OMG I have a mantle.

The biggest, most gigantic thing in my life—literally, actually, if I pause a second to consider actual sizes—is the fact that we bought a house, Eben and I. We spent months and months looking at house after house—about 80 of them. And we spent months and months arguing and negotiating and complaining and being stressed and occasionally hopeless.

Then, we put an offer in on a house! We drove by it once or nine times a day to admire it. After the inspection, we withdrew our offer when it appeared that the house was actually ready to crumble into a soggy heap, and froth into the earth from whence it came. Then we were extremely sad.

Then we had a Showdown: Eben wanted a house with a terrible kitchen and an odd basement; I wanted the pristine showplace in which a seventy-three-year-old Mormon woman had lived her entire married life without ever once redecorating. But it was <i>very clean</i>. Plus it had a fabulous yard! Also, a sliding door that led from the dining room out to a little patio, and for some reason I clung to that as being deeply important to me.

He won, and oh, I’m glad he did. I love our house. It is cape-cod style, with two stories plus a basement. It has a perfect number of bedrooms and a ridiculous overabundance of bathrooms. There are hardwood floors and a working fireplace  that I spent most of the winter in front of and beautiful molding and a terrible kitchen but so many windows and so much light and mountain views from almost every window and it is our house.

Maybe later I will talk about What It Means To Be Staying in Utah for Now, but at the moment, that doesn’t seem especially important—which basically sums up the issue to this point. What is taking up all the real estate in my head is being a grown up. Grown-up plumbing and grown-up electrical work and grown-up cleaning the gutters and grown-up mowing the lawn, and sometimes it sucks to be a grown up, and sometimes it feels like the dumbest thing we ever did is sign up to care about mulch and whether our outlets are grounded.

But there’s also decorating, which involves buying real, grown-up furniture and choosing paint colors and considering the various varieties of throw pillow and spending real energy considering the various merits of an assortment of colors and patterns. And while I know that every person who has ever picked up an issue of <i>Domino</i> considers themselves a decorator with an eye for color, possessed of a knack for whimsy and a well-developed taste and a carefully curated art collection, there is still a little part of me that thinks I am pretty good at it.

However, the beautiful part of the whole deal is that I don’t care if, objectively, I am actually very poor at decorating and have all the taste of a buttocks-shaped Jell-O mold; I love it, I do. I love picking out chairs and deciding on night stands and choosing the perfect shaped-lamp and sometimes, I even think phrases that I’d never say out loud, like “pop of color” or “well-balanced arrangement” or “add a layer of texture,” and I am filled with glee. <i>Actual goddamn glee.</i> I am comfortable admitting that, because it is an honest and pure glee, born of an honest and pure love for colors that warm up the walls and light fixtures that really make a bold statement, by god.

I have a bookmark folder titled “House” that has—oh, god, I don’t even know how many links. To shops and individual items and decorating blogs that talk about decorating techniques. I’ve got so many lists and have so many ideas and I want to talk about finishes and my ideas for curtains (a pattern, yes, of course! But contrasting apple green, or blending-in turquoise? <i>I am so torn.</i>) and go on and on and on (yes, exactly like this) about how I found the best end table ever and how I’m still deciding whether to paint the kitchen cabinets white or green. Eben has strong opinions about many things (NO GRAY WALLS. WE KEEP THE SHUTTERS. I LIKE THE COLOR ORANGE) but in general he has been content (afraid enough?) to let me steer the Good Ship Crazy Pants straight into stormy waters.

And it has been swell. When I’m done down here, I will start arranging the upstairs to my satisfaction, and then the basement, and then the outside and then I will come over to your house and shout things about the color wheel and softening sharp angles with textiles and adding fun pops of graphic prints until you lure me into the yard with back issues of <i>Elle Décor</i> and lock the door.

I decided that I wanted to go someplace warm, and probably that has a lot to do with the wind-chill factor and the single-digit temperatures that are whittling me down to a shivering little nub. And I’m going to leave everything I own. Even the books? Even the books. Even the pictures? You love your art. Even my art. Even the cat? Maybe the cat. Okay, not the cat. Anything else? No, nothing else. I don’t need anything else.

