An expatriate in my own land
Day One: Gray is the new pink
Your Disney Experience begins long before you arrive. You are supposed to pre-select the color of your wristband, which you will use as a room key, admissions ticket and credit card. It probably records biometric data.
If you don’t log into the app before you arrive to select a color, you get the gray band of shame. I am going to play it off like I chose gray because it goes with everything. It’s a sophisticated neutral.
Continue reading “My Disney diary”
Originally published in 2012.
The best laid plans can go astray in the run-up to Christmas and you may find yourself having to buy a last-minute gift, as I did yesterday.
In the weeks leading up to holiday I have felt that I have been engaged in a kind of stress challenge, a triathlon for moms that measures thoughtfulness, organization and endurance.
Radio 4’s “Woman’s Hour” recently had guests Allison Pearson, author of I Don’t Know How She Does It, and journalist Deborah Orr on to debate the extent to which an Asda supermarket commercial was celebrating reality or perpetuating gender stereotypes and whether or not Christmas is a mother’s realm, her undoing, or her finest hour.
It hits a nerve, right?
In an anthropological aside, an American ad would never end with giving the mom a glass of wine. Instead mom gets external validation, male approval or female envy, a sticky kiss from her son or Santa winking from the rooftop or the husband’s arm around her shoulders.
So, here, in an effort to help you in this final push before the big day, or as on online note to self as I train for next year, are some last-minute gift ideas: Continue reading “Keep calm and win Christmas: 10 last-minute gift ideas”
It is Thursday morning, Day 6 of the capsule wardrobe, Project 333 experiment. My friends and I are recording the month. Some notes.
Monday evening: Cosmetics are not part of the project, but I go through my box of make-up and am delighted to find an iridescent, electric blue eye shadow that I had totally forgotten about. I will wear this tomorrow.
Tuesday morning: I look for my Cholly earrings and can’t find them. Charles made these for me in high school out of a sheet of metal from his dad’s sequin factory. He experimented with different shapes and sold them at a Soho boutique. Most were round and dramatic with connecting parts, but mine are long and skinny, almost like feathers. Remember feather earrings? Remember buttons? I wore these earrings almost every day in 10th grade. I kept track of them through all of those high school sleepovers, sleepovers after parties, sleepovers after my friend’s play, after Trader Vic’s. Taxicabs, Magic Tree, rain, coffee shops, the quiet key in the door. I picture the glass-topped hotel side tables I might have laid them on in January. I am pretty sure I wore them in Atlanta last month. They are a blackish blue, not shiny, but not dull. They would easily be lost on a reflective surface. The edges are worn, distressed metal from summers of corrosive beach air, 30-plus years of being handled. They are a very physical souvenir of all of these years—of a friend who is still making things, of being a kid in New York in the 80s—and completely irreplaceable, so if I left them in the hotel they are gone. I look in the bags I took. Not there. I say goodbye to them.
Tuesday evening: But I am really good about not losing jewelry. In a hotel, I slip things into my purse rather than leave them on the side table. They are very thin and maybe they are actually in the jewelry box, but I just didn’t see them, but I tell myself this is a vain hope. I take the box into good light and there they are, tucked up against the side. What else is in here?
Technically, for Project 333, you are supposed to include your accessories, even sunglasses, in the 33 items you wear but I’m not doing this. Anyway, I thought, in terms of making more space in your life, the jewelry box is going to occupy the same space whether it’s full or only has six items in it.
The box has an upper tray, where I keep earrings. This is where I find Charlie’s earrings. Right where they should have been. A reversal of loss. The tray lifts out and underneath is are bracelets and a small green velvet box. But as with so many other things, clothes, recipes, ideas, we keep skimming the same things off the top. We get used to what is there and we stop seeing. This is why supermarkets rearrange the shelves so often. It’s not more efficient all of a sudden for them to put the napkins in the far back corner, it’s that when you walk your route and lob the napkins into your cart without thinking you are not considering other purchases you could be making. You are not looking for the napkins. Once you devise a pattern, they rework the maze.
