project blind-folded

as much as i love decorating and renovating my home, there is one task that i loathe.

shopping for window treatments.

if martha could see my struggle with picking out curtains, drapes, blinds, etc. she would design a much better selection of offerings than what is presently available. first, much of the selection is geared towards my mother's generation. there are not too many selections for hip, twenty-some... oops, thirty-somethings with actual taste in design on a budget. and please goddess, no fruit, lacey cut-outs, ivy or flouncy petticoat type curtains should ever grace a window.

oh sure tarshay markets itself as the design inspiration for those with caviar dreams on a bud light budget, but even their selection and prices aren't exactly high couture. for people with whom furniture is often shabby and not because its chic, designing a line of offerings for them to remind them that they are too poor to afford better stuff is just cruel. especially when the price points are still too pricey for them. ouch.

my family room has 14 fucking windows. yes, fucking windows. i say it every summer and spring when i clean the fuckers and change from the light and airy white curtains to the heavy-please-tell-me-the-sun-is-still-there drapes with thermal linings. a room with 14 windows gets mighty nipply.

but it is not for those windows why i am in the midst of my present shopping nightmare. this time i know what i don't want in my upstairs bathroom. nothing heavy to block the great light, but something that will prevent the peep show i've provided my neighbors in the next cul-de-sac behind me (for free!) the last few days. no frills, flowers, bright colors, pastel-ly colors, or anything expensive.

thank goddess the trees' leaves are filling in as nature's curtains to block my peep show to most of my neighbors. i am not usually an exhibitionist, but now that my bathroom renovation is complete (sans curtains, of course) i am going to use it.

the answer to my problem might just be a sewing machine away, but my recent attempts to sew a button on my pants (yup, it popped) reinforced the notion that despite my creative juices, there are some skills i just haven't mastered. or even entered into the shallow end of the pool with yet.

until then, i'll continue looking and hope my neighbors aren't.

it was the best of times...

...and it was the worst of times.

the box lied to us - this was neither fast nor easy. nor installed at this point.

i am referring to the last piece of our renovation project operation kill the pepto. our desire to remove the last remaining pepto bismol pink walls that coated our master bedroom and bath suite led to the last three and a half-months of painting, scraping and tearing out floors, fixing the closet so it can actually be used as a closet. (although it still can't hold all my shoes. crikey!)

we ripped up brown nasty carpet and replaced with new, puppy-approved carpet. we brought home two samples and let the girls choose -- of course they friggin' pick the expensive one.

we painted the walls a cool, silky ralph lauren metallic silver, which accentuated the room's size and contrasted nicely with our rich mahogany furniture and the velvety merlot hued-wall behind our bed. we painted the bathroom is slate blues, crisp whites and chose a brazilian cherry laminate floor for the closet, hallway and bathroom.

that's where it gets tricky.

neither of us are too shabby when it comes to the world of tools. my husband comes from a family of carpenters and skilled tradesmen, and even worked himself as an electrician after college and before he could step up into the white-collared world of eletrical engineer. i spent many years working in a frame shop where i learned to swing a hammer, work with sheets of glass and use tools like a pro.

so when this box of fake wood -- stick slot A into slot B -- fcuking refused to work for us, well, we had a problem with that. for a box with a total of 6 directions and directions in which both of us with our advanced degrees read numerous times, we could not fcukin figure out what we were doing wrong.

we got to the point were we almost decided to shave off the edges and nail the thing to the floor. we had reached a critical milestone -- our project could not proceed without a floor. we cursed, we screamed, we almost cried. we decided we needed to walk away.

when we came back the next night, we were inspired with a new vigor. it was going happen we could feel it. and it did. we missed the step where you unwrap the materials to allow them to acclimate to the room's temperature for at least 24 hours before attempting to install.

it seems my little habit of not unwrapping things has once again bit me in the ass.

i wish i thought of this...

if this is so wrong, what makes it right to do to a pet?

this movie clip was an advertisement produced by a canadian advertising firm for the spca.

i am not sure if it ever ran in the u.s. but i sincerely hope it would.

our house is a very very very fine house

the true measure of a couple's compatibility and the strength of their marriage can be gleaned by their response to this three-word phrase:

home improvement project

some shudder. some cry. some get angry and vow never again. some just laugh.

face it, with half of all marriages ending in divorce, someone at home depot needs to come up with a better slogan than "you can do it. we can help." unless they also plan to start offering couples therapy and cheap divorce lawyers.

maybe it's just because men and women are so different in their approach to life (and a project) that even having a store like home depot just deepens the line drawn in the sand between the sexes.

i spent a better part of my morning in home depot as you may have guessed. hubby and i had a reason to be in the store, we were picking up supplies to finish our master bedroom, bath and closet makeover. sadly, ty pennington and carter oosterhouse were not a part of this home makeover, although their presence would have certainly made things more enjoyable for me.