And I would leave my cell phone on the dining room table and get in my car (Your car counts. Okay, I don’t need anything but my car. GOD.) and I would turn the key and slowly lower my foot and probably tear off the bumper along the driveway curb again and then I would pull out and get on the highway and I would reach over and turn off the radio and in the silence of my car (except for my yowling cat, who has no sense of poetry) I would drive and drive and drive until no one could find me.

Florida, maybe. It has a west coast that no one ever remembers. Somewhere in Virginia, which is for lovers who will always be looking in each other’s eyes or at each other’s bits, and not me. Southern California, some college town full of unobservant kids? All the way to Mexico, and then deeper in, stopping only for ceviche until I hit ocean or impenetrable jungle.  Fang will love the beach and or the swinging vines and mysterious pyramids and vibrant parrots. I will be dying to check my email but eventually you detox and I will support myself with alligator hunting and beach combing and cloud spotting and sunscreen neglect and I will forget how to type and my voice box will shrivel up and one day I will simply cough up its little dessicated corpse and eventually I will die in a sandpit and leave behind a burnt-leather corpse.

But that sounds like a lot of work. And the What If game is a lot of pathos. What If nothing catastrophic happened? What if my life continued on its current path, which is sometimes difficult and exhausting and frustrating–but mostly, pretty happy, and full of pleasure and goodness, luck and loveliness, things that are good and things that I am grateful for.  That would be crazy! I could try, maybe, playing the game What If You Didn’t Always Expect the Worst.

I want to be perfect and unassailable. I want to be absolutely bullet proof. I want no one to ever find fault with me, because there are no faults to find, no cracks, seams or crevices. You can’t dig your fingernails under the edges of my mask and yank, because there is no edge because there is no mask because there is just me, all the way down, and every stop of the way–perfect.

Of course no one is, everyone makes mistakes, everyone has endearing flaws and charming faults and that is what makes them wonderful and with a little communication and just a smidge of work and compassion and understanding everyone can accept everyone else’s interesting quirks and winning idiosyncrasies and love-them-because and not -in-spite-of. Hooray!

That doesn’t stop me from wanting to be perfect–I accepted long ago that I need to give up perfection in general, don’t worry. But I still carry with me a streak of the -ism that coats everything I do in a thin, greasy sheet of frustration and irritation. I want to be good at everything, and immediately. I want to pick up a bowling ball and roll a hole in one, I want to complete The New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle in ink in under twenty minutes, I want to have a designer’s eye for color and a decorator’s sense of shape and proportion and have a spectacular home that makes people gasp and a sense of style that makes people shake their heads admiringly. I want to paint, draw, knit, sew, sculpt, dance, sing, photograph, and do all of it so well that I ought to get Major Awards for all my attempts.

I want. I don’t. I have tried each of these things, and in some of them, I am reasonably good, some of them I am okay, in some of them I fail egregiously and the result should be dropped down into the bottom of the sea. When I was younger, this would mean that I would immediately cease to try entirely and I would never, ever, ever again pick up a piece of pastel chalk because I was so terrible and being terrible made me angry and the idea of practice made me angrier, because why wasn’t I good just naturally? Why couldn’t I be perfect? Why why why why I HATE YOU and snap goes my pencil or the pool cue, and I am jealous and envious of the people who are better than me, just naturally because they are lucky and I suck and why do they get to be good and so what if they spent years practicing it is not fair.

I think maybe I am growing up, a little. See, I know a shitload of talented people, and I hate hardly any of them. I particularly seem to know talented photographers whose photographing is really just stunning–they have an eye for composition and color and subject and they have read their camera manuals and they take their cameras wherever they go and they take pictures wherever they are and they are just good.

Me, I have a little point and shoot whose manual I have never glanced at, whose settings are a mystery to me, whose button makes a satisfying click. I do not take good photos. Some of them turn out well because if you take four hundred pictures, luck will have at least one of them turn out surprisingly well. My pictures range from bad to boring to surprisingly cool, and I still take pictures. I still carry my little camera around with me–or I used to–and take pictures of things that make me happy, and upload them to Flickr. Some kind of switch flipped in my head, and just the act of being creative is meaningful to me. Just the act of writing that sentence means I ought to be smacked in the back of the head, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.