I never look under the tray. When I get dressed, I reach for the earrings on top. I forget about the necklace I had bought in the Bermondsey Market one dark and early morning. My new, now old, friend had taken me there, back in the days of her introducing me to London. We had eaten breakfast in a caff, English bacon, then new to me and not what I thought of as real bacon, but would come to love, mugs of strong tea, a place filled with mates and geezers, and always a few tourists on a recommendation from their Lonely Planet guide, “off the beaten path,” or from an expatriate women’s club newsletter (see previous post) or word of mouth among expatriate women, or the sheet of recommendations they typed up for visitors, or a blurb in Time Out.
I knew better to think I would be buying antique silver candlesticks for a song. I do not know enough about English china, nor had then logged enough hours of Roadshow to think I would in any way be able to get a bargain. This was the “thieves market,” where anything sold here, under cover of darkness, was fair game.
But I wanted to buy something, at least a souvenir of having come. Had we brought a flashlight? That was part of knowing what to do. I remember driving out we asked someone for directions and as a point of reference, a man actually said, “Do you know the muffin man?”
Inside the green velvet box are a pair of earrings I bought the first fall we had moved to Alabama. We were downtown and A. was visiting. Before we knew she would be coming, I had signed up for a 5K run for cancer research, something I had never tried before, but I was trying to fit in and be part of the community. After the race we went to an antiques store and I bought them. I don’t think they are even particularly old, but they were pretty and different to anything that I had. Not long after, a stone came loose and they joined the endless list of tasks that, when you are new, take longer because you don’t know where to go or who to ask for a recommendation. It was easier to leave them in the box.
I open the box. The stone is fitted back in and I can’t tell where the repair is needed. One back is missing. The post is bent. The box rattles. I shake out a lone earring, whose twin is in the tray, and another pair of earrings that I had forgotten about to such an extent that for a moment I thought they might have come in the box from the antique store. But then I remember them. Why are they in the green box? Had they needed a repair too? Had the earrings mended themselves, left alone in the dark for three years?
There is a lesson here, in this box within a box. Damaged treasures. The friends and places that seem to envelop them, why getting rid of certain clothes or things can be so hard because it’s not the thing itself but all the memories it conjures up.
Wednesday night: Having fewer things forces you to take better care of the things you do have.
Thursday morning: The older daughter is now taking a business and career class, a freshman requirement. One thing they can do for 10% of their grade is wear business clothing one day a week. I lend her a skirt and survey the rest of the clothes I have placed on the other side of the closet and consider what constitutes a business wardrobe for a freshman who has yet to decide upon a career. Will this require the creation of a capsule wardrobe based on anticipating the sartorial standards of a teacher I haven’t met for a career, the idea of which we hope to nurture, but which is hypothetical. For the boys, of course, this will be achieved with khakis and a blazer, whereas for the girls, do I tell her this?, it is much more complicated.
Photo, screenshot of photo of clipping (New York Magazine?) from Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York.
If you remember the game SimCity that used to come preloaded with Apple computers in the 1900s, you will be able to picture the random piece of terrain you were assigned upon which to would build your dream city. You will think of it when you visit places like Washington, DC’s National Harbor, which I have written about previously, where I just spent several days at a conference.
You got your land and you built a coal or nuclear power plant. You built the electric grid and laid down roads, which would eventually swarm with ant-like traffic. You put down units of housing which might become trash-strewn lots with high crime rates or grow into dark glass towers. You could check the stats and the growth rate, add industrial units if jobs were needed. Periodically you would receive feedback: “Residents demand a stadium” or there might be an explosion at the nuclear plant, with little particles of radioactivity smudging out bits of the roads or buildings.
A quarter of a century later, I remember it fondly. It preceded the Sims, whose tacky condos and pets and relationships would corrupt what may have been a perfect game. A current iteration exists, which we gave the Older Daughter for Christmas, called Roller Coaster Tycoon.
National Harbor has no public transportation, but they seem to have gotten away with it, like the Walrus and the Carpenter in the poem, who lure the baby oysters out to nowhere and eat them.