it started out routinely enough, we entered together pushing a cart with our list in hand. i'm not sure what evil force field lurks beyond those sliding doors but by the time we were ready to leave the store, we're ready to go aisle 9 to pick up a pick axe and finish each other off.

the funny thing is it's not just us that this strange phenomena happens to -- today, i witnessed at least 3 other couples who were ready to see judge judy for dissolution of their marriage. friends have told me similar stories of how they simply refuse to go into that store with their spouse. home depot has morphed into the great orange divide.

maybe its the way the store is divided between "contractor" and "home" that begins the tension. my husband left me in the paint department to just go check out a miterbox. it's not needed for our project today but i like walking through the kitchen cabinet section to dream about things i cannot have, so he have his few minutes alone to wonder how great life would be with this miterbox at his side.

with list in hand, i continued picking up items on it. when i got to the bottom of the list i realized wow, he's been gone quite awhile. my next thought is, this can only end badly.

as i whipped out my cell phone to use as a tracking device, i shuddered in panic. we had been in the store for almost two hours. i sincerely believe that the amount of frustration that a project absorbs is directly proportional to the amount of time spent procuring supplies in the pre-planning stages. we planned to be working in confined spaces for the next two days -- if he was pissed at me he'd go to taco bell and try to asphyxiate me while i painted the bathroom.

i dialed his number feverishly. no answer. oh my god, oh my god, oh my god. we were now entering into the "where the hell were you" stage of shopping. it didn't matter who went where...we both left the spots where we had last been seen. now it was just a matter of getting the words out first and with the proper finger point and exasperated facial expression.
in my journey to cover the monster warehouse aisle by aisle in search of him, i kept running into another couple deep in the throes of home depot-itis. they bickered as their anklebiters climbed all over their cart of plants and mulch. they traded snide remarks that i couldn't hear but could tell it wasn't pretty by the curled lips and bared teeth.

taking on a home improvement project just amplifies the normal human response to conflict. it has all the best elements to break a marriage:
+ to fights over the cost of the project (you spent how much over budget?),

+ to battles over who wins final say when a couple is in disagreement (sorry, we are not painting the kitchen yellow),

+ to struggles over work ethic (get up off yer ass and help me, would you?).

a home improvement project is like a soap opera -- c'mon, why do you think the steady surge of television programming in this genre? it's not because people are suddenly interested in paint colors and shag carpeting. it's for the conflict, silly.

a good project has all of this drama and a still has room for a pleasant result in the end. and for the couples who can eventually find humor during the process, well, they have the longest staying power there is.



before i got married, my husband and i had to take pre cana classes where a pregnant woman taught birth control and a priest talked about relationships. now either she didn't practice what she preached or her methods were suspect. regardless, i had volunteered at planned parenthood long enough to know what's what. but the single priest trying to tell me how to be a better partner? this is like me teaching a cooking class -- neither of us are qualified to give any advice in these areas.

but just think, instead of those wasted hours learning the rhythm method of birth control -- which has a failure rate somewhere near the rate of marriage survival -- what if there were field trips to home depot instead? what if that weekend was spent doing a home improvement project to test a couples' compatibility, to see if two people can work side by side, crammed into a tiny room, ripping up carpet, painting and installing new windows? finding misplaced tools, screaming for help when something lands on your foot? all of the homework could be completed for habitat for humanity and maybe some couples would learn a little more about each other than they originally thought they knew.

as for me, my hubby and i play the game so well. we both got the "where the hell were yous" out at the same time and we both had stinky lunches. thankfully, our bedroom - bath - closet home makeover is almost complete.

just as soon as that green cloud dissipates.

learning to juggle

as this 3-month project at work winds down to a close, i think my middle-of-the-night cold sweats will stop. the million moving parts that i have been responsible for delegating, reviewing, compiling, approving and finalizing are finally slowing down.

the blur that these last few weeks have been -- the sinking feeling of drowning -- of being pulled in more than one direction -- of feeling completely incompetent -- piles of paperwork -- post-its clinging for dear life on my monitor -- emails multiplying like rabbits in my inbox -- the long hours and late trains -- the incessant red blinking light on my phone signaling more questions, more comments, more requests for my time -- should end with it.

my boss emailed me today to tell me how proud she is of me and what a great job i did on managing this process. i thanked her for her compliment and told her it feels like i learned how to juggle knives blindfolded.

the jews killed jesus

please, please, please don't think i am an anti-semite. i am against all organized religions, actually.

after 12 years of brainwashing in a catholic school, they did all but pump subliminal messages into the drinking water and over public address system. *jesus died for your sins.* whoa -- jesus died because i got into a fight with my brother? holy shit! even in a 7-year-old's mind that seems like way too much power over someone.

