Lessons for Exiles: Hiring an Interior Decorator When You Suddenly Have an Empty House to Fill

April 28, 2010 by

There comes a time in many a young man’s life when he has to hire an interior decorator. Not every man, of course. Many men go their entire lives without experiencing the joy of interviewing a group of what are invariably straight women and gay men who will explain to them about color coordination and fabric samples.

I am not, though, one of those men.

Most people who live in the city don’t need interior decorators, by virtue of the simple fact that they don’t have a lot of interior to work with.  It’s not worth paying someone to help you decorate 500 square feet.  It’s only the seriously wealthy with multimillion dollar 3 bedroom coops and condos who can even make use of a decorator.

But when you move to the suburbs, you suddenly find that you have to fill up all that new space, that you’ve gone from two bedrooms and a living room to four bedrooms and a living room and a dining room and a family/great room and a foyeur and maybe a few other rooms to boot.  It’s like someone leaving the military whose wardrobe consisted of uniforms, two pairs of khakis, and some tshirts suddenly needing to figure out what business casual means.

You don’t absolutely NEED a decorator, of course.  You can do it all yourself, if you have any kind of design sense.  But, man, it takes a lot of time, so if you’re a busy type who has a million other things to worry about for the new home, it’s not a bad idea.

We had actually used a decorator before to reasonably good results in the city, after we did a combination/renovation of our apartment to create a two-bedroom with a lot more space.  She helped us buy a lot of new stuff.  But even with that, we were going from 2,000 square feet to 4,500 square feet when we moved to the suburbs, so we thought it would be helpful to have someone help us with it.

With regard to the expense, it’s really not so bad.  The basic value proposition most interior decorators provide is that most of their fees are offset by “decorator discounts” that they get from furnishing retailers — that is, you have to pay them, say 30% of the value of the furniture you buy with them, but they get you a similar-sized discount off the retail price of that furniture.  I’m sure that really savvy shoppers can finagle their way to some of that “decorator discount” on their own, but, again, then you’re spending all your time trying to find furniture rather than, you know, your actual full-time job.  Decorators also charge a manageable hourly rate and maybe a consulting fee, but in the grand scheme of everything that you spend to furnish a new home, it doesn’t really move the needle.

So it worked for us. It might not work for everyone, but this was our first big new home together, and it’s a great space, so we wanted to do it right.  And, frankly, we didn’t trust ourselves (particularly me) to know things like what colors and patterns go together.  You’d be amazed at what is actually fashionable design-wise.  There seems to be a fine line between “bold” and “ludicrious,” and I’m not so sure that I can see it.

If you’re going to hire an interior decorator, though, a couple of things I’d recommend to keep in mind:

Fees in Writing. Get all the fees in writing, and make sure everyone understands what you’re paying for and what you’re not paying for.  We once had a problem with a decorator because she believed she was getting paid even for furniture we found on our own (which is not unreasonably necessarily, just not what we expected).

Get the Discount.  Make sure you’re getting that decorator discount, and even condition the fees on it.  We had another issue with a decorator when we were paying 30% of our purchases, theoretically getting a 30% or so discount off the retail price, then found our couch offered for about 40% off to the general public.

Hire someone you’ll like.   This is a bigger deal than you think.  If you meet a bunch of decorators, you’ll find that they’re all probably pretty good.  They’ll all show you pictures of their work, and most of them have a fairly broad palette so they’ll work with your particular tastes.  But you’ll also probably find that you just LIKE one of them more.  That’s actually important, because you’re going to spend a lot of time schlepping around places looking at furniture, so it’s kind of nice to have a designer that is pleasant to be with.  You might be inclined to hire some scary genius who intimidates you, on the theory that they must be good if they’re that overbearing, but you’ll have a miserable experience working with them.  That’s no fun. Life is too short to be running around sample stores with some jerk.

In our case, we had a bunch of good people come through to pitch the job.  We liked them all, really liked two, and ended up loving one of the two.  So far it’s been great, although we still don’t have any actual furniture yet….

Filed Under: Advice, Humor, Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs Tagged With: , ,

Lessons for Exiles: The Challenge of Decorating an Actual, You Know, Home

April 22, 2010 by

When you live in Manhattan, the biggest challenge you face in designing your home is trying to find places to put all your stuff.  When you’re living in 800 square feet, pretty much everything you buy has to be multi-purpose — your dining table doubles as a desk, your living room couch is your guest bed.  Most of my life in the city, I ate dinner on a tv tray sitting on the couch.  Our dining table, which we only pulled out for guests, was this clever foldout that seemed to defy the laws of physics in its ability to convert from about an 18-inch end table to seating for six.