I went for our dog walk yesterday, and I took hundreds and hundreds of photos all the way up the mountain and back down and the hour and a half flew by and some of the pictures, I absolutely love and some of that is because I love my dogs and some of that is because the pictures are funny and some of that is because I  lucked into a beautiful shot or because nature cooperated. And all of it makes me happy. I am never going to be a great photographer, anything approaching perfect–even if I had the time to practice, I don’t have the sensibility, I am not good at shaking off the cliche and finding the real picture, and it turns out that that is more than fine, that I am less than perfect.

My baby brother and I spent a ridiculous number of hours in the basement with our Nintendo and our enormous collection of games, flailing our arms and yelling at the screen and mashing buttons and throwing our controllers and stomping around and hunching forward filled with grim determination and saying things like YOU CAN DO IT GO GO GO GO YAY YOU WIN YOU ARE SO GREAT! My brother was so great far more often than I was–he was the one who could koopa the troopa out of those little fucking turtles and save the princess and find the wand and discover the treasure and blow right through the enemy line.

Me, I spent a lot of time falling off platforms and getting frustrated, and eventually I was just content to sit and watch as he won, though I would provide extremely valuable advice and wisdom and unassailable observations like, You just died, and You have to kill the guy. We were a very great team, and would pour over the Nintendo Power magazine looking for clues and information and secrets and maps to guide us through the dungeons that we could not figure out how to get through on our own, which made us greatly furious and full of anger. I was the official Map-Reader and Keeper of the Tips, and interpreted directions, and together we destroyed the 8-bit world with our magic and might.

Though I was never good at the behind-the-controller portion of the gaming, I stayed a gamer, playing role-playing titles that more or less only require you to navigate your little man through a story and around dungeons and choose spells from lists in the correct orders in order to destroy the evil bad guys who were full of evil and badness. I never quite got over the sense that I couldn’t do it on my own, and for every game I purchased I would purchase the strategy guide, which was less a guide full of strategies to employ and more a step-by-step hand-holding extravaganza full of maps and bulleted lists in large, bold-faced type. Gaming for dummies, essentially. I was a dummy.

It has been years x years since I’ve played any games, until I got a Wii for my birthday because I have a spectacularly awesome boyfriend. But it took me awhile to actually appreciate my Wii–I was afraid to play it. I wouldn’t be good at the games. I would be so sad when I was bad at the games, and embarrassed, and there was no one around to take the controller and let me be the map person with the very good tips. Because I wasn’t really using it, I lent the console to E and his house of boys, who discovered almost immediately that you can hook the sucker up to the World Wide Web and start doing amazing things like visit other Wii consoles and download classic games.

“Oh my god, for real? For real, for real?” I shrieked when I came into the living room and they were browsing a list of games that included Secret of Mana and The Legend of Zelda and Donkey Kong country, and I jumped up and down and exploded with rainbow fireworks of gleeful hyperbole. Greater than the greatest thing ever! I spent a lot of time downloading games. “Why don’t you play the games you already downloaded?” E would say. Because I can’t and will be bad at them, I didn’t reply. I just kept downloading games because it made me happy to own them, and reminded me of my brother. Kid Icarus, holy crap, we were obsessed with that game, download thank you!

Sick this past weekend, on the couch, tired of reading. I turned on the Wii (you can do it with the Wiimote! Wiimotely!) and I hesitantly clicked on The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, and started to wander through the game, gingerly and a little afraid. Crazily afraid! What is there to be afraid of? It is a game. They are pixels. I hate not being good at something immediately and spectacularly. I hate to be wandering through a puzzle feeling as if I have missed something, that I’m clueless and lost and unsure of what’s going on and completely walking by things that are utterly obvious. I hate the feeling that I may have made a mistake.

I was tempted to get off the couch and go get my laptop and find some step-by-step walkthroughs that would tell me exactly what to do and how to do it and when, how to go through the dungeons and defeat the evil and save the day, but I was sick and tired and didn’t want to do anything but move my thumbs, and I persevered, bravely, through the dungeons. And I beat the dungeons and I defeated the evil and figured out what my items did and where to get bombs and how to get flippers and increase my health and save the day and a few days later, I am jonesing to play, flush with accomplishment, feeling like a badass. Feeling competent.

