Concentration and space

I can not concentrate inside our spacious, lovely new house. I can’t even follow through on the laundry.

Of course, some of the concentration problem is related to the fact that I do not have a desk chair.

Here are four totally unremarkable, unoriginal truths that are being driven home to me in spades right now:

1) Every last thing on Facebook — every photograph of produce, every old Steve Carell video — becomes more fascinating when forbidden. When one needs distraction, these things are boring. When one needs focus, these things are must-read, right-now, can’t-look-away black holes of timesucking temptation.

2)It’s easier to do housework when the results make you feel good. Part of the problem with cleaning in a partially set-up house is that at the end of the cleaning, it’s still a mess.

3)Getting your head in and out of projects takes time. The transition back into any project takes extra energy. Extra energy that takes concentration… and lack of mess…

4)The distracted me is the narcissistic me. For some reason, the same brainspace that does not allow me to concentrate on work also tempts me into the burnishing of my Facebook photo.

OK. Back to the feed. I mean, grind.

The metal drawer of crap.

I have been meaning to take a picture of the wire drawer full of crap that I have sitting in our foyer area.  For a long time, I couldn’t find the camera. Then I found the camera, but not the camera battery. This morning, I saw the camera battery charging in the kitchen, but then I couldn’t remember where the camera was again…

The wire drawer was something we bought for the first apartment we moved into in Los Angeles. That apartment was a disaster: Wiring problems, sound-proofing problems and a crazy landlord who came and went in our apartment as she pleased. She walked by me into the kitchen one day. Didn’t knock.  Just walked in. When I said, “Hello Lupe,” from my desk where I was working, she said “Huh! You scared me to death!” To which my response was, “I live here, Lupe.”

This is an event I think about when arguing with myself about whether buying a house was a good idea.

Anyway, we bought this wire drawer thingie. I set it up. And then we promptly moved out. We had only lived there six weeks.

We found another great apartment, with no wiring issues and the best landlord ever. We lived there for almost six years. And for that entire six years, the wire drawer stayed in our storage closet. Filled with crap.

Everyone has a box or drawer or closet full of crap. At some point, you held every item of crap in that box or closet, and decided that it shouldn’t be thrown away. Someday, you might need felt pads for very small chair legs. Or extra lightbulbs. But now you don’t quite remember what’s in there…. So when you need new lightbulbs, you buy them.

I haven’t gone into that wire drawer for six years. We moved it, unmolested, into our new house.  I feel strongly that what I should not do is move the wire drawer of crap-I-haven’t-touched-in-six-years into the new storage space. I should just throw it away. But I can’t. Not without opening it.

Somehow, though, I know that if I open the wire-drawer-of-crap, nothing good will come of it. I will once again feel that I shouldn’t throw those items away. Maybe someday I will need that little pink box. For a crafts project, or something.  I won’t be able to throw it away. A long period of not-knowing-how-to-store-or-organize-this-crap paralysis will ensue.

And I just don’t want to go there.

As a result, I have not touched the wire drawer. Perhaps I will shellack it, and put it on the tree stump outside the kitchen window, as a statue.

Quality garage time.

No one gives the garage any love. I’m spending some QT with my new garage.

No, really, I’m sitting in my car, inside the garage, with all the doors closed. I’m sitting in the driver’s seat, typing, and listening to the radio. The air quality is poor. Eventually, it’s going to get hot in here. But right now… It’s kind of cozy.

Am I going a little bit crazy?  I feel like this would look pretty weird, from the outside. Say, if P came home. “Why are you sitting in the car in the garage with all the windows and doors closed?” Um…

Thing is, I don’t really want to walk to the café where I have been working lately. I can’t go into the house and work, though,  because I have no desk chair set up and my desk is still surrounded by an extremely stressful sea of boxes.

Why not just suck it up and go to the café? Well. I will. In a matter of minutes. Moments. Soon.

But they don’t play KCRW there, and right now, the semi-dark, the quiet, and Jason Bentley’s saccharine-smooth voice between songs from the new Twilight soundtrack is making me feel better  (there is something clever and witty to be said about the fact that the “Twilight Saga: Eclipse” soundtrack is basically a Morning Becomes Eclectic playlist, but I don’t have it in me right now).

