50 posts tagged “qotd”

How many houses have you lived in? How is where you live now different from where you grew up?

A lot.  A lot lot lot.  Which is why I am now going to write a novel about it.

1. I came home from the hospital to a little house in Bethany, Oklahoma, where the streets were and still are dirt.
2. When I was a year old, we moved to another tiny house on Polk Street in my "hometown" of Hugoton.
3. A year later we moved to a big old house on 10th Street, which had been cut into two apartments at some point.  Because I wasn't in school yet, I stayed home with my mother and my grandad, while they remodeled it back into a single house.  I remember quite vividly the day after they built an interior staircase, and I stood at the open doorway to what had been the exterior staircase, watching them rip the stairs off the side of the house.  Can you guess where I got my home remodeling urge?  At age three, my main toys were various sized nails and screws, a hammer and pliers, and some scraps of wood.
4. I'm going to count my grandparents' house, too, over on Harrison, just two blocks from the train tracks and the grain elevators.  It was my real childhood home, where I was always a child, spoiled and doted on.
   
5. After my parents got married, they decided to build a new house, but in the interim, we moved to a house on Trindle, which was much smaller than the 10th Street house.
6. Then the landlord on Trindle sold the house and we had to move again, because the new house wasn't finished yet.  We moved to the horrid little Blue House, where everything was blue.  The carpet, the paint, the kitchen, the bathroom, everything.  Also, it was only two bedrooms, and with seven of us, it was like hell on earth.  On top of each other all the time.  Also, the air conditioner didn't work for shit.  Also, the hot water heater didn't work at all.  Also, you couldn't run the drier and anything else at once.  Also, did I mention that everything was blue?  I hate blue.  That house was so bad I would have been ashamed to invite my friends over, if I'd had any friends.
7. At last, the new house was done.  Mom's new house.  It would never be our new house, because Mom had designed it and picked out everything in it.  All the carpet was the same, all the furniture the same, so that all the bedrooms looked the same.  It was like living in a motel.  Salmon carpet, ivory walls, and freaky faux-Danish furniture.  Oh, except in the kitchen where the floor was tiled in brown and the counter tops were orange.  Fucking 80's.
8. Then I left for college and lived in a dorm room for a while, which I don't really count.  My junior year, I moved in with Allen, my football buddy, and two architecture types: Ken and Jen from Colorado.  It was the first time in my entire life that I had my own room.  At 19, my first room.  It was about 9 x 10, with a sloping ceiling in the attic.  I had enough room for a twin bed, a small dresser and a milk crate for a night stand.  It was lovely.
9. After two years of that, I moved into my very own apartment: part of a huge Victorian, where my bedroom was the formal dining room, complete with chandelier, and my bathroom was the butler's pantry.  That's where I also had the cat ghost.
10. I made the mistake many college co-eds make.  I agreed to move in with my boyfriend.  He picked the house and it was a dump.  I'd moved out in about six months, and so I only count it as representative of why you should never trust someone else to pick out your living space.  It was located in the flood plain of the '51 flood and it flooded.  We didn't get water in the house, but we got it right up to the underside of the floor boards.  Mosquito central, nasty filthy place, and then we got a dog--which boyfriend also picked out without any consideration for my opinion.  Spastic little dog.  Nice enough, but never destined to be my dog.  Then, my cat got shot by some hillbilly neighbor.  I was done.
11. After that, I moved into one of my favorite homes: an apartment in the old Wareham Hotel.  Elevator.  Restaurant and bar downstairs.  Swank.  Soundproof.  Beautifully tiled old bathroom, walk in closet.  My own.  Pigeons walking by on the window sills outside.
12. Then I got a job in Japan and moved into a traditional Japanese apartment in Nakazawa, upstairs from the Quickie Mart and just down the hill from a massive Shinto shrine.  Tiny bathroom.  Tiny kitchen.  Two lovely 6-tatami rooms that opened out on a balcony that overlooked a few thousand acres of rice and the Honshu mountains.  I had tree frogs and mud swallows and a stray cat. 
    