On arrival there are girls in leotards or with exposed midriffs and starched glittery bows and gold lipstick and tubercular blooms of red upon the cheek. No, not conference entertainment, well, sort of, but cheerleaders there for some kind of convention. Teams of parents are wearing baggy sponsorship T-shirts or odd shades of green. In we filter, with our tote bags and a different shade of enthusiasm.
The hotel is set, as the name suggests, at the edge of a harbor. It is hard to say where the magical world of the hotel ends, with its townhouses within an atrium, and the fake town beyond the fields of landscaped cabbages begins. There is an ice rink and a miniature Stonehenge set by the side of a road, themed restaurants, and ragged metal statuary. You leave the hotel and enter one of the eight-lane highways that connect Maryland, Virginia and “the District.” The sign for Maryland says, “Enjoy your visit.” Why not something about the state’s assets or its beauty. Why not, “Welcome home”?
I am not staying at the hotel, but with friends from London who now live in Maryland, in an apartment building. It is filled with people, young people, young people in duffel coats. An older guy, maybe in his 30s, stops by the concierge desk: losing his hair, dark clothes and dark sneakers with a day-glo green sole. He’s asking the concierge about his son. “He’s in North Carolina?”
“No,” the concierge says, “he’s in Florida.”
“That’s right,” says the man, “That’s correct,” as if he were administering some kind of test. Later he will tell people about the conversation, in passing. Let it be noted that he is good with people, he makes an effort.
A woman is in the process of leaving her apartment, already bundled into a belted black down coat, talking on the phone as she gets her keys. The door is ajar and I see her showroom-style kitchen, all burled granite and wood and halogen. I had to make a note of my friends’ apartment number so that I could find my way back, like a parking bay for people. I did not want to find myself pushing random buttons in the elevator wondering, Where might they live?
I had forgotten what it is like to live in an apartment building. The elevator door slides open like a curtain, each passenger a new act. You can hear their conversations under the doors, their phones ringing through the walls. In the elevator are minutes from the latest tenants meeting. The last item on the agenda is Disposal of Household Grease: Best Practices.
There are more cabbages in my friends’ neighborhood, arranged in planters like profiteroles. Here we have music playing on the street and people ea
ting Saturday lunch in restaurants and the educational children’s toy shop and the posh wine shop and a place that sells pernickety sweaters and Nordic fashion. They are having a closing down sale and before I enter the shop I know that these are going to be the kind of clothes I hate and they will be, even on final sale, too expensive.
“Oh,” remarks one of the sales people/owners as I enter, “you brought wine.”
Maryland no longer hands out plastic bags in shops.
The clothes were, as I expected, awful.
Everything is bright and pretty (except the cabbages. The cabbages are silly.)
In the morning, my friend who is attending the same conference, drives us through the fog back to the fake town.
If you were the development tycoon and you could build anything, my friend asks, is this really the best you could come up with? The house in the atrium, he says, is based on the template of the hotel chain, a replica of a replica of a replica. We’re just lost in the fog with the cheerleaders and the teddy bears and the statuary that commemorates and represents the need to have a statue in this location because it’s the kind of thing a real place might have. A large stone, or more likely fiberglass cast to resemble stone, arm with a grasping hand reaches out of the bay.
Imagine the empty terrain. The cursor blinks, waiting for you to select your tool, to build the roads and create the zones (commercial, industrial, residential). Visitors demand an experience.
What do we bring home with us, then? My friends’ daughter is four. She likes princess dresses, Swan Lake and reversals. It was a bear. No, it was a monkey. It’s on your head. It is a froggy day, we tell her.
I have displaced her from her room. At night I dream that I am on a London bus with my daughters. It is rainy and winter. As we alight, I realize that we have a son. He is hiding under one of the seats and I scoop him up wondering how it is possible that I have been, for years, telling people that we have two children when we have three, girls when we also have a boy. What does it mean that I have forgotten my son? And that I almost left him hiding on a bus?