The fact is, I’m also feeling judged by even the slightest personal interaction. The  twenty-something barista at the café is totally sweet. He asked me what my sign was when he saw me reading the horoscopes they keep taped on the counter. When was the last time someone asked me my sign? But when I see him now, I start thinking, “I bet he’s wondering why I come here and stare at my laptop like some unemployed loser every day.”

These thoughts are the type of thoughts that keep me from socializing, when in fact, socializing is probably what I need right now.

All I want to do is curl up and watch endless episodes of old tv shows on netflix on demand. But there is so much that I need to be doing. Deadlines to meet. Boxes to unpack. Overdue library books to find… Typing in the garage seems like a nice compromise.

OK, the Prius just made a little dying electrical noise and turned itself off. Like it’s trying to tell me something. Maybe it’s time to go.

Homeowner.

This is ridiculous.

I own a home. Or rather, I am on the hook to the bank for a chunk of change, along with my husband, and my parents, thanks to the saving patterns of a different generation, own a significant portion of the house, which is mine except that said bank will take it from us if my husband and I stop paying our mortgage. Hence. Homeowner.

But we can paint the walls, and do things to the garden, like… garden it. H will have her own room. Actually, what’s really going to happen is that H will stop having to share her room with me and my husband. P and I are probably more excited about the whole extra room business than she is. In fact, I’m not sure what she understands about the prospect of moving right now. But my friend J told me yesterday that it was about time that my husband and I have our very own, grown-up room. Don’t ask that question you’re thinking about asking. I won’t answer it.

The next set of questions will be all about budget and time. When you fantasize about having a home, you fantasize about the freedom to make it your own–the avocado paint here, the framed pics there. But that stuff takes money, and until that money materializes, it’s going to be the three of us knocking around in those extra rooms, scraping furniture together off Craigslist.

And I’m thrilled. I am.

Oh, dear.

The loan docs are coming in…

It’s looking increasingly like I’m going to be a homeowner. Not by myself. Via a loan, which I am signing up for with my husband, and via a huge infusion of cash from mom and dad. But homeowner nonetheless.

A friend, on the phone, said: “I don’t remember you sounding this way about having a kid… the long silent pauses… the anxious tone of voice.”

Yup, that’s right. I’m more anxious about owning a house than about having a kid.

The kid, though… I have always known that I wanted kids, I’m comfortable with the genetic programming that makes me want a kid… On the other hand, I have serious doubts — possibly born of over-analysis of the impulses that make us want to buy a house, but nonetheless –  especially about the act of buying at all in a bubble market like Los Angeles.

And the house is great, I love it… But. There is always a “but.” When you have spent years being obsessed with housing and houses, when you have looked at almost every house on the market in your area for years, when you know exactly what your ideal multi-million dollar perfect house would look like… It’s easy to find flaws in what you got.

But we’re buying the right house. I know it.

Of T-Bills, Loan Docs and Men

The T-Bills have come in. The money is sitting, waiting to be funded somewhere else. Everything is progressing normally. But….

But. The new hold-up is the loan documents.  If everything goes as planned, and we get the loan documents today, then we can get them to my parents, who are co-signatories, and we can all sign, and we can close on time and everyone is happy.

If we don’t get the loan docs by tomorrow morning at the latest, then it will be hard to get them to my folks by the 19th, and my father leaves the country for four days from the 20th to the 24th. We close on the 25th.

The bank scheduled a trustee sale for the 26th.

If we don’t close on time, we risk losing the whole thing to foreclosure.

Crap.

There are third way solutions. Power of attorney, notaries in Canada solutions.

Needless to say, I am checking my email compulsively, hoping for loan docs.

Inspections

The inspector was a soft-spoken man with salt-and-pepper hair and a razor-thin moustache. I kept running into him around the house and giving him this big nervous smile. It’s not like I wanted him to miss anything. I mean, if there’s a sinkhole, we want to know. But I still felt like it was important to please him.

In the end, his verdict: Wiggly this. 30 inches of space needed near this. Open this drywall. And don’t use the dungeon as a bedroom (there’s this weird little basement room… not up to code as a bedroom. It’ll be storage). But basically, he said that things looked solid. The house is bolted to its foundation and seems unlikely to go anywhere. The pipes are copper. We are all systems go. Holy crap.

The current owner was there. She seems kind of awesome. She fed H a snack, including a banana. We’re taking her house, and I took a banana. I feel like I should send her kids gifts, or something. What’s the proper gift for your short-seller?

