4.26.4 Remembrance of Things Future
We leave for Vegas on Sunday. Mr. Jones (turn those speakers on, honey, and kick out the jams). Glider trip. There are now a rather old fashioned version of sirens, so we may not make it home for a long time, unless we lash ourselves to the mast.

Lately there has been a series of fairly dumb pieces running in the PI about what foods transplanted people miss from the place they used to live. Lordy knows I can go off about Tastykakes and vinegar-basted brisket, but here's today's theory: There are actually two distinct categories of missed food. One is from childhood. It doesn't have to be good, and for Young Americans, it is frequently mass produced. It's like the flavors are somehow hardwired into new brains; when we indulge in those foods as adults, it's more about satisfying those cranky little synapses than sensory enjoyment. Perhaps the cravings are what happens when those specific taste-memory brain cells die off: Must make TastyKake casket for brain cell NOW!

The second one comes on when we're older, frequently when we leave the parental home to live in our own place. In establishing new traditions, we establish new food-based rituals. We're often young and feel brave, even if we're not: Making new rituals is something that makes a person feel that way. The food is often tied to the neighborhood we're living in, frequently one that is urban and interestingly ethnic in a new-to-us way. When we crave those foods later in life, again we're not necessarily craving the food. In all honesty, one decent taco truck taco is pretty much like any decent taco anywhere. What we really want is to return to the newness and imagined bravery of that earlier time. Remember how we sat around and ate tacos and I didn't yet know how boring my adulthood was going to be? Remember when I didn't think I was finished?

I think a more interesting way to live is to continually establish new, more flexible rituals--among other things, it's easy to continue feeling like a brave little soldier of life's army. Sweetie and I always love a taco truck; some are good, some not. In a few years, we will probably always stop for some other sort of food truck, just like we were insane for barbecue before we got hit by taco madness. I'm hoping for chocolate pudding vans, personally. Or for Washington to suddenly have a very successful pineapple industry, thanks to global warming.

4.23.04 Archie and Mehiteboom Writing with a large cat on your lap (paws resting on the space bar) is no easy task. Especially when he bites the hand that is on the A/S/D/F keys.

Before moving on to expressing the oddity of home ownership: Yesterday, I was driving behind a Toyota Prius. The man behind the wheel had his window rolled down partially because he was smoking a cigar and needed to tap the ashes out all over the exterior paint of his hybrid vehicle. So does this gentleman spend so much money on cigars that he needs to save on gas? Is it possible to be a drive-with-cigar sort of fellow and also be environmentally aware? Do people buy Priuses (Priusi?) to withdraw their support of terrorists? Please solve this Great Mystery for me.

Now then: owning a home is some sort of cultural insanity. I think that if home ownership still meant "I create the materials and build myself/my family a shelter for protection", it would make more sense. Instead, it means "Now I must go insane making it all perfect and spend imaginary money doing so". In my years of renting (my goodness. 15 years. Who knew.) I did not care that the light switches were imperfectly placed or whether the silverware drawer rattled unneccesarily, and if something didn't work I just called the manager. Being one's own building manager blows. Just ask Sweetie, who used the shopvac to suck three dead birds out of the dryer vent. Are there more? Do we now live in some kind of bird crematorium? They are air dried, so I have coined "A Raisin in the Vent" as the title for this episode of home-owning thrills.

4.12.04 Fumes
Painting is basically done, after Team Paint ignored the fact of a gorgeous weekend and spent a thousand hours turning yucky stained walls into Walls of Glory. Much of the place is now colored "Universal Gray", and it's funny: everyone likes it. I kept saying "the language of paint is universal" in a foofoo British accent, but only I thought it was funny.

The nightmare was the RedRoom. I forgot to go get primer for dark colors, so the paint went on all uneven. Five coats later, it looks pretty good; with judicious placement of large framed prints, it will look fabulous.

Anyway: On to Moving! Thursday night should see us in the new place. No, you don't have to help. Yes, it now looks fabulous. Sun and fluffy trees and breezes and chirping. Lovely. Much of the chirping comes from these wee fellows.

4.7.4 Fire!
Generally I'm an encourager when it comes to people doing dumb things to their bodies. Eat more doughnuts! Drink cheap beer! Injest whatever substances seem interesting! Have an American hamburger or Canadian chicken sandwich!

And then I bought a condo from two older gentlemen who smoke heavily. A Professional Sort came in to clean all the sticky, brown crap off the walls and cabinets. He had to scrub the whole place with his special products three times to get it all clean. Some things, like the blinds and doorknobs, simply need replacing, as the sticky brown grossness has infested them permanently. Basically, if something isn't coated with a thick, nonpermeable layer, smoke sort of fills the holes in the surface to create its own brown, sticky layer of nonpermeableness.

If lungs were worn on the outside of our bodies, I don't think smoking would be too popular--people would be all "eww. brown is so not my color" and Big Tobacco would be selling smokes that tinted your lungs different seasonal colors to match your handbags. The texture would drive people to the lung equivelant of tongue scrapers and we could buy Crest WhiteStrips (I am open for corporate sponsorship, Crest!) for our lungs. Just tap it into place and breathe deeply!

Anyway. Even though I want to have a lovely, lovely smoke at least once a week, I don't think I will. And unless you would willingly walk around with your skin coated in sticky brown blackstrap molasses, then I think you should not smoke either.

Of course, writing all this about cigarettes just makes me want to go have one. And it's been years. And I'm going to spend the next several days inhaling latex paint fumes.

4.5.04 Jilgrim's Progress
Funny: we have been given keys to the new place. We have also been given keys that do not seem to go to any lock we can find. We have also had our locally-owned drugstore use the wrong blank to make us unusable extra keys. Clearly, we are meant to climb in through the windows.

After two late-night trips to the new place and continually thinking "what have we done!", (alternating with "what were we thinking!"), a visit during yesterday's lovely afternoon sun made me All Happy and Relaxed. Everything will be Just Fine. Happily, we ignored the "crap, they're closing right now" pressure of hurrying to get paint, and Sweetie redid his complicated paint math. We do not actually need 11.5 gallons of paint for our living room: we need four. Tra La.

There is a way cool bird nest hanging in a tree outside our new place. It's made of moss, and looks like the second one on this page. The one that mentions tropical birds. Perhaps we have a parrot living outside. A very tiny parrot. Also, hopefully a quiet parrot. Or perhaps there are other tropical birds that could conceivably be living on Capital Hill.