In the city, square footage is at a premium. I actually convinced my wife that we needed flat screen TVs with the argument that they were SAVING us money, because they freed up floor space that cost like $1,000 a square foot.  You put a TV on the wall, you open up like 10 square feet — that’s $10,000!  That was a good argument to win.

But when you move to the suburbs, no matter where you move, you’re going to double or triple your square footage, so you all of a sudden have this enormous obligation to buy a lot of stuff.   Now you have a dining room, so you have to buy an actual dining table that doesn’t fold up like an accordian when you’re not using it.  And you have actual guest bedrooms, so you need places for them to sleep.

Sadly, they don’t just give you all that furniture when you cross the border into the suburbs, you have to go and buy all that stuff.  It’s one of those hidden expenses of living in the suburbs, like property taxes and car insurance, that you don’t generally prepare for when all you’re thinking about is how much cheaper the actual real estate is.  Congratulations, you now have a 4,000 square foot colonial with five bedrooms!  Now take out your credit card so you can fill it up with a bunch of stuff!

And it’s not like you can put it off. There’s nothing sadder than popping in on someone who moved out to the suburbs a year ago, and you find that they’re still storing boxes in the guest bedrooms.  You gotta suck it up and buy some furniture for those rooms.

So that’s what happened to us.  We had a little bit of a head start, because in 2005 we combined our apartment with the one below us, so we went from 600 square feet to a relatively, for the city, roomy 2,000 square feet.  We bought a lot of stuff back then, but we still were going from 2,000 square feet to 4,500 square feet, with all sorts of new rooms to fill up.

Here’s what happens when you start trying to fill it up:

  • You’ll start to resent your friends.  The idea of spending a few thousand dollars for a bedroom set for guests is galling.  A bed is like $1,000 right there, plus they need a headboard, and a table, and some sort of dresser, and, you know, towels and stuff.  Who do these people think they are?  What is this, a hotel?  Bring a blow up mattress, you’re lucky I’m not making you sleep on the couch.
  • You realize how much stupid, useless furniture you need.  When you live in the city, every piece of furniture is important.  In the suburbs, you just need lots of stuff so that your place doesn’t look all empty.  Who has end tables in the city? Who has a foyeur?
  • You realize how expensive it is to cover walls.  In the city, you maybe have five or six actual walls to cover up with art and stuff, once you take out the walls with lots of windows, kitchen walls, etc.  Now, in the suburbs, you have like thousands of feet of bare walls.  Start shopping.

Assuming you end up keeping the stuff you had in the city, that you haven’t been living all this time with the milk crates that you bought in college as your bookshelves, you’ll probably at least be able to use some of your city stuff in the suburbs.  What happened with us is that everything we had got downgraded a level.  The stuff that we just bought for our living room ended up in the family room, requiring us to buy all new stuff.  And our bedroom set became a guest bedroom set (which frankly is more than you deserve, you freeloaders).  I guess it makes sense: as you get older, you hopefully have more money and can afford better stuff, so your new stuff is nicer than your old stuff.

So be prepared.  If you’re moving to the suburbs, don’t put all your money into your down payment, because your real estate closing is just the beginning of all the crap you have to buy…..

Filed Under: Advice, Best of, Humor, Living in the Suburbs, Moving to the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs Tagged With: ,

A Fan of New York: Confessions of a Sports Polygamist on the Eve of Another Glorious Baseball Season

March 1, 2010 by

Thank God it’s baseball season. Yes, I know that we’re only starting spring training, but March is an important month for sports fans, because it means that we’ve just gotten through the worst part of the year– the fallow cold depths of February, when football is over, baseball hasn’t begun yet, and basketball doesn’t matter yet.  When the highlight of the month is the Basketball All Star Game, we’re talking sports wasteland.

But once we stagger through February, we start a beautiful run:

  • March: March Madness, bracket pools, spring training.
  • April: the glorious return of baseball!
  • May and June: baseball in full bloom, and basketball playoffs.
  • July and August: more baseball, and football training camps
  • September: King Football!, and baseball pennant drives.
  • October: More football, and baseball playoffs.
  • November: Even More Football, and maybe some people get excited about basketball coming back.
  • December: FOOTBALL FOOTBALL FOOTBALL
  • January: Football playoffs, made sweeter by the looming specter of February.
  • February: You want to kill yourself. (Yes, I know you get the Super Bowl, which is fine, but it’s just one stinking game).

So we made it through another horrible, horrible February, which means that we have months and months of wonderful sports to come.