dressed in our little blue uniforms and peter pan collar blouses, knee socks slouched to a certain level of coolness, we were pawns in the big, fat, religious conspiracy of catholicism. we were made to feel guilty for being girls, after all it was eve who fed adam the friggin apple and made it all go to shit supposedly. why? because adam was too friggin lazy to make his own dinner, dammit!

let's face it, our attendance was based more on a shitty public school system and not our parent's piety.

so when my friend talked about the moving religious service she attended, it was hard to see how this happened. what my head tuned out, it seems, is the fact that it was a jewish service she attended. my ears heard religion and automatically shut down. frankly, i am surprised i didn't go straight to my inner happy place.

well, that's surprising. its not that we were against the jewish faith, as i said before, we are just wary of any bully-pulpits. so that fact that she got some satisfaction from it really threw me for a loop.

instead of encouraging her experience, the rest of my friends cracked jokes. (deal with it. it's what we do.) we laughed how the nuns would have responded, "but the jews killed jesus."

of course, someone also pointed out the romans killed jesus but that doesn't justify any acts of persecution that have been heaped on the jewish people for all time. plus it doesn't look as good on a t-shirt.

only beckys and negroes are flammable

last night, as i walked out of my grad class with a few classmates, a few of us joked how the "bad kids" always gravitated towards one another in school.

normally, they would find each other outside puffing away as curls of cigarette smoke formed chains of solidarity around our necks. i was in fact very much a part of the bad girls smoking crew. like something straight out of an emily dickinson poem:

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us — don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.

my undergrad years were very much like that. the crew of malcontents to which i belonged shared our poverty, our cynicism and our drugs the same way our opposites shared fashion tips. we were the 90s versions of hippies and radicals in torn jeans, flannel shirts listening to nirvana at all hours of the day and night. our beliefs were based on concepts shaped outside of pampered suburban childhoods or the virtues of having two parents. we clung to each other for our visions, truth and doc martins in the face of our vapid classmates.

but mostly we stuck together for the drugs.

despite our empty wallets, we quickly learned the basics of investing and good citizenship. by combining a few measly dollars, we could buy enough drugs to share the assets with all investors -- like a marijuana mutual fund.

oh we were frugal. our knowledge of dime bags only can take a college student so far when ramen noodles never quite satisfied the munchies we'd develop. still, most of us could never call home and ask for money to buy food even if it went to when taking into account we could again pool our finances to pay for the $6 dominos pizza special, we still always felt like we came up short on money.

what we were not short on was fun. yup, we were the kids who stole the bell from the library. we used it to ring it at parties and say,"yup shit's officially out of control."

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

we rather liked our no name status on campus. we partied by and for ourselves, sometimes letting friend-of-friends in our fun. it was one of those nights when we discovered the flammability of beckys and negroes.

it was a routine saturday night sitting in someone's dorm room on campus. we had yet to get kicked off or have the local cops come to arrest john fidelis. we had no clue who the fcuk was john fidelis. we were partying with eric.

who the fcuk is john fidelis?

we often said that ourselves. until of course, we discovered "eric" was john fidelis in three states and desperately wanted by the cops for something we didn't really care to learn what for exactly.

so it was a pretty routine night, nothing out of the ordinary. we were drinking and smoking, passing the pipe from person to person, until we smelled smoke.

a different type of smoke. not the sweet ahhhh scent of pot, and not the pinch of clove cigarettes and certainly not the black curtain of marlboro reds we chained smoked back then. it smelled worse.

becky or someone sitting next to her had dropped an ash from one of our lit smoking devices and instead of hitting the floor to burn us and the dorm into extinction, we were burning becky. the fringe of her torn jeans had caught the hot ash before it hit the grungy carpet. becky was on fire.

it took a moment for our drug and drink induced haze to clear enough to grasp what was happening. BECKY WAS ON FIRE.

and we laughed. oh god, how we laughed! BECKY WAS ON FIRE. hell, becky even laughed with us. after she realized the guy that pounced on her was not going for a cheap thrill.

thankfully someone had the good sense to dive on becky and pat the bottom of her legs down until we were sure we wouldn't lose her to the burn ward. aside from adding new scars to a ancient pair of jeans and some minor bruises from her overanxious savior, she emerged unscathed.

"ding! shit's officially OUT OF CONTROL," the bell captured the moment.

until a few moments later when fluffy, our lovable 6'5" massive black friend began to sweat after snuffing out the flames on becky. he managed to set himself on fire as he bent over becky, the fringe from his cut-off denim jacket was the next item to go up in flames.

the guy standing closest to him refused to touch him. he goes as a black man, "i am the next one to go up in flames, dammit. 'cause everybody knows only beckys and negroes are flammable."

ding!