You know, I hate Learning Valuable Lessons so we’re going to pretend that didn’t happen, and I am not quite as dorky as I appear, and that no one needs a strategy guide to navigate my remarkably simple psyche. I’m going to just go downloadTetris Party, now.

So for the past two weeks or so, I’ve had a handful of rush jobs, for the proofreading people I work for. Of course I said “Yay, money! Bring it on! Kitty needs a new bag of kibble!” and said yes to everything that was offered me, and it was great because I was very very busy, and feeling very, very busy makes me panic far less about paying the rent and making my car payments and the gigantic, enormo gas bill that made me burst into tears when I opened it.

When I have proofreading work to do, I forget about life/work boundaries completely. I work all day, and I work all night, and I work while I’m eating and I work all weekend. I don’t work as quickly as I ought, a lot of the time, because I get distracted by the internet –look up a product name, quick-check email, twenty minutes later I  have learned a great deal about the history of the zipper and also Jessica Simpson’s weight gain and watched a video of a cute kitten and then I realize that maybe videos of cute kittens and J.Simp’s butt and the zipper, as fascinating as it is, are not all paying the bills and so it is back to the salt mines for me. Do they really mine salt? I should look that up.

I finish my chapters in good time, because I am very brave and do not let my internet problem interfere with my work (to excess). But if I finish a chapter, and I have six more chapters to do, even if they are due a week from now I cannot possibly say Oh! They are due a week from now! I can be a normal person and just go paint my toenails. But no! Chapters! To do! No rest for the crazy! And I will work until I realize that I have not read a single word for the past three pages and then I will go lie down and get up tomorrow and fill my entire day again, morning to night, with work.

And now the work is finished, and I had a whole free day yesterday, and I didn’t know what to do with it. I spent it spinning around in circles looking confused, and then I went to lie down for awhile, and then I wandered around, and then I put my head under a pillow and wept for awhile, and then I went back to bed. I was confused and shell-shocked and bowed under the great weight of terrible guilt because I was not accomplishing anything that was going to buy me a loaf of bread and I am also kind of a dope. And relieved when I got another email today, because another job is starting up.

Maybe when I’m sure that the work I’m doing can pay the bills, I’ll settle down, relax, plan a little better, be a little less frantic, allow myself weekends, and remember that freelancing has all kinds of benefits that keep people doing it despite the drawbacks and maybe it would be nice to enjoy that a little, hello?

I’ve got some proofreading jobs that I do at home in my underpants, and I am pursuing some Leads, vis a vis some more writing jobs which I would also perform in my underpants. I’m terrified down to those underpants about how my income has gone from steady-and-reliable to someday-you’ll-see-a-check, maybe, and so I’ve been looking at job boards andcraigslist and the paper and wringing my hands and worrying about paying my absolutely insane gas bill and making my rent and meeting my car payments which are enormous and terrible.

All of these are good reasons to have a job that is steady, and reliable and outside the house, even though what I really want to do is pursue a freelance career, work for myself, write for a living, connect with people and make a living doing something I believe in and think is important and good and does something good and keeps my carbon footprint all little and cute because I am not commuting to work or buying disposable paper cups full of coffee and danishes wrapped in wads of tissue paper and packaged in bags with an entire box of napkins that used to be a tree. Inside my heart keeps thrumming the words SAFETY SECURITY RELIABILITY PANIC PANIC PANIC, and that is because I do not trust myself to actually be smart enough, talented enough, brave enough and go-gettering enough to make my own way in the world.

But also, I miss the structure. I miss the people. I miss the clothes. I do. I am a person who has, in the past, been embarrassingly famous for her kind of sad reluctance to put on pants and leave the house (depression, anxiety, bone-deep laziness, bake at 350 degrees, serve warm). But I realized, recently, that since the end of my office job back in December, I have not worn a skirt, put on makeup, done my hair, had lunch with someone who isn’t my cat and a conversation with someone that wasn’t overIM or email. My days are me in my apartment (and I love my apartment) with my cat (and I love my cat) in pajamas or yoga pants. I haven’t dressed up. Back when I was still financially solvent I splashed out on this ridiculously awesome tweed pencil skirt with moths stenciled on it and it is sexy and fabulous and I thought I’d wear it to the office and instead it’s been folded over its hanger for a month, now. I miss having a place to go, and a purpose, and a goal, and being pretty.