As you might have guessed, I’m one of those guys who loves sports, watches a ton of games, follows all the major sports (King Football, Baseball, Basketball), plays fantasy sports, all that stuff.  It’s the one “guy” thing that I do, since I don’t know anything about cars, can’t do much more than screw in lightbulbs around the house, have shot guns like twice in my life, etc.

And when it comes to sports, I have a confession to make: I am a New York fan.  As I’ve noted before, of course, I’m absolutely in love with New York City, which is one of the driving forces behind writing this blog — my commitment (however wavering) to maintaining my connect to this city that I love to death even while I was forced into exile.

But when I say I’m a “New York fan,” I’m more precisely referring to my relatively odd and unusual quirk as a sports fan — I root for all the New York teams.  Virtually everyone else pledges their allegiance to one team or another — if you’re a Mets fan, you hate the Yankees; if you’re a Giants fan, you hate the Jets; if you’re a Knicks fan, you barely can even muster up enough passion to be mildly disinterested in the hapless Nets.  For most people, rooting for a team is like making a commitment to a spouse — you have to forsake all others.

Not me.  I root for them all, as long as they play in New York.  I’m like a New York Sport Polygamist.  I root for the Yanks, the Mets, the Giants, the Jets, the Knicks, and try to muster up a passing interest in the hapless Nets.  I don’t really follow hockey, but I root vaguely for the Rangers, and don’t really have any hate for the Islanders or Devils.  I love them all, so long as they are from New York (let’s just ignore the fact that the Giants and Jets actually play their games in New Jersey, which is an accident of geography and good taste).  That said, like any good polygamist, I do have my favorites — Yankees over the Mets, Giants over the Jets — but that’s only when they’re playing each other.  Otherwise, I always root for New York teams over any other city’s teams.

Most “real” fans hate me for that. Sporting polygamy is heresy.  Even fans that have weird non-geographic allegiances, like New Yorkers who like the Mets or Yankees yet somehow became Dallas Cowboy fans (largely, of course, because the Cowboys were good when they were growing up, and the Giants and Jets were terrible), look down on people like me who root for two teams in the same sport. I also get a lot of flack from out-of-towners who insinuate that I root for them all so I can talk smack about whatever team is good, which is totally true.  My friend Scott, a true Boston fan exiled to LA right now, get apoplectic that I can mock him for both Bill Buckner (Mets) and Bucky Dent (Yankees).

I don’t get it.  I don’t understand how “New York” fans can root against New York teams.  I mean, I see their point about committing to one team, but how can they ever root against a New York team?  You see these Met fans, who are also usually Jets fans who absolutely HATE the Patriots, but who will root for the Red Sox over the Yankees.  I totally don’t get that. I wouldn’t root for the Red Sox if they were playing Al Queda.

And there are, of course, some great advantages to being a polygamist New York fan. I get to count all the championships when smack talking with people from other cities. I double the odds that I’ll have a good team to follow in any given year. I can cherish the memories of all the great teams: the 1986 Mets and the 1998 Yankees, the 1969 Jets and the 1986 Giants, the Patrick Ewing Knicks teams and, okay, not so much with the Nets.

Most importantly, I get to save all my hate for the people who deserve it, like the people who root for Boston and LA.  I don’t waste that hate on the New Yorkers that I love.

Filed Under: Best of, Humor, Living in Manhattan, My Life in the Suburbs Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

The SUMA Life: Our First Party, Superbowl 2010

February 11, 2010 by

I love Super Bowl parties.  As a sports fan, I recognize that the Super Bowl is way overhyped as a sporting event, and that some real sports fans hate Super Bowl parties because they take away from the actual game, but I love them.  I love the wagering, the chicken wings, the commercials, the whole thing.

So I’ve had Super Bowl parties at my place virtually every year for the past decade or so.  I can’t remember what year I started doing it, but it was largely because I got tired of casting about for a place to watch the game and just decided it would be better to bring the party to me.  And when we rebuilt our apartment so that we had a lot more space, along with a rooftop penthouse room with a flatscreen and outdoor space, the parties just got bigger, to the point that it became an annual bacchanal with probably 40-50 people.

So when I moved to the suburbs, I was adamant that I would continue to have the party, particularly because my new condo is an even better venue, particularly with a 90 inch projection tv in the family room.  I also realized that I could set up a secondary projector through Slingbox and broadcast the game in the living room, which for some ungodly reason has no actual TV, which would give me another 75 or so inches of gorgeous TV football goodness.

