Futility Now

While I appreciate jmags’ generous use of “we” in the last post regarding our current housekeeping practices,  in all actual truth it has been me that’s been ignoring the slow creep of chaos.  My only defense is this analogy: it’s like when you are no longer interested in someone, in fact plan to break up with them, and maybe even already have your eye on some alluring alternative — you stop really doing any maintenance or caretaking.  Do you bring flowers?  No.  Give back massages? No.  You neglect the relationship, and turn a blind eye toward the accumulation of dust on your own heart.  Well, we thought we might be able to move forward with this house business pretty quickly, and in my excitement I have done just that — spent my time dreaming about someone else’s crown molding instead of doing the dishes.

This became painfully obvious when our plans were monkeywrenched by the ghost of NYU.  Now that it appears we have at the very least several months left in what is by all rights a very nice apartment, I have a lot of apologetic vaccuuming to do.  It’s important to keep busy, too, because I have fallen pretty hard for a house that we almost certainly won’t be able to buy.  I’ll say this much: 1908, two stories plus an attic garret & basement, pocket doors, porch swing, & leaded glass.  And just the right amount of disrepair.  Sigh.

Lest you think that house-lust is all I’ve been up to, I have photos to prove otherwise.

Hedgehog or pot?  Dunno.

Steamboat or pot?  Dunno.

And, last, Zia’s Christmas present.  The firing had to be postponed because of the Blizzard of Aught-Eight, so she only received it last week.

The impetus for this project, technically the most complex that I’ve done, is Objects: USA, a book I found on a cart in front of an antique store in Sellwood.  As jmags would say, its school is very old.  One of the featured artists within is Michele Oka Doner, who has gone on to do all sorts of impressive things.  I knew as soon as I saw these creature/babies that I had to make one for Zia.

Mine is made of a very different clay body, and I think the face is actually a little less freaky, unfortunately, but the spirit I think is right.  I loved doing this level of detailing.  It was very satisfying.  Almost as satisfying as winning the Miller Teaching Award.

Wait, what was that, you say? Mmhmm, I won a prize. A $5,000 prize — the best kind.  Too bad I can’t use it to buy up that luscious crown molding-ed (and box-beamed!) house, right?  Sometime this spring I’ll be going to a banquet to receive a big check.  The grant I wrote as part of my application was for taking ceramics classes, esp. in wheel throwing, and for developing an online portfolio.

So some dreams really do come true.  Consolation in the face of so much vaccuuming.

So, we’ve been looking for a house. There is something undeniably foolhardy about looking for a house, given the state of the universe in general, and in our states more particularly, but there it is. We’ve decided to be foolhardy. Or just fools.

It is not, of course, going with 100 percent smoothness. For example, there is a lot of money that has to be directed to a lot of places before one can even consider considering paying money towards the prospect of considering such a purpose, but we’re soldiering on through all that paying and considering with our fingers crossed.

In the immediate term, the main issue our search presents us with is the fact that it is made us pretty sloppy in terms of where we live now. This is, one must admit under the hot-lights of reason, a fairly pointed piece of criticism, especially when one is trying to contend that one’s optimism isn’t some subset of denial. If nothing else, the process is already educational.

It’s somewhat easy, when you have a nine foot long couch, to bookend it of a Saturday night with your boyfriend, a cocktail or two, and a certain smugness.  This is where I found myself a few weekends ago, and, eyes scanning the wall of books framing the end of the couch (and said boyfriend), I began to comment on our duplicates.  You see, it was just last January that jmags left New York for Portland, bringing his books along with him.

Our initial system of organization (alphabetized by genre) was relatively functional — perhaps especially so when compared to my last grouping strategy, which was by color, and made for some very compelling juxtaposition, but was not so much useful for finding anything — until we rescued his remaining books from what he refers to as the Ancestral Homeland.  But that is for another post.

As it is, our duplicates speak well of our reading habits — double Nietzsche, triple Virgil (two Mandelbaums, one Fitzgerald), etc., with one glaring exception. That would be Nella Larsen’s Passing.  Yes, this book has virtues.  But I greatly dislike it for the melodrama and missing logic of the ending, its general evasiveness, and for being introduced to it in an academic setting as a part of a sequence of books that were dramatically superior.  This is no fault of the book’s, but true nonetheless.  It happens with people, too.

jmags didn’t remember much of anything about it at all, much less why he’d held onto it so long.  And yet here it was, Penguin edition, doubled, on our shelf.  Full of scorn, I decided something should be done about this misallocation of precious space — immediately.

Note: I realize this behavior might be construed as undercutting my claims about melodrama.

Hazel is painting. It looks like something out of Lovecraft here, but I think the result will be pretty adorable.

For me the process of setting up house is pretty new. There was a very short-lived attempt at it once, almost a decade ago. Even creating my own spaces has been primarily a matter trying to minimize the impact of objects so I can have a little nest to crawl into and hide.

Hazel is not really so much of this disposition. She’s definitely more of the home-making type. These things are important to her, so she’s a good influence. I guess mostly my contribution to this side of things is that I can carry so much more than she can, and when we first got here and had rank upon rank of boxes littering the floor, this was not a contribution to be sneezed at.

Thankfully the initial phase of this process came to a fairly successful close yesterday, with the acquisition of a pretty dramatic couch. Behold!

We also have a normal-person bed, if by “normal person” you understand me to mean “guy who is 6’4″.

It’s a nice contrast to my office space, which could definitely be considered midget-friendly.

(Why the fuck is there a five Pound note on the floor under my desk?)

In stark contrast to my previous apartment, there are separate sinks for the kitchen and the bathroom. I’m pretty sure that this is now how I define luxury (and probably means I need a new theme song.)

Stairs!

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Bonus image of the Polaroid wall under construction.