13. I made another mistake.  I moved in with my sister and remodeled an apartment in a house I didn't own.  A story better not dramatized.  Another lovely living space, but one I had to leave when my sister got remarried and sold the house.  Au revoir.
14. I followed that with a dinky little subsidized apartment in a brick WW2 era complex.  Subsidized because I was making about $18K a year working for Planned Parenthood.
15. After two years there, I got married and moved to Florida, where Hubbicula and I resided in a craptastic apartment in a craptastic complex for about a year. 
    
16. During which year, I did mountains of research to figure out where to buy a house.  I drove endlessly through neighborhoods and researched property values and sales trends, and we looked at five houses.  House #5 was perfect, except that it didn't have a garage.  It was a lovely little Arts and Crafts Bungalow in a suspect neighborhood a block from the interstate.  Still, it was perfect, with oak floors, original tiled kitchen counter tops and ten-foot ceilings.  And thousands of little lizards living in my yard, sneaking up my walls, sleeping in my potted plants.  Loved that house.  Almost nothing to remodel in it, except for the urgent need to paint over every room in the house.  Pepto-bismal pink in the living and dining rooms.  Dining room had exquisite paneled walls with a plate rail and a lovely chandelier.  Hideous other colors throughout.  No remodeling until the end, when we got ready to sell it, then we redid the front porch and I redid the kitchen ceiling.
17. That brought us back to Kansas, where we spent two months living with my parents.  It was...okay.  Hubbicula might have other things to say about it, but living in the suburbs was never our plan.
18. So we bought the house we have now.  The tiny, adorable little limestone gnome cottage.  The house of the charming screened porch and the leaking basement.  I have mixed feelings about this house.  I'd probably love it if it weren't the size of a postage stamp.  Oh, and if I didn't wake up on rainy nights and panic. 
    

I believe that's an adequate survey of my various homes, and I'm frankly shocked to discover that I've lived in 18 different houses.  No wonder I'm tired of moving.

What's different about my home now and my childhood home?  Well, not a lot.  It's in Kansas, surrounded by Kansans.  It's a lot bigger town than my hometown.  90,000 people vs. 3,000 people.  It's humid here, but not brutally windy.  We've got eight movie screens instead of one.  We've got squirrels and cottontail rabbits instead of coyotes and jackrabbits.  I don't know everyone yet and I'm related to almost no one.  Still, it's Kansas.  I've got that going for me, which is nice.

What is your deepest, darkest fear?
Submitted by [Susan].

Being friendless, brainless, helpless, hopeless, and unemployed in Greenland!

Are you celebrating Cinco de Mayo?

This is something that always amuses and confounds me about America.  We're the descendants of a bunch of Quakers and Puritans and the like, but we will take any excuse for a drink.  We have this convenient excuse that we call "Melting Pot."  Oh, we say, there are so many cultures in America that we have to expect that we'll adopt a bunch of different holidays.

Yeah, only all we seem to adopt are holidays that allow us to drink copiously.  St. Patrick's Day?  We're on board.  Oktoberfest?  Bring on the pilsner.  Cinco de Mayo?  Mix up some margaritas.  Mardi Gras?  Laissez les bons temps rouler and show us your tits.

This is why I think various religious and ethnic groups need to think really carefully before they start promoting their own holidays in America.  Next thing you know, everybody's celebrating the Prophet's birthday with liquor.  Hell, I'm surprised we haven't co-opted Chanukah and turned it into an eight-day drinking game. 

So, I don't think I will celebrate Cinco de Mayo, but that's only because I don't like Mexican beer or tequila.  Now, give me a nice Belgian holiday and I'm on it.

What was the last great epiphany that you had?
Submitted by Ross.

When I was a kid, my dad had a game he liked to play, called "Psychedelic Light Show."  This involved coming into the bedroom my sisters and I shared at some dark hour of the morning and rapidly flicking the lights on and off, while crowing, "Psychedelic Light Show."  There are worse ways to be woken out one's adolescent torpor, but PLS is still pretty high on that list.  It wouldn't surprise me if they do that at Guantanamo.

The point of this little journey into the past is to lament the nature of my "great epiphanies."  Tragically, my moments of epiphany all seem to follow the same cycle.

1. Epiphany.
2. Several hours of delighted declaration of epiphany.
3. A few days to a couple weeks of actively incorporating epiphany into attitude/behavior/world view.
4. Rapidly fading understanding of why epiphany seemed so damned important a week ago.
5. Distant memory of something that seemed life-altering, but turned out not to be.
6. Repeat 6-12 months later.

