Plumbing the depths

Something I find more intimidating than even the process of buying a house is the process of remodeling. We moved into our house knowing that we would have to redo the upstairs bathroom (and eventually the kitchen and downstairs bathroom) and have been deferring that decision ever since.

However, the peeling wallpaper and paint flaking from the ceiling and the water staining on the vinyl flooring make abundantly clear that our upstairs bathroom requires attention. So, I am starting to think about the redo. Blurgh.

A particular challenge is that the bathroom measures about 5 by 8. Which actually is fine with me, except that I harbor a deep desire for deep baths. (Calgon, take me away!) Which is leading me to look rather longingly at the walk-in soaking tub:





Or is it too geriatric?

Or is that perhaps a forward looking investment in case we sell the house to empty nesters or stay here past retirement ourselves?

Coming next: Oh, how the Toto makes me want to go-go.

I can't fix it

Today, I am going Garrison Keillor on you. No, not by cracking jokes about Lutherans - ha ha ha! Here is a poem that I think summarizes exactly what a house of one's own means for StraightMan and me, esp. in this summer of repair.

It is "Handymen" by Cornelius Eady, published in The New Yorker on October 8, 2007:

The furnace wheezes like a drenched lung.
You can’t fix it.
The toilet babbles like a speed freak.
You can’t fix it.
The fuse box is a nest of rattlers.
You can’t fix it.
The screens yawn the bees through.
Your fingers are dumb against the hammer.
Your eyes can’t tell plumb from plums.
The frost heaves against the doorjambs,
The ice turns the power lines to brittle candy.
No one told you about how things pop and fizzle,
No one schooled you in spare parts.
That’s what the guy says but doesn’t say
As he tosses his lingo at your apartment-dweller ears,
A bit bemused, a touch impatient,
After the spring melt has wrecked something, stopped something,
After the hard wind has lifted something away,
After the mystery has plugged the pipes,
That rattle coughs up something sinister.
An easy fix, but not for you.
It’s different when you own it,
When it’s yours, he says as the meter runs,
Then smiles like an adult.

BTW, we have this poem taped to the wall of our kitchen, right above the light switch for the basement, which as far as I am concerned is a place that contains things that certainly are vital, but also leak and rust and crust over...

Like my colon, I want to be able to take for granted the working condition of the nether parts of my house. It is bad news when they call attention to themselves.

The WC

The air around here has been thick with the dust of cedar shakes being scraped for restaining, and heady with the scent of trim being repainted. For the last two months... Yesterday, there was also the buzz of saws cutting rotted wood and rusted metal from the flat roof of our laundry room, which had been added onto the house some time in the last 50 or so years and apparently never maintained.

Not to worry: StraightMan and I hired someone else to work on it. They seem actually to know what they are doing. When they are here, but that is another story...

Even as I write this post, StraightMan is in the kitchen, replacing the kitchen faucet. Last winter, our furnace quit, our pipes froze, leaving thankfully minimal damage, but it included hairline fractures in the neck of the faucet.

(If you were, are, or know a breastfeeding mother: You know when a baby suddenly pops off mid-nursing, sending the stream shooting across the room in a fine white thread? Our faucet behaved like that. For those unfamiliar with breastfeeding, now you learned something new about human lactation.)

Meanwhile, this is the first summer in the six years that we have lived here that I have weeded and pruned and even grown a few plants in pots. Something resembling landscaping has been emerging around the house.

I also am researching a remodel of our upstairs bathroom because the time finally has come to do it. The paint and the wallpaper are peeling, the vinyl floor covering is prying loose, the area around the tub has dark spots of water damage, and the vanity around the sink is rotting. Sigh.

In an earlier post, I decried the tyranny of the kitchen island, which in fact was a way of expressing my irritation with the so-called "not-so-big" movement, which seems really to be about not-so-small spaces and kind-of-big budgets.

To get ideas, I am turning to Web sites like apartment therapy because I realize that we essentially live in a duplex apartment with a bit of outside space not unlike a Manhattan roof deck or even a large fire escape.

I also just read about vintagesimplehome in a Better Homes and Garden Kitchens and Bathrooms magazine that I bought at Home Depot. I * heart * the bathroom, which is just similar enough in size and layout to our bathroom - except it might be a bit roomier (or is it just the effect of the pedestal sink?) and our toilet and sink are on the same wall (which I guess makes the layout quite different...) - it gives me hope that we can have a pretty bathroom, too.

A sure sign that I am approaching middle age: I so covet subway tile.

On the other hand, there is always Plan B.

P.S. The photo above came from here.