That said, I had two big problems.  First, I didn’t actually have the projector installed yet.  The people who sold us the condo had put in a state-of-the-art audio visual system in the condo, but it was state0of-the-art circa 2002.  And if you’ve been paying attention for the past decade or so, that state has changed just a little bit in that time.  So the projector they installed was the size of a suitcase, and probably cost as much when they bought it as a suitcase filled with gold bars, but it was completely inadequate for my needs.  And, of course, as a devoted procrastinator, I didn’t get around to actually figuring out how to replace it until about two weeks before the Super Bowl, which ultimately necessitated an enormously rushed and expensive job to get a new one installed and set up to work on the ridiculously elaborate system that’s set up in the condo.  But we did it.

The second problem was, of course, that no one who came to my old Super Bowl party in the city particularly wanted to come to my new Super Bowl party in the suburbs.  Getting people to leave the city to visit you in the suburbs is hard enough, getting them to leave the city on a Sunday when they can watch the Super Bowl at a million good bars is even harder.  So I did everything I could to make it easy, luring them with promises of homemade lasagna (promise fulfilled) and homemade ice cream (sadly, promise broken), and arranging for pickups at the Tarrytown train station so they could get an easy back and forth.

Amazingly, I got a good crew coming out from the city.  More interestingly, I was surprised to realize just how many of my annual Super Bowl party crew has actually moved out of the city in the past few years. It never occurred to me when I held the party in the city how many people were driving into it.  So maybe half the people who were habitual invitees actually had an easier trip than they used to have.  Which was great.

It’s one of the things that sneaks up on you.  When you leave the city, you think you’re leaving all your friends behind.  But your friends are getting older too, and what you find is that a lot of them are already gone, or on their way.

So our first suburban party was a pretty good success.  The one great wrinkle we had this year was that we made up a board with those boxes (the ones where people put in a few bucks to buy a box, and then you assign numbers for the team scores for each quarter) on one of the walls in the living room.  We haven’t painted the place yet, so I got a special dispensation from the wife to make up the board on the actual wall, using tape to mark off the boxes and giving everyone a piece of paper so they could stick it right on the wall.  Much better than cardboard!

Filed Under: Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs, SUMA Lifestyle Tagged With: , ,

Suburban Rite of Passage: Shopping at Marchalle’s

February 2, 2010 by

I have never been a big clothes horse.  At least, compared to what you see in the rarified air of Manhattan, where even straight men do things like get bespoke suits (a term I only even learned a few years ago), and read GQ, and actually, you know, have a sense of fashion.  I don’t keep track of whether my lapels are supposed to be wide or narrow, or what kind of vents I’m supposed to have in my suits, or, frankly, what vents actually are.

Essentially, the extent of my fashion knowledge boils down to some basic points that I’ve gathered over the years:

  • Three button suits, which were really in a few years ago, are not so in.
  • Double-breasted suits, which haven’t been in for a while, are still not in.
  • Pleats go with cuffed pants, flat fronts with no cuffs (I think).
  • In casual wear, don’t tuck your shirt on (it took me a long time to grasp this).

My only real fashion principle is that I throw out my ties every few years, sometimes if only because of the tomato sauce stains that end up on the ones I have.  But I also know that the fashion police have realized that ties are the one relatively affordable item that even fashionphobics like me will bother to replace periodically, and so they reinforce that impulse by making ties the one “fashion statement” that even schlubs like me can grasp and follow.  So ties get fat, then they get skinny, then paisley is in, then paisley is out, etc.  That’s why when you watch a late-90s sitcom like Frasier, where all the characters were ostensibly fashion plates, you see Frasier and Niles wearing dark shirts or those goofy ties, and realize just how old the show is.  Essentially, replacing your ties is a lot cheaper than replacing your suits, so the fashionistas change tie styles often enough to at least force the schlubby to go shopping every few years.

So the general point?  I’m not a big fashion guy.  That said, I’ve always had at least some degree of “Manhattan fashion sense,” which basically boils down to having a lot of black clothes.  Now that I’m in the suburbs, though, I’ve started to notice a change.  Less black, more jeans, more super-casual wear.

It’s a slow change, but it’s starting to happen. I can feel my impulse to put on dressy clothes when we go out ebbing, as I realize that I’m very overdressed for the crowd at the local restaurant or even at a bar or something.  What passes for normal on the upper west side, or even the lower east side, seems like pretension in the local Nyack eateries.

Thus, it was with some degree of fascination mixed with revulsion mixed with anticipation that I stepped into Marshalls for the first time.  Marshalls, the epitome of the suburban “place to buy clothes where you don’t really care what you look like anymore” mall store.  Or, as we call it in the suburbs, “Marchalles,” with a frenchified accent.