Maybe that's the nature of epiphanies--fleeting and intangible, but I always feel like someone is flashing the lights inside my brain on and off.

How do you think having siblings (or not having siblings) affects who you are as a person?

I have six sisters.  Try that idea on for size.  I was the youngest of three, so there are no baby books, no bronzed booties, no meticulous record of my childhood bowel movements.  Mom was just too tired by then, plus most of my first two years were taken up with getting a divorce.  Apparently there's something about screaming, red-haired babies that'll really destroy a marriage.

When I was six, Mom married my dad, who had two daughters from his previous marriage.  They were conveniently located on either side of me--one a year older, one a year younger.

Then, when I was ten, my biological father decided he needed to breed again and produced a pair of identical twins with the help of my fragile, fun, but later diagnosed as schizophrenic step-mother.

At various points over the next six years, I lived with a rotating menagerie of sisters, including even my half-sisters when my father went to prison and his wife went crazy. 

So, what does all that mean? 

One of the first things you learn when you're one of seven: it's not all about you and it never will be.  The odds of you being anyone's favorite are slim and none.  (But thanks for trying, Gran June.) 

You learn to wait for a little silence before you speak.  Since it never comes, you learn to scream.  Since everyone is screaming, you learn to hoard your thoughts. 

You learn that to really get anyone's attention, you can't just be loud or flamboyant, you have to be truly alarming.  You learn that getting someone's attention isn't worth being a fuck up.

You learn that the only important things are the ones you make important to yourself.  You learn to value other people's things, because maybe they'll be yours eventually.

You learn from other people's mistakes and regrets.  You learn to be responsible for your life, because everyone else is busy being responsible for theirs or somebody else's.  Not yours.

You learn.  You have to, mostly by observation.  That way you don't have to wait for anyone to explain it to you.

Or at least that's what I keep telling myself...ten rejections down, I'm ready to send my eleventh query for the fantasy novel.  I'm giving myself until March 11th to get it ready.  After all, that's when Mercury goes out of retrograde....  Now that I've broken my rejection streak on the short story front, I'm declaring this my new theme song.

Charmed Life

Mick Jagger

You hire a hooker, and for fun invite a friend of yours along.  You're a nice guy, so you let your friend go first, but when it's your turn, you accidentally kill the hooker.  Totally.  An.  Accident.  So, you and your friend wrap her in the shower curtain and put her in the trunk of your friend's car.  Drive her out to the woods to dump her.  When you get there, you realize there's some blood in the trunk of your friend's car.  You paid for the hooker, but who pays to have the trunk carpet steam cleaned?

How did you celebrate Valentine's Day?
Submitted by Stephen.

For a photojournalism internship widow I had a pretty pleasant V-Day.  I talked for a few minutes on the phone with Hubbicula.  In the afternoon I spent several quality hours with The Internet.  I spent some portions of the afternoon guiding flower delivery guys to people's offices and dodging well-meaning gifts of chocolates I won't eat.  Later in the evening I had dinner with Desmond.  Pizza with green olives and spinach.  Not like you're even reading this now.  You're just staring at that picture.  Fine, I'll leave you two alone now.

Valentines_date

1 comment

Who or what do you really love?

You already know how much I love Hubbicula, so today I want to talk about another great love of my life: the internet.

Hit_play

Some of you young folks will hardly remember life without the intrawebs, but as someone who started college in 1987, when the internet was nothing but a gleam in Al Gore's* eye, it still feels pretty darned revolutionary.  In 1987, K-State had an intranet that allowed students to access files on the university's network, play rudimentary role playing games together and exchange e-mails and instant messages with other students.  It was so new that back in those days, most people's e-mail addresses were just their first names@ksu.  

Even back then, you could see the dangers of the internet: people sitting in the same computer lab, messaging each other for hours, instead of walking across the room and talking face to face.  It was the dorkgasm of it all.  It was new, exciting, a little scary, and sexy.  Even by 1993 when I got my first AOL account, things were still new enough, innocent enough that you could chat fearlessly with total strangers.

