into adulthood just right or else you become a forgotten American. You wind up making an effort to make ends meet, and tying up your entire livelihood in the upkeep one major asset – your home – living in fear that its value might drop out from under you. And if the bottom falls out from under your life you don’t just become forgotten – you disappear completely.

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We had to be cajoled into applying for our pre-approval, because we assumed we would be laughed out of the realitor’s office. We read the news – we knew about how bottom fell out of the mortgage industry, taking thousands of forgotten Americans with it. We didn’t think we had a hope.

Well, owing to living marginally, we did; though we don’t have any equity, we don’t have any bad credit either. In the mind of a reeling industry we still represent a good risk – a possible reward.

For a few weeks the potential mortgage check in my pocket made me feel immune to any financial woes. But, now that the euphoria has worn off the sticker shock is settling in.

Can we afford the homeowner’s life? Are we equipped to go from marginal to mobile without falling into the margins?

While I don’t think we will become invisible or disappear completely, both outcomes now loom tangibly, if remotely, over our house hunting. I’ve been invisible before, when I was a child visiting the corner store with a fist full of food stamps. The prospect of returning there – no matter how incredibly remote and unlikely, sets my stomach to roiling.

Life without risk may not be rewarding, but at least it’s comfortable.