And, you know what?  Not so bad!  Lots of ridiculously cheap stuff that is clearly not “trendy,” but reasonable looking and ridiculously cheap and, have mentioned, ridiculously cheap.  I’m not going to buy a suit there, I haven’t fallen over that cliff (at least not yet), but got a couple of pairs of jeans (one fashion principle I refuse to accept is the idea that, one pair of jeans is different from another pair of jeans), a bunch of very discounted “Life is Good” t-shirts that I wear around the house or theoretically if I ever go to the gym, and some socks. Socks are socks.  These ones were socks like other socks, but cheaper.

From a SUMA perspective, here’s the way to think about Marshalls. If someone opened a “remaindered” shop somewhere in Dumbo, or in some burned out storefront on the lower east side, and didn’t put a sign out, and spread the word through Twitter or whatever about the amazing deals you could get on cheap jeans and tshirts and stuff like that, all the trendies would flock to it in that “semi-ironic so we don’t admit that we’re doing something uncool but really in our hearts we know that we’re being ridiculous” way.  They’d all be telling their friends about this super-great discount store that popped up, and they’d be staggering out laden with all sorts of cheap booty that they’d wear ironically.  Take out the burnt-out storefront, and the underground viral whispering campaign, and replace it with a big airconditioned supermarket clothing store filled with suburban housewives, and that’s Marshalls.  Same stuff, just a different attitude.

So Marshalls is okay in my book.  I just have to squint a little to blur out what it is I am actually doing, and keep repeating a mantra to myself that an $8 tshirt that I’ll wear about 100 times in the next few years is a great buy.  Fingers crossed, though, that I never get to the point that I’m buying my suits there……

 

Filed Under: Humor, Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs, Suburban Rites of Passage, SUMA Lifestyle Tagged With: , , ,

The SUMA Life: Finding Dim Sum in the Suburbs

January 28, 2010 by

The whole idea of building a “SUMA life” in the suburbs is to try to find ways to recreate and fashion an urban experience in the suburban environment, in what is probably ultimately a failed attempt to retain some semblance of the life you lived before you exiled yourself.  It’s not easy.  But it’s not supposed to be easy.  The whole point of living in the city is that you can have experiences that you simply can’t replicate when you live in the suburbs.  But as with many things, there is heroism in the attempt.

With that in mind, we wanted to try to find a place to get dim sum — the “Chinese brunch” experience that you can get in like a dozen places in Chinatown and, I would guess, in other urban Chinatowns, and, I would also guess, in, you know, China.  My wife is a Chinese-American, so dim sum became a pretty regular staple of our weekends. Most weeks, we’d just order dim sum-like appetizers from our local Chinese place, but that’s not the same.  Dim sum isn’t about the food, it’s about the experience, which requires certain atmospherics:

  • First, you need a huge warehouse-like space with a ton of people sitting, often community-style, about big tables.  You can’t get real dim sum in some fancy upscale Asian fusion restaurant.
  • Second, you need the carts, those metal monstrosities being wheeled around with all the little plates on them.  You can’t get real dim sum by ordering from a menu. Flagging down a cart, getting a plate, and then having the waitstaff stamp your “card” with some totally incomprehensible mark that eventually determines how much you’ll pay is part of the fun.
  • Third, you need a lot of food that the white people like me won’t ever eat. It’s not real dim sum if you don’t see stuff like bird’s feet or pig’s knuckles (or bird knuckles and pig’s feet, I can’t remember which) that isn’t, in my opinion, actual food, but which real Chinese people like.  (Indeed, one of the things I’ve learned about marrying into a Chinese-American family is that the greatest delicacies are precisely the foods that are most inedible, something I have learned at many Chinese wedding banquets where the only thing I could eat was the plain lo mein noodles served at the end like a palate cleanser).
  • Fourth, you need actual Chinese people eating there.  You go to Chinatown, you can tell that you’re getting authentic dim sum because there are a lot of Chinese people there. I’m not racially profiling, or whatever, I’m just pointing out that you can take certain comforts in knowing that you’re not in some tourist trap, and that the food must be good, or at least authentic, if you see them there.

All that said, I didn’t have high hopes for finding dim sum in the suburbs.  I can’t even get good everyday Chinese food like vegetable lo mein in the suburbs, much less a lip-smacking plate of bird feet.  It’s not like I’m going to eat the bird feet, but I like knowing that it’s there.