Away from your family you are displaced. As a single entity attending a conference I appear to be a whole when I am a part. The younger daughter sends the occasional text as do friends and former colleagues from London as we search for each other at break, each of us now making our way in the new world, still finding strange this new, more affluent and referential version of America.
The cabbages, weather-resistant, practical, nutritious, inexpensive and with their blooms of color, could sustain us should the hotel run out of food or the beltway close, should something occur that is just beyond the imagination, like a fiberglass monster rising from the water. Oh, wait, that was their idea.
In SimCity, you were the king with your cursor, planting fields of cabbages to increase the commercial value of your property. I had never imagined myself as a resident.
“I don’t think anyone ought to stand up anywhere in politics and say there is a group that are so wealthy that they should be given a free ride and should be excluded from having to carry the kind of burdens that other people have, particularly in a time of austerity like this. If we’re going to be a coherent society, and that is absolutely fundamental to our success and our prosperity, everyone has to carry a share of it.” So said Susan Kramer on the Today program/me, (BBC Radio 4).
The phrase “coherent society” struck me.
I was half-asleep in the middle of the night when this show was on. In an accent cloaked in good woolens this was how articulate someone could be while being provoked by news presenter Justin Webb, who jumped on the Lib-Dem Treasury Spokeswoman for being disingenuous: Did Nick Clegg not even tell her about his policy? But she held her ground, pushed on and then she came out with the above. Maybe she read it from her notes, but she spoke uninterrupted.
The idea that the people at the top of the socioeconomic scale have any duty to those at the other end and that this connects to our success as a society, or that coherence is of value, does not seem to come into play here in America. I don’t think we are especially interested in being a coherent society.
In these pre-election days of political rhetoric, people are wanting to restore the promise of America or turn it around or get it back to work. America has oratorical coherence, in the moment. Words are spoken with emphasis and precision, (except when someone uses the “wrong words.”) It all sounds like it’s supposed to make sense. It makes sense when you agree.
Definitions of America are partisan. It’s about freedom. No, it’s about freedom. America is symbolic of being about potential, sacrifice, freedom, success, road trips, individuals, immigrants and baseball, but what you have is a celebration of the individual and sports tribalism. America is not about sharing or collective responsibility. We make promises to America about getting them a job so they can afford their own health insurance and be free. In my family’s lore, the 10 newly arrived immigrant brothers drank a pint together at a pub in Philadelphia before setting off independently to seek their fortunes.
From the other room, I can hear the convention. During Romney’s acceptance speech, people break into chanting “USA, USA.” It was weird. It sounds both forced and completely fanatical. He was pushing their crazy patriot buttons.
I have been thinking about America in the dystopic atmosphere of The Orphan Master’s Son, a novel about modern-day North Korea, a book that I was surprised to find myself reading let alone liking for the humor and for the way the idea of identity and story are considered and played out. Adam Johnson’s portrayal of America through the eyes of his North Korean characters is distorted and funny with shards of truth sticking out.
In the word’s of Johnson’s fictionalized Dear Leader to a Texan Senator:
“Yet in America’s capital, five thousand black men languish in prison due to violence. Mind you, Senator, your prison system is the envy of the world—state-of-the-art confinement, total surveillance, three million inmates strong! Yet you use it for no social good. The imprisoned citizen in no way motivates the free.”
There was much in the novel that was awful to read, hear about, think about. It is a book I would recommend to you, but with a bunch of disclaimers about heartbreaking, toe-curling brutality, but then it is also a provoking interpretation of how society shapes our story.
“‘But, in America, people’s stories change all the time. In America, it is the man who matters,'” says Dr. Song, one of the government officials in the novel who travels to Texas with the protagonist.
Much of the rhetoric of British political debate is towards a fair and just society. There is less I and more we. In America, we champion the rights of the individual; the we is less about all of us, but rather for the people in our ideological camp, our demographic bubble, maybe, if pushed, our state. The restraining hand that keeps the flailing arms of the opposing parties from pummeling each other is the law. If there is too much we it ceases to be about us and becomes the I of whatever government or dictator defines us. Then it becomes them.