I could wear heels to walk the dog, I suppose. I could put on a dress and lipstick go down to the coffee shop and type very busily at a table and pretend like I’m very a busy and important businesswoman. I could make grocery shopping a formal occasion, and reading a celebration and working on my novel a black-tie affair. I could put on lipstick, at the very least, even if I’m staying on the couch, under the electric blanket. But I still miss what I guess is the social environment. The people I was working with in specific, because they were awesome people, but also just–people. A few weeks back the guy who owns the CD store invited me to apply for a job with him. And now I’m tempted–for the cash, for the people, for the opportunity to sellRadiohead CDs while wearing a ballgown.

photo by giant ginkgo

E has been working his ass off doing wonderful things for his little company, and they said thanks with a very large travel voucher. You tell us where you want to go and what you want to spend it on–a hotel, a safari, airfare–and we will make the arrangements for you. It was both incredibly generous and incredibly deserved, and I was so proud of him, when he told me about it. “I am so proud of you!” I shrieked. “Where are we going?” I like to get down to business right away. I am very practical in that way.

Who says I’m taking you? E said. Because he is hilarious. And once I finished beating him with my shoe, we got down to brass tacks. We have a small but significant pile of money. How do we maximize awesomeness and minimize our own expenses? How do we spend this properly and to greatest and happiest effect? We decided that we needed to do something we would be reluctant to splash out on because it seemed too big a luxury or too crazy a trip. So, something international. A big city? A few days in London, a weekend in Paris, a flyover Amsterdam, a couple of minutes in Prague? I started to get excited about the idea of a romantic whirlwind trip to a place with cobblestoned streets and quaint old-timey street vendors selling authentic cuisines in a paper sleeve and maybe some accordion playing and picturesque waifs.

But our pile was not that large a pile, and the bags under my sweetheart’s eyes were large bags, and what he needed was not a weekend of running jumping climbing trees but of lying very still and Just Being. My baby needed a break. His older brother said, there is an amazing place in Cancun, right on the ocean. Seriously–you walk out the door of your little private cabana, and there is the ocean, right there. At your doorstep. And they catch your food fresh every night and prepare it for you and there are only three rooms and you are hidden away and you can snorkel and swim and it is paradise.

Paradise is way out of our budget, dude, we said. No way, his brother said. And he was right. For a week, seven days, we can afford paradise. Actually booking paradise was the trick. Okay, this week! No, sold out. This week? Sold out. This week? Sold out. Okay, fine–pick a week for us. The first available. And so we are going to paradise at the end of February, right when we are the most tired of winter and want it to be over, please. Cancun! The ocean! A week of reading and lying down and eating and drinking and scuba diving and reading and eating and finding other ways to occupy ourselves. E is very excited about the possibility of wrestling sharks.

He needs this vacation badly, and I am so glad to see how excited he gets, when we talk about it. Paradise, for a week. He deserves it.

It’s always the little things that get me. I am dutifully impressed and fascinated by monkeys controlling robots with their minds and the creepy-cool Large Hadron Collider, but it’s the daily evidence in our lives that while we may not be living in a future with personal jetpacks–yet–it’s still a goddamn amazing place filled with wonders and miracles no one could have imagined a century ago, a half a century ago, ten years ago.  THE FUTURE!

Usually I go about my business here in the future as blithely and unconcernedly as anyone else does, taking it all for granted because that is what you do, if you are of my generation and later. But like everyone else does, usually of my generation, this weird set of kids (and we are so often still just kids) that somehow straddles the divide between the quaintness of the 80s and the brilliant flashing diamond of the millennial years, sometimes you have to stop and marvel at the marvels, and go wow. You know, that is just cool. I appreciate that I live here in the future, with access to hot and cold running water, adequate sanitation and access to sophisticated medical care. And also the internet.