Against all odds, though, we found a place.  A simple Google search turned up an actual Chinese restaurant in Westchester called Central Seafood that’s about 20 minutes away and had some reviews mentioning the dim sum.   So we went, and it was perfect — big rooms, round tables, lots of Chinese people, food I wouldn’t possibly ever eat.  Not quite the Manhattan experience, but with some advantages like, you know, parking, and cleaner rest rooms (don’t ever go to the bathroom in Chinatown.  Ever).

So we found a small piece of SUMA, a place to get our dim sum fix  once a month, with the bonus that it’s very close to a great dog run where we can take the dog.  Although, obviously, we won’t bring the dog to the restaurant, both for the health code issue and, you know, (stipulate to a Chinese people eating dog joke).

UPDATE: We have since found another place called Aberdeen in White Plains that we haven’t tried yet.

Filed Under: Advice, Humor, My Life in the Suburbs, SUMA Lifestyle Tagged With: ,

The Unanticipated Politics of Getting a Dog

January 5, 2010 by

I wasn’t prepared for the politics of getting a dog.  Wow.

Since I got my new suburban accessory, a cute little half-Pomeranian, half-Shitsu ball of fur called Kozy the Dog, I’ve been asked by a lot of people where I got him.  I guess that because of my general liberal sensibilities, people assumed that OF COURSE I would go to a shelter rather than a pet store.  And when they found out that I actually did the horrible, awful, convenient thing of buying a dog at a store, I got this look like I’d just wrenched a baby seal from the protective comfort of her mother and clubbed her to death.

Listen, I get it.  I tried very hard to get a shelter dog, did all my research online looking for the kind of dog I wanted, put out feelers in all the local shelters, but it just didn’t happen in time.  I wanted a dog for my wife for a Christmas gift, and I guess that’s when demand is high and supply is low, because the shelters just didn’t have the types of dogs I wanted available in the time I needed. Yes, my deadline was arbitrary, but, well, I wanted a stupid dog to give to my wife for Christmas.  So sue me.

So I went to pet store, run by some very nice people in the area. Took my wife there, we looked at the dogs, fell in love with the Kozy dog.  He was maybe, probably the result of a puppy mill, which I think is terrible.  But nothing I could do about that.  He was already alive, already there, nothing I could do about that.  Again, go ahead and sue me.  I found a dog I liked, and I got him.

The backlash literally started the same day.  All excited to have our new puppy, and committed as usual to supporting small local businesses, we went into a local store to buy some doggy stuff — food, some bedding, etc.  So the guy behind the counter, old guy, not the friendliest of local proprietors, asked me where I got the dog.  And when I tell him, he sneers at me, “Oh, I just don’t get it — people who sell dogs,” in the kind of tone that someone might say “Oh, people who sell human body parts.”  And he points to some dogs that I guess his store shelters part-time, two dogs that God-Bless-Their-Poor-Hearts-I-Hope-Someone-Adopts-Them look like the kind of beasts that should be applying to guard Hades, and tells me that i could have gotten those dogs instead of buying one at a store.  Given that I just wanted a small dog, and that I don’t own a junk yard that I’m trying to guard, it wasn’t really an option.  Strike one.

So then he asks me what breed it is. I tell him what the sign said when I got him, that it was a “Pomshu,” which is this cute little name that people have come up with for half-Poms, half-Shitsus, sort of that whole “designer dog” idea.  Another sneer: “Oh, so he’s a mutt.”  Okay, fine, I probably did sound a little like a jackass, but that is, in my defense, what the stupid sign said.  Fine, he’s a mutt, I have no problem with that, but it bothered me that he thought I did.  Strike two.

And then to add to my cavalcade of consumer happiness, he asks how old he is.  My wife tells him that the dog is about three months old, and he shoots back, “well, I guess he was there for a while, that no one wanted him.”  That would be strike three.

So, basically, we didn’t buy anything.  One local business that I don’t need to support.

Again, I get it.  I love dogs. I love animals. I don’t like people to exploit them.  I’m not about to throw blood at people, or forswear eating meat or wearing leather, but I’m in that squishy middle ground that most people are in.  So if I could have gotten a shelter dog, I would have.  But I couldn’t, at least not the type of dog in the time I wanted.

You want to revoke my “good liberal” card, then go ahead.  But I just wanted a dog for my wife, I wasn’t trying to save the world.  I gave a chunk of money to my local shelter in Kozy’s name, I’ll give another chunk next year, and that’s my contribution.

In the meantime, excuse me, I’m going to go clean up some poop.