Despite the ick factor of some elements of the internet, it is still one of the most amazing things I've ever experienced.  I'm naturally a hermit, and in my real life I have about 5 close friends.  That's it.  Five people I could call if I ever desperately needed help or needed someone to talk to or just felt like shooting the breeze.  The internet has introduced me to dozens of other people I now think of as my friends.  I've even met some of them in person.

Love_this_photo

It used to be, if you were lying in bed and couldn't think of that actor who was on that show with that other actor, you were just going to lie there and wonder.  Three days later in the middle of a staff meeting you'd blurt out, "Phillip Michael Thomas!"  With the internet, you can just get out of bed, turn on the computer, Google Miami Vice, and go back to bed.

You can learn all kinds of random information, access libraries' databases of knowledge, see art and hear music you would otherwise miss.  Plus, the weird.  I love the weird and the internet has a steady supply.  Spucko compares Leslie and the Lys to Laurie Anderson, and after watching some of Leslie's videos I couldn't help but remember back in college having tickets to Laurie Anderson and being so sick I couldn't get out of bed.  Instead my jerky ex-friend Fat Andy went to the show with Spucko.  Cheated.  It was four years before I finally got to see Laurie Anderson.  Sure, live is wonderful, but the internet allows you to access weirdness that takes place far away and only rarely.

In short, Internet, what I'm trying to say is that I...I love you, man.  Be my valentine.

*I kid.  Poor Al Gore.  He really was instrumental in getting the funding that ultimately led to the internet's availability, but the media sure skewered him with that lie.

Do you think real love can last throughout any distance, or will long distance end most relationships? 
Submitted by Miss Joy.

The answer to both of these is yes.
Yes, real love can survive a long distance relationship.
Yes, long distance will end most relationships.

Hell, living together will end most relationships.  Our national divorce rate hovers somewhere around 60%.  And those are the folks who manage to make it to marriage without breaking up.

The differential between the two yesses is all about the nature of the relationship.   If it's based on convenience, long distance will probably kill it, because there's not much convenience in living 200, 700, 3,000 miles apart.  If it's based on sex, long distance will probably kill it, because phone sex can only do so much.  Basically, if the relationship isn't based on a deep personal connection that goes beyond your basic "he's kind of cute and I like the way he takes me out to dinner and holds the door and the sex is pretty good and most of the time I like being around him," long distance will probably doom it. 

Look at the military to see how badly long distance can rough up a relationship. Young couple likes each other, but after six months apart, whoever is left at home starts thinking, "I really wish I had someone to spend time with."  It's a killer.

Now, Hubbicula and I on the other hand are a pretty good exemplar of the kind of relationships that survive long distance.  We never really dated.  We were pen pals, and I think we were pen pals for close to a year before we ever met.  After that, we went on being pen pals for another two years, while he was stationed with the Marines in Okinawa.  We had a week or two together in those two years and then...we got married.

At the time, I think we thought it made sense, because at least if we were married, the Marine Corps would have a certain degree of obligation to keep us together.  Wrong.  The first five years after we got married, we spent approximately 22 months together.  That's right, we spent about 38 months apart in the first five years of marriage.  Sometimes he was only a few hundred miles away--sitting in a field in Florida, or lurking around in Washington, D.C.  At other times he was in Egypt or Kuwait or Qatar or Classifiedistan.    Sometimes I didn't know where he was and once the Marine Corps lost him, and I spent a week calling around various military offices saying, "Where's my husband?"

There were plenty of times in those 38 months that I had a sort of desperate longing for someone else to get up in the middle of the night and figure out what that noise was.  I cursed him when I had to refinance the house by myself.  I relied upon the kindness of gay neighbors to mow my lawn.  I went to movies by myself.  I ate alone a lot.  The one thing I never did was think, "I need to get a new man."  Because at the bottom line, I was always happy to get an e-mail or a phone call or a letter from him.  (The letters were how he won me over in the first place.)  Even when I had to go a week or two without any of those things, I was still always thinking about him, because he's my husband.  He's real family of the kind that you get to choose.  I'm always going to wake up and think, "I wonder what that crazy Jedi weasel is doing?" 

So, the same thing applies now that he's gone to Utah for a year.  As long as I regularly get a letter or e-mail or phone call, our relationship is solid, because I'm still just interested in him: what he's doing, what he's thinking, what he's reading.  The things that go on in his head are more important than sitting next to him on the sofa watching Lost tonight.