As the novel’s North Koreans release their American kidnap victim, the loudspeakers report:
“Still, her departure was a sad one, as she was returning to America and a life of illiteracy, canines, and multicolored condoms. … And we must admit: she belonged with her people, even in a land where nothing is free—not seaweed, not suntanning, not even a basic blood transfusion.”
Image: Tower of Babel, c.1563, Pieter Brueghel the Elder
The younger daughter comes home on the third day of her week-long art camp with an invitation to an art show at which her work will be for sale. The art school/gallery will take a 10% cut. We, her parents, find it funny to pay, or bid against others, for the projects that she would otherwise just bring home in a bag on the last day.
We suggest that she should hand over any proceeds to cover the cost of tuition and possibly the cost of the gas to drive her there. And then she gets mad at us.
My husband proposes a 15% cut and she can keep the rest. But she is still mad.
Fine, she says, you don’t have to come. You don’t have to sign me up for things.
This forces us to back up and try to explain. We can’t expect her to share the joke without understanding the context. The more we start to articulate what it is about this leap from kids messing around with materials to being invited to enter a professional arena the more we start to feel a need to take a stand against it.
First of all, it’s not about the money and it’s not about not wanting to go. It’s something bigger and more culturally pervasive. And when you put it that way, your kids totally get it.
Actually, they don’t.
Last week she came home from another camp all psyched because the instructor told her that she could get a college scholarship if she carried on with the sport. The takeaway point for her was that (after three days of trying out an activity for the first time) this was her golden ticket. What a relief it must have been to know that this whole college thing, the reason why we say her grades (will) matter, was pretty much a lock. All she has to do now is figure out how to get her 12-year-old non-driving self to practice for the next six years.
I know, I know, I tell her, we’re meanies, but just try to understand what’s going on here.
I will spare you the entire scene, although the younger daughter, who read this before publication, wishes me to convey that she is a sane and stable person, but our reasoning goes something like this: You, the child, are just doing this activity because it’s fun, like you do lots of other things, because this is the age of trying things out. It’s good to commit to a team because the act of showing up and being part of something and working to improve has value more than the activity itself.
The early introduction of the future benefits (scholarship, sales, travel team, finding your passion) that one could get from an activity puts pressure on the kids to hit those marks. Why should you think that after three days of an art class you have anything worth selling? Or be good enough to do the sport in college? Which is not to denigrate the fine work you have done—you have to keep coming back to this concept, that you can be criticizing part of something but not all of it. Something or someone can be well-intentioned but have a flawed idea. And we forget that this is sometimes a hard concept for kids to grasp.
Come to the next class, come three times a week, join the travel team, sign up for the state tournament. Pay the fees. Back in London, we were suspicious of any class that offered “a chance” to perform at Euro Disney. Were there not enough performance venues in London itself to meet the experiential needs of the 8-year-old dancer? And if your 8-year-old is making her international stage debut are you seriously going to miss it?
So now you’re telling me that I can’t be an artist, she says.
Nobody is telling you that you can’t be an artist.
Help me out here.
And then this unexpected backlog of thwarted ambition comes pouring out, fires we had neither lit nor stoked. Suddenly it was all so bleak and complicated:
First, she says, you make me miss my flute lesson for the swim meet when I was practicing a piece to audition for all-state and I only swam exhibition and now I won’t make all-state and I won’t get into a good college for band and then you said I couldn’t do this additional sport to get a scholarship and now I probably won’t get into college and I don’t even know if I like doing any of these things.
But that’s just the point. The stakes are being set too high. You don’t have to want to major in something to take the class.
And who knew she was feeling this kind of pressure about college? I feel terrible. We hear things about how older kids are becoming too careerist and driven but it’s happening in our house, in spite of us.
Summer presents us with these huge swathes of our children’s time, which we are trying to fill on their behalf with meaningful pursuits because otherwise they are at risk of wasting time. Is it that we do not trust her to put her own time to good use? Partly.