Filed Under: Having a Dog in the Suburbs, Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs, Suburban Rites of Passage Tagged With: ,

Our First Suburban New Year’s Eve: Home with Hives

January 3, 2010 by

I used to hate New Year’s Eve in the city.  So do most people who actually live in the city, because it’s like the worst night of the year to go out.  The big cliche, of course, is that it’s “Amateur Night,” precisely because everyone who doesn’t normally go out decides that it’s their night to hit the city’s bars, clubs, and restaurants. (Of course, to the true urban sophisticates, a group that never included me, every weekend night is sort of an “Amateur Night,” because professional partying urbanites go out on weeknights to do things like see a particular DJ, a taste I never actually acquired).

I don’t hate New Year’s Eve because it’s Amateur Night, I hate it because it’s an artificial experience:

  • Restaurants Suck.  None of the good restaurants put out their normal menu, instead offering a “Special New Year’s Eve Prefixe!” that has like three dishes, is twice the normal price, and requires you to either eat early and skeedaddle for the late service or eat late and be sitting in a stupid restaurant when the ball drops, so you can’t see Dick Clark, bless his heart, mumble through the countdown.
  • Clubs Suck.  All the clubs ratchet up their cover charge, require you to buy multiple bottles if you actually want to sit down, and justify the increased costs because they give you a noisemaker they got for 10 cents at Ricky’s.
  • Cabs Suck.  Forget trying to get a cab on New Year’s Eve anytime after 8PM and before 4AM. Not only is the demand too high, but it seems like a whole lot of them go “off duty” all night in an attempt to get desperate women in torturous heels to pay a blackmail off-meter price.
  • Traffic Sucks.  Even if you do get a cab, or have your own car, good luck getting around the city with the bottleneck created by the monstrous Times Square celebration, where people inexplicably line up for hours so they can stand in the cold and not drink so that they can witness a big ball drop for about 60 seconds.

The whole thing is a disaster.  That’s why virtually every New Year’s Eve for the past five years or so, we had our own party, usually a nice dinner party for close friends where we’d opt out of the whole city experience, have a great meal, talk to each other in ways that you can’t if you go to any ear-blistering club, watch Dick Clark at midnight, and go to bed by 2AM or so.  Always a great night, made better for me at least by the fact that I could spend the whole night without venturing outside my front door.

That said, of course, now that we’re suburanites, we had every intention of going into the city for New Year’s Eve, because, well, we’re now EXACTLY THE SORT OF PEOPLE WHO RUIN NEW YEAR’S EVE FOR THE CITY PEOPLE!  We were looking forward to being outer-borough amateurs running around the city and making asses of ourselves.  We were going to meet up with our city friends at some swank club, overpay for drinks all night, and collapse in a ridiculously expensive hotel room for the night. Essentially, we were eager to ruin it for the rest of you.

Sadly, the Gods punished us for our heresy.  New Year’s Eve day (is that the right way to say it?), my wife comes down with some sort of allergic reaction, gets these weird hives that she never had before, and can’t go out.  We tell our friends to take our hotel room, which may be the nicest thing we’ve ever done for anyone ever, and hang out on the couch all night.

So that was our first New Year’s Eve in the suburbs: home, alone, watching TV and in bed by 12:30.  Yeeeesh.  We’re becoming suburbanites faster than I thought…….

Filed Under: Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs Tagged With: , , , ,

Suburban Rite of Passage: Getting a Dog — The End of My Poop-Free Life

December 28, 2009 by

My wife always wanted us to get a dog.  She’s allergic to like every kind of hair except dog hair, oddly enough, so I think that part of her just wants a dog so she can curl up next to something hairy without getting all itchy.

But she bugged me for years about getting one, to the point that one year she asked if I wanted a hint for what to get her for Christmas.  I said, “sure,” and she responded by going like this: “Ruff Ruff.”  Which I think is unfair, insofar as barking like a dog is not really so much of a hint as it is a command.  So no dog for her that year.

It’s not that I don’t like dogs. I love dogs.  But I didn’t want to have a dog in the city.  It’s just too tough.  You can’t take the dog anywhere you go, you can’t even take a dog off leash in Central Park, and walking the dog seems like it would horrible to both human and dog.  Walking city streets is great, walking a dog is great, walking a dog on city streets is horrible: hard pavement, constant fear of passing cars, etc.  And if you don’t have outdoor space, you either train the dog really, really well to hold it in while you’re at work, or your apartment slowly becomes a poop zone.

On top of all that, it was the stairs. I’ve mentioned the stairs before. Four flights.  The idea of schlepping that stupid dog up and down all those stairs every time he had to take a poop was just unfathomable.

So no dog while we were in the city.  It was one of the few arguments I ever won with my wife.  My life was a complete poop-free zone.  No kids. No dog.  The only poop I had to deal with was my own, which was frankly all I could handle.