Yesterday, it was two things, practically back to back, that made me stop and shake my head, and feel a little old and also grateful for penicillin and antilock brakes. I had to get my book manuscript into the hands of a reader, I don’t have a printer, they live all the way across the country. I uploaded the document to FedExKinkos , and this very morning, even as I type, they are printing it four blocks from her house and then they are going to deliver it right to her front door, in a box, bound with rubber bands, fresh and hot off the printer. And for some reason, it absolutely blows my mind. My file went from being here, electronic in Utah, to a hard copy in New York, delivered within a day. Maybe my astonishment is all hayseed yanked off a farm in the mountains and set loose in overalls, blinking up at the bright lights of the big city–boy howdy, that’s shiny! But I tell you–that’s brilliant.

And as I was uploading and marvelling over the futuristic convenience of on-demand printing and shipping, I looked at my twitter page, saw that a friend was stranded because his train was delayed by an oil refinery explosion along the tracks. I didn’t have my cell phone on me, so I emailed his phone instead and asked him if he needed a ride. We messaged back and forth while he was on the shuttle bus. “I think the driver is lost,” he wrote. But no, he doesn’t need a ride. “Holler if the bus driver starts heading towards Vegas ,” I write back. When we don’t hear from him for awhile, we check Google News, and see that the trains are running, if slowly, and he ought to be home soon with Arby’s bag in hand.

And okay, I want to jump up and down and yell oh my GOD do you REALIZE how many AMAZING things just HAPPENED in that SINGLE PARAGRAPH! Today a wonder we behold. These things are so commonplace and ordinary and I feel a little dopey when I get that urge to bounce around and take people by their sweet little chipmunk cheeks and look deep into their eyes and urge them with uncomfortable-for-everyone sincerity to say hallelujah, amen! I should just take everything for granted until we get ourjet packs that are guided by the minds of the monkeys who run the Large Hadron Collider . But probably tomorrow I will become speechless with wonder over the miracle of heated automobile seats and those sneakers with the little wheels inside.

There is premium denim out there, people. Premium! For a premium, admittedly. But in the world exists brands of luxury denim that are not only luxuriously made of hammered gold and pressed diamonds and sheets of fabric that have been woven by fairies in a land of dreams where wishes always come true and McDonald’s breakfast is served 24 hours a day, but they also have magical properties. The greatest of all qualities that premium denim has, and I have heard tell that it has many qualities, is that it makes your butt absolutely magnificent. Premium denim lifts, shapes, separates, fluffs, caresses and presents, so to speak, your glorious technicolor ass in even more glorious surround-sound.

I will say it right here, flat out to the world and in front of all my peers and loved ones: I am not ashamed to say that I would like to have a glorious ass. That’s right. I am fond of my buttocks as they are. I think they are nice buttocks. But I would like for premium denim to come into my life and take my very nice bottom by the hand and lead it all the way up to the Promised Land. I want people to sing hallelujah to my bum, to weep and cry out loud to the heavens praise the lord and pass the hand lotion, it is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

Premium denim, they say, can do this for me. It can also make me look gigantically tall and obnoxiously long-limbed and spectacularly thighed. In premium denim people will mistake me for Heidi Klum, be briefly embarrassed, and then want to be my friend because I am even hotter than Heidi Klum! Okay, maybe not that last part. But premium denim! It exists, and we can all agree that somehow, by dint of its premiumness and magical denim properties, it is something that you want to be investing in. And oh, it’s an investment. Not just of money, but of time, because do you know how many kinds of premium denim there are in the world? As many as the twinkling stars in the sky they came from.

And then each brand is subdivided into types and shapes and washes and waistbands and styles and colors and platonic ideals and lengths and then after you figure out the combination that best suits you, your complexion and your astrological house in which your moon rose, you have to figure out your size and in order to do that you have to know a mysterious number which is possibly your waist size but there sure is a lot of goddamn interpretation of exactly what it means to be a certain number of inches. How do you interpret a number of inches? It is a mystery of premium denim. It is what makes me say you know what? Maybe I don’t want to invest in magic denim. Maybe I am okay with my perfectly adequate butt. I was happier when I didn’t know about premium denim.

photo by digicla