Left to her own devices she bakes, organizes her room, has read 13 books and visits our neighbor. She had a job looking after our friends’ dogs, twice a day for two weeks, and we didn’t have to remind her or drive her there. But there is also a lot of noodling and flopping around. She has read up on all the uses for baking soda that were printed on the 13.5 lb bag my husband bought at Costco in a moment of madness. She sprawls on the floor and talks to the dog.
You make me sound crazy, she says. You have to make it clear that I do normal things.
Between the 10,000 hours of Gladwellian practice one ought to invest in the name of excellence and the unstructured time children need to develop inner resources and just be (even if that being involves learning about baking soda), I thought that art classes, summer league swim team, a few flute lessons, the chance to try a brand new sport mixed in with a little responsibility and some sleepovers seemed like a good balance.
You can’t win summer. I was being ironic.
We go to the art show, which is part of a city-wide arts week, so there are lots of people at the reception, not connected to the class, and lots of other art on display. The children have had the option to price, auction or just display their pieces. We are at peace with letting her rabbit sculpture go for $20, but I really love the painting she has painted of a door. It’s in the Ashcan style, unintentionally. What if someone buys it?
If you try to win summer, you will lose it, and you will never get it back.
On the first day of third grade, the children found their teachers on the multicolored playground. The younger daughter’s class assembled by the carved wooden owl and they formed a line, a skill not practiced over the summer. They were gangly, tan and full of bounce, with jack-o-lantern smiles, new Crocs and T-shirts from summer places. The annual reshuffle of personalities reconfigured by class list and peppered by new kids.
I watched in horror and fascination as one of her classmates, a new boy in fashion-forward skate punk clothing and a hairstyle, who reeked of ennui, whipped out an iPhone and began day trading or organizing his holiday snaps as the class marched into the building and all that lay before them as a new school year began.
Just as swiftly, one of the teachers, plucked it from his hands and said he could have it back at the end of the day.
I breathed a sigh of relief.
Fast forward a couple of years and my daughter bemoans the fact that she does not have a phone. And not just a phone, but an iPhone. Until recently, she was the only girl in her class who did not have pierced ears, now she lacks a data plan.
Parenting is like standing on the shore as the tide laps at your feet. Requests are made and denied, wishes granted, desires are satisfied and recede. You watch the waves come in and roll out. Some kind of balance is achieved but all the while the tide moves up or back. You try to not let your feet become implanted in the sand nor let the waves knock you down.
Or maybe parenting is being a storm chaser. Or a sailor. It is essentially a person and nature situation. The navigational strategies are the nurture components.
In 2008, a third grader with an iPhone was extreme and ridiculous but very quickly the kids would catch up and it was neither. In fifth grade it was all about apps. And she still didn’t have a phone, not even one of those prepay ones “for emergencies” that parents used to get their kids when they were afraid they might get mugged. We upgraded her iPod shuffle to an iPod touch so she could have a camera, do email, have music and a few apps, but, really, a phone? Why?
Now 12, she still thinks we should get her a phone, but more often she comes home with stories of how she has been with friends who have spent the whole time texting each other and not talking. Twice a week she helps out with the morning drop-off at school, unloading little kids from cars and making sure they get into the building safely. Often there are screens in the cars, handheld or mounted on the seatbacks. People not talking. Bags of drive-thru breakfast on the seat.
She is like the only sober person at a party of drunks. Part of her just wants what everyone else has and doesn’t want to be left out, but she is also able to see how sometimes everyone has gone a bit mad, that the dream they’re chasing is, you know, not so great. Now that she has email, she has junk mail.
Yesterday she gets her hands on a device and texts me. I am standing in the room with her. Hello, she texts me. Hey. Then, check ur messages. Then, Repli. Then, Ur phone is making mad noises.
Child, I say, stop doing that.
I remember taking a paracetamol tablet after a year of abstaining from any type of substance during pregnancy. As the drug hit my veins and dissolved my headache, I felt like a character in a Hubert Selby Jr. novel.