She has three kids, including a little girl exactly H’s age. At first, I felt weird, like… well, like it must kind of suck to show your house to the people who can be seen as profiting from your misfortune. But overall, it was clear that she wanted us to like her house that she is having to leave for some reason… I tried to look appreciative and psyched, in a non-gloating humble way. I complimented the awesome lazy-susans in the cupboards in the kitchen. It’s true. They rock.

Her mother, who is Ukrainian, was clearly the primary care-taker for H’s counterpart. She — the grandma — spoke no English, but she thought it was super hilarious when Harper brought a big blue foam tube inside and played tug of war with my mom. That shit is cross-cultural. The two girls were too shy and too toddler to really interact, but they did some parallel play in the same vicinity. H loves the play structure in the backyard. We love her loving it.

My mom: “You could do a lot worse, in this price range.” This from the woman who is purchasing a solid chunk of this house. But, she didn’t say she was pulling the funding, so I’m going to take that as a ringing endorsement.

This is what I’m reading right now.

Home-ownership and Ontological Security
Saunders used survey evidence to argue that home-ownership is more strongly associated with pride, warmth, autonomy, relaxation and identity than renting, (Saunders, 1990, pp. 270-274).    However,  his  methodology has been criticised by a number of commentators (Darke, 1994; Doyle, 1996; Gurney, 1997) who argue that subtle differences between attitudes and meanings highlighted elsewhere (Kempson and Ford, 1995) are ignored. For example, whilst there is evidence in Saunders’ work for the existence of a tenure-specific meaning of home (Saun- ders, 1990, pp. 272-273) and for a set of tenure specific attitudes towards home improvement and pride of possession (pp. 298-299), the data actually tell us very little about what home-ownership means to people. This creates problems for Saunders in his attempt to equate home-ownership with `ontological security’–a term which is notoriously difficult to define (Franklin, 1986; Gurney, 1990, 1991; Dupuis and Thorns, 1998). Faced with an absence of appropriate evidence, Saunders uses `pride of possession’ as a proxy for ontological security. This shortcoming is compounded when he goes on to conflate ontological security with emotional security. Ideas of home which stress family, intimacy and love are well established (Fitchen, 1989; Allan and Crow, 1991; Anthony, 1997) but the consensus seems to be that they are more closely related to key events in gendered biographies than to housing tenure per se (Gurney, 1997). So Saunders’ research, although widely cited, adds very little to our understanding of the complex meanings associated with home- ownership.

In other words, I’m reading about how the reasons we give ourselves for buying a house are, in fact, cultural constructs, myths, clichés, rhetoric… “Pride of possession” should not be conflated with ontological security.

Go git your ontological security somewhere else, the urban studies researcher is telling me.

Bank approval.

The bank approved our offer on the short sale.

I tried to draw a map of my feelings about this. I have a friend who draws intensely complicated and precise life maps and venn diagrams. Mine was not particularly helpful. You’ll notice that all roads lead to Freak Out.

The most surprising part, for me, has been the little flutter of fear about staying in Los Angeles. My girl who lives and owns in Portland said, “It’s like getting married.” But I didn’t have any fear of commitment about getting married.

all roads lead to freaky town

I have spent a lot of time reading about this city, thinking about it, learning to love it. I know that my fellow natives of the Bay have a hard time believing this, but I dig living here. I love Los Angeles (which does not mean I think it’s perfect, but that’s a topic for another day). I do. That’s not it.

It’s the idea of *not* living other places that gets me. All the doors that are closing. –>Freak out!

What about Portland? My hometown, the Bay Area? What about Buenos Aires? or The Compound on the coast? Some smaller, more peaceful college town with cheaper homes and better air quality?  Or Miami? What about Miami? What about all the  less predictable choices other than a single family home in a nice neighborhood that nevertheless does NOT land within a great school district by the way but that’s another story and…?

Meanwhile, the good people of Portland are like, “Stay where you are, angelino freak! We have enough of you people coming up here,  driving up housing prices, bitching about how white everyone is in Oregon!”

Of course, the inspections could still go haywire. We could find mold or gaping holes in the foundation.

And then I will draw a new map, with arrows pointing to “PHEW” and “CRAP.”

Hello world!

Well, at least the website isn’t broken anymore.

Coming soon…