Come on, Come Out

For once, I put my money where my mouth is unlike past recommendation-request posts (see: vacuums, as I haven’t upgraded yet, and just used my ancient Eureka for the frillionth time), and went to Barnes & Noble and picked up a few books — “The Devil in the White City” the first in the pile, because there were five of you – FIVE! – who enthusiastically recommended it, even those who generally read fiction, like me. I’m cracking it open this evening, and I’m rather excited about it, so thank you!

In the “Oh, the irony — it BURNS LIKE THE HOT SUN!” category, I also picked up Michael Chabon’s “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” which is something I’ve been meaning to read since it came out a few years ago. This, of course, means that I am gleefully lining the pockets of the Chabon-Waldman family, and in some strange way, am contributing to Ayelet Waldman’s uncanny ability to be as condescending as humanly possible. (For a nice, succinct reason as to why I’ve always been … lukewarm at best, on Ms. Waldman, read here. That’s really just the tip of the iceberg.) (Thanks, Lawyerish!)

And yet! I loved Chabon’s “Mysteries of Pittsburgh” and “Wonder Boys” remains one of my favorite books AND movies (though Chabon didn’t write the screenplay to the latter, both are equally good), and one of my neighbors is wonderful and funny and kind and his wife … well, his wife isn’t, to put it nicely, and I hate punishing him because he married a bit of a douche, and I suppose the same theory applies. I’ll just try not to think of the satin sheets I helped the Chaldmans procure with my purchase, and I will try extra-hard not to envision what they do between those sheets, despite Waldman’s relentless reminders.

(For the record, it’s never been the meat of her mothering essay that bothered me, it’s the … well, it’s the condescension with which she presents her ideas. Like those who harbor views different from hers are merely poor, unenlightened sacks worthy of pity.)

Anyway! Anyone who’s sold a house well, ever, can appreciate the misery that is living while it’s on the market. A knife in the sink is not just a knife in the sink, it is a knife in the heart of the prospective buyer who does not want to know that you eat peanut butter. He doesn’t want to know that you use cocoa butter on your legs and he definitely doesn’t want to know that you wear underwear, so for the love of God, put the laundry away! PUT THE LAUNDRY AWAY BECAUSE THE BUYER MIGHT BE AT YOUR HOUSE IN A MINUTE OMG.

Don’t get me wrong — I like a clean house, really I do, but it’s reached the point where I’m afraid to eat, lest a rogue crumb escape my lips and breed and multiply and ruin my chances of moving out of this house as long as I live, forever and ever, amen. All because of a blueberry muffin.

This also means we won’t be decorating for Christmas, which breaks my heart a little, but there it is. It’s particularly sad because we lived in apartments and tiny condos for so long that we were never able to decorate — one of the things we were so excited about moving into our own! house! was that we could finally hang lights like normal people and OH HANG LIGHTS WE DID. Most years, you could see our house from space, and Adam started clamoring for decorations the day after Thanksgiving.

The grand irony in all of this is that Adam was raised Jewish, and yet … he’s the most enthusiastic Christmas decorator you’ve ever met, in large part because he can finally participate, I guess. I don’t know. At any rate, if it were solely up to him, our house would look as though a thousand tiny elves threw up all over the place.

But this year, we’re too terrified of offending anyone to hang anything that smacks of the slightest whiff of religion, because with our luck, we’ll find the one non-Christian couple within a 500-mile radius and they will be offended by our (entirely secular) lights. This would be an astonishing stroke of poor luck , as we live in a part of the country where the Pledge of Allegiance AND at least three prayers are said before any business meeting, but I’m not putting it past our craptastic luck.

And with that, I’m off to fold the 8,897 load of laundry today. I hope you had a great weekend! Happy Monday!

*As in, come on, come out and for the love of God, does anyone want to buy my house? Pretty please? But it’s by A Fine Frenzy, if that’s what you meant. I mean, she’s fine and all — I actually really like her voice — but she’s extremely overrated. The review on iTunes is spot-on. The only reason I can conjure for the ridiculous excitement and … frenzy … around her is that she attracts the teen set after appearing in One Tree Hill. I mean, reading some of the reviews online, I was expecting JESUS HIMSELF to be singing to me, and perhaps I was set up for disappointment from the get-go. Maybe that’s it. Although she is an improvement over Ashlee Simpson, as one iTunes reviewer noted.

19 comments December 2nd, 2007