The other day I was driving the younger daughter and two friends. It was a 10-minute trip. “Finish telling your story,” one says. Apparently, they had started stories at school and so she picks it up, from out of her head, and spins it. It’s her story, so I won’t retell it, but it’s actually rather good. When we get to our destination, we sit in the car as she closes a scene. The friends say, “it’s really good.” “It’s like a real story.” I wait until they are out of the car so I won’t embarrass her before I concur.
When she was little, she had inventions, but said she was keeping them in her head so no one would steal them. Every now and then, I would suggest that she write them down so that she wouldn’t forget them, because that would be terrible, to be haunted by the ghost of a memory of a great idea.
And this is what it’s like as they grow up, they have these strengths that blossom when you least expect it. Eventually, she will need a phone so that she can call her executive car service to pick her up from the pool, and that day will come, but there is something worthwhile to be gained from the clarity of her observations that I hope she won’t forget as the wind draws her into the vortex of whatever storm is brewing.
Photo taken at the Smithsonian by the younger daughter, July 2011.
“You have to write about it,” my husband agrees, “but you must make it absolutely clear that it was not our destination. We were on our way to somewhere else.”
I can’t say that I hadn’t been tempted by my colleague’s tales of designer clothes going for a song or our friends’ house guest’s recent purchase of a portable DVD player for $40, but it was only because we were going to Chattanooga that we decided to stop in and see what it was all about. As a New Yorker and a Londoner who has never been to the Statue of Liberty or the Albert Hall, I am capable of living in a place and ignoring, even avoiding, its star attractions.
Initially, the idea of the Unclaimed Baggage Center captured my imagination. We heard about it shortly after we moved here. This was the place where unclaimed bags from airports all around the world ended up. A major tourist destination in North Alabama, UBC was the second place in the state to have a Starbucks.
The idea is compelling. What do people pack? What would you find?
This is the interest factor in shows like Storage Wars. A bag is revealing in the way that a person’s shopping on the supermarket conveyor belt provides a speculative ramble about another life. It is socially acceptable snooping.
But there is something fundamentally morbid about an unclaimed bag or an abandoned storage locker. Have you noticed that Barry Weiss wears black gloves with skeleton bones when he unpacks the lockers on Storage Wars? It’s grim reapery to be picking through the remains of a life, even if it is only the little sampling of a life that was, as we were when we stopped in, on the way to somewhere else.
The Unclaimed Baggage Center does the Barry Weiss skeleton glove work themselves, unpacking, cleaning and sorting all of the contents so that there is a department store/charity shop format and no smelly surprises, not the mystery bag auction I thought it was when we first heard about it.
Did you leave your book or your reading glasses on the plane? There is a whole section of reading glasses, a monument to forgetfulness, shelves of books, a case of bibles. There are racks of unclaimed sidewalk art, a display of all the headphones found at the bottom of seat back pockets, each one in a plastic bag. This place conjures up the discomfort and transience of air travel, the confinement, the unwanted physical proximity to others, the hand that pushes on your seatback and inadvertently pulls your hair, other people’s ears, salted nuts.
The only items that seem not to have made the cut are toiletries, except the barely used bottles of perfume encased in the jewelry section, a spritz of hope, the joy of duty free, a week going out for dinner. But underwear did. The lives this collection of goods represents no longer intrigue me. There is no poetry here. I know too much. Spirit, take me away! I didn’t even check the prices on these large white ladies underpants, but honestly, how much of a bargain would they have to be for you to buy them? This makes Kirkland lingerie seem like a luxury item. Nor did I check the label on this bondage-inspired designer bodysuit. I was desperate at this point to be on my way, headed somewhere else, anywhere but here.
1. Feed the cats
As I am leaving for work on Friday, our contractor mentions they will have to remove the ceiling of the pantry and where should the guys put the food. The work is being done above the garage but the pantry is actually part of the house. It has a sliding door and a window and it is alternately referred to as the cat pantry because that is where the bowls and the kitty litter are.
Continue reading “Just add water”
Pop goes the cork. Ding-dong goes the bell. It’s time to watch House Hunters!