But then, of course, we moved to the suburbs — otherwise known as “Doggie Heaven”.  Big back yards, lots of dog-friendly parks, dog runs, people with dogs, kids with dogs, dog stores, everything a dog could want. And although we didn’t have a yard, we had an elevator, so walking the dog would be a lot easier.

I held out for as long as I could.  I really enjoyed that poop-free life of mine.  We’re going to have a kid at some point (the next great Suburban Rite of Passage), at which time my life will become heavily invested with OPP (“other people’s poop”), so my hope was to hold off on getting a dog until I had no other choice.

That said, I didn’t really hold out for long. I made it until Christmas, the first gift-giving holiday following our move to the suburbs.  So really, I didn’t hold out at all.  First holiday, new dog. A cute little half-Pomeranian, half-Shitsu puppy that we named “Kozy,” after a little stuffed animal called “Kozy Bear” that I’d gotten my wife a few years ago.  He’s a really great dog, and my wife is committed to teaching him how to poop in specially designated poop areas.  So I have some guarded optimism.

Move to the suburbs, then get a dog.  One of the great Suburban Rites of Passage.

Filed Under: Best of, Having a Dog in the Suburbs, Humor, My Life in the Suburbs, Suburban Rites of Passage Tagged With: ,

Three Suburban Rites of Passage in One Day: Costco Membership, Getting an SUV, and Our First Suburban Party

December 16, 2009 by

The Suburan Rites of Passage.  Those changes, both big and small, where you start losing your urban identity and start adopting the customs of your new home. When you start evolving from urban hipster to suburban fuddy-duddy.

I’ve been noticing those Rites of Passage over the past few months, most of them little changes in perspective that sneak up on you where you realize that you’re becoming a true suburban.  You become exasperated when there isn’t a close parking spot in the mall, forgetting the 25 minute drive-arounds you used to do to find a spot anywhere in the city.  You go to the movies for a first-weekend blockbuster and get there only 20 minutes in advance, secure that you’ll still be able to get a seat.  You eat at Cheesecake Factory.

But it’s the big Suburban Rites of Passage that slap you in the head and make you confront your reality.  We had three of them today.

1.  Joining Costco

We got our Costco card today.  Now, I’m not going to belabor the experience, because the whole “marvel at all the giant boxes of things you buy at Costco” is a pretty tired cliche at this point.  But it really is amazing — huge warehouse full of all these oversized bottles and boxes, where you end up getting way more stuff than you really need.  And joining Costco is almost a suburban requirement, particularly if you’re new to the suburbs and you’re not used to needing, say, toilet paper in more than just one bathroom.  So instead you get the 800 roll pack, or whatever, so you’re well-stocked for the next 100 years.

2.  Getting an SUV

You know how in the city, if you look at traffic stopped at a light, about half the cars are taxicabs?  In the suburbs, half the cars are SUVs.  Every family has one.  So we had to have one, even though it’s going to be my wife’s car and we don’t even have a kid yet.  But we are desperate, you know, to fit in.  Seriously, it just wouldn’t look right if my thirtysomething suburban wife was driving around in some sort of convertible or sports car.  More importantly, she’s a terrible, terrible, driver, so I wanted her to be able to ride high in the saddle and, moreover, have a lot of car between her and whatever it is that she’s going to hit.  So an SUV it is!

3.  Our First Suburban Party

We’ve been in the suburbs for almost five months, but we hadn’t yet been to a proper suburban party.  Part of that is we don’t have a lot of friends in the area, and haven’t been particularly good about meeting new people. And part of it is, frankly, that I’m a crotchety person that people don’t like having around.  Despite all that, we were invited to her friend Noelle’s house for a Christmas party.  She lives in Northern New Jersey, and we actually know her through a group of friends we made in the Apollo Circle at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of my wife’s recent desperate attempts to inject some cultural significance our lives.

So Noelle threw our first suburban party, which is different from city parties in one big way: I couldn’t drink, because I had to drive home, and I don’t like dying or getting arrested.  I can’t begin to tell you how much of a difference not drinking made. I’d like to say that it was like one of those movies where a guy who’s a borderline alcoholic learns that he doesn’t need to drink to have a good time.  But it wasn’t.  It was like one of those movies where a guy who isn’t a borderline alcoholic learns that not drinking all night at a party is a real fucking bummer.

So that was our day: joining Costco, getting an SUV, and going to a selectively-dry suburban party.  Three Suburban Rites of Passage in one day.  Awesome!

Filed Under: Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs, Suburban Rites of Passage Tagged With: , , , ,
« Previous Page
Next Page »