A couple make appreciative murmurs about the light fixture in the double-storey hall. They enter the kitchen. Will it meet expectations? What words will they say first?
Hand sweeps the counter: “I like the granite.” Drink.
“Oh, there’s an island.” Drink.
“No stainless.” Take a sip of water.
“But I really like the wooden floors.” Drink.
You watch, too, don’t you? House Hunters is everybody’s guilty, middle-aged secret. Either you are sharing the fantasy or you are deconstructing it. Come sit with us and see it for the game that it is.
My husband and I thought we would try our hand at making up some rules. House Hunters and a glass of wine? It’s a drinking game. And just in time for the holidays. If you’d rather not explain to your children what “drinking game” means then you could simply call it a “game” and use pennies.
This is a show not about the diversity of housing stock worldwide or the unique requirements of a particular couple or family but about the banality of human desire.
It is in the kitchen that features take on a feverish, lustful intensity, regardless of whether or not one cooks. Kitchens are the showroom of your private self. We have been conditioned to respond to particular signals, which have little to do with boring kitchen triangle theory and more to do with appearance of finish. Kitchens used to be at the back of the house but now they are at the center of the family room, with dazzling spotlights.
Developers know with a creepy, scientific exactitude what you want in a house so that they have attached what the agent calls an “upcharge” for each feature the couple lovingly caress in the model home. Yes, those are nice, that’s another $4,000. And they have taken away a square inch or foot here and there to make it back. It’s your turnkey fantasy, just a touch smaller than you would have ideally wanted, and an extra 20 minutes from work, but, mmm, fixtures, surfaces, and that closet.
While commuting time is often a factor, location, once the bottom line of property selection, is just background noise.
In our game, when the couple, walking through what my husband calls “the stimulus machine,” get what they want, you get a sip of wine; when they don’t, you get water. Sometimes something will be so awesome, like hardwood floors throughout, that everyone drinks.
Choose a room When the people get what they want in your room, you drink.
Kitchen
Granite, stainless, nice counters, updated cabinetry, island, hardwood, splashback tiling worthy of mention. Fail: florescent light in a box, faux granite, granite with really visibly cheap cabinets so that you are paying for a crappy approximation, a parody almost, of your heart’s desire. That hurts.
Master bedroom/ensuite bathroom
Big enough, walk-in closet, his & hers sinks. If the walk-in closet is impressive enough to be mentioned as an attribute of the house when they have the postmortem, you have to do a shot. Fail: pink tile. Funnily, in the US, a corner bath isn’t the kiss of death that it is in the UK. (This is about cultural conditioning, not intrinsic worth.)
Living room
Open feel, they decide where to put the TV, crown molding, archway, “Our furniture will fit great here.” Fail: tray ceiling, even if they’re happy about it.
Everyone drinks when the door bell rings, because that’s the name of the game; the househunter is unable to name a basic feature—banister, wainscoting, alcove—and instead waves at it and says “I like that…”; bonus area; making memories; husband says: “The color is just not me.”
Weird personality issue with househunter or animosity between agent and couple You call it early on and it’s yours; when it is made manifest you can make everyone drink. If it’s really bad even the narrator will allude to it.
International rules
Let’s drive on the wrong side of the road. Everyone drinks for: no kitchen appliances, house opens onto busy road, box room with bad smell, chicken in yard, small tiled room with drain.
Close of play When the second doorbell rings at the third property everyone needs to guess which house the househunters will choose. Then, off to bed, lock up, don’t forget to run the dishwasher.
Believe it or not, I only went to Hulu for the first time last night as I was searching for a screengrab of The Bob Newhart Show. It looks like you can watch shows and type commentary about them to your Facebook newsfeed as you watch. So if you wanted to play Ding-Dong with another family or friend you could. It could become kind of a community thing. But just remember, as we are busy thinking that stainless and granite are the last word in kitchens ever, our parents had avocado green appliances and conversation pits. And everything goes in cycles.
Feel free to submit additional rules of play.
The Other Side 