Peeved

This morning, I took Bubbie to his "swim" lesson. So called because it involves a swimming pool. (In fact, I like the lessons, and I credit them with helping Beanie develop swim-readiness.) Bubbie enjoys most of the activities, except those involving having to listen to the instructor and holding hands with the other kids.

Nevertheless.

As I am backing out of the driveway, I stop, of course, and check the street in both directions. At the far end of the block, I see a car just crossing the intersection, but as it is a full block away, and it is a residential street with a speech limit, and it is a slow Saturday morning (i.e., no students speeding to a class for which they likely are unprepared and in which they are unlikely to participate meaningfully...) I decide, I think reasonably, to back into the street. I was not conscious of making these calculations - I think this is what Malcolm Gladwell calls blink.

I digress.

I am just straightening out and pulling forward when I just barely see the other car whiz past on my right. There is a good chance that we could have sideswiped each other. I slam to a stop. Bubbie, strapped into his car seat, protests. I am livid.

I try to get over it, but then a couple of blocks later, I see the car come to a rolling stop, then whiz into the parking lot across the street from the Y (where I am headed) through the one-way exit. I pull into the spot across from the car as it happens to be the closest open spot. I admit I am somewhat surprised when the driver turns out to be a kind of elfish-looking middle-aged woman, but I roll down my window, and tell (admittedly, scream at) her, "That was an incredibly dangerous thing you did on Elm St. in front of my house while I was backing out."

She looks at me, half laughs in disbelief, then tells me, "Lady, I had the right of way, I saw a space, and I took it." I am not sure what part of this peeved me most: Lady? (Ever notice how this word went from being a compliment to a bit of a pejorative, uttered when somebody says something obnoxious? I cringe whenever I hear people use "lady" as a term of address or of reference, unless followed by something like "Camilla" or even "Gaga.") Right of way? (More below.) Space and took it? (Did she learn to drive playing Pole Position?)

Whether or not she had the "right of way" - and she was at the other intersection when I pulled into the street, which indicates to me that she was speeding - it seems to me that the driver still acted dangerously. Was she in a rescue car with lights and siren blaring? Was I driving a tractor or Amish buggy on a county road?

By the way, she had sped through the streets and pulled into the parking lot through the one-way exit on her way to a plant exchange at a local church. Gardening emergency!

I was thinking a lot about why this incident and my exchange with the driver so shook me. Because when she told me she had the "right of way," I tried to tell her: I could not see you passing me on the right. There could have been an accident. (Which, btw, there already had been this morning, with a college student slamming into a parked car while she was changing the CD she was listening to - she was not hurt, but the other car was totaled.) This is not just a matter of what your "right" is, but what the right thing to do is, with people being considerate of each other. Even when that means slowing down for the car that you see, from a block away, has pulled into the street. Or at least honk to let me know you are passing me on the right.

This got me thinking about why people post signs in front of their houses that read "Thank you for not speeding." Which I used to find a bit silly (not sure that they actually changed anyone's behavior) and also a bit snarky (because they clearly were not about thanking anyone, in the same way that someone who calls you "lady" often means something else).

I have been thinking that the signs are a way (the only way?) that people feel like they can assert their concerns and frustrations. (Our apparent impotence as neighbors and citizens is a topic I think about, too. Another time.) I think it is a comment not on whose right of way and the law, but how you behave around people's homes. The street in front of my house is public, but it is part of the immediate environment that I call my home. So, I do not like high school students breaking beer bottles, college students drunkenly shouting, or middle-aged gardeners speeding in front of where I live.

Perhaps it is a sign of the good neighborliness that many people around here really do exhibit. I have come to take that right way of behaving (not just a right of way way of behaving) as what we all ought to do. Not necessarily in the borrow-a-cup-of-sugar and chat-on-the-porch kind of way that (I think) is so romanticized, but at least a more fundamental patience with each other. Because we live with each other. Because we need to get along.

My tenure kitchen

Hard to believe: I just finished my 4th year of teaching at what on this blog I will call East Central State University College. I agree it is ridiculous that all of these words can be strung together to form the name of an institution.

So, I am supposed to start thinking about putting together my tenure file.

Allow me to preface what I am about to say about tenure: I am not sure how I feel about tenure in general b/c I get that there are arguments for it pro and con, and this is now how they do it in the UK, and so on. For example, in terms of so-called job security, the idea of a 5-year contract, with possibility of renewal, sounds reasonable to me, too. However, tenure means "more" than job security. So, as far as that goes, I want tenure, too, as a sign of a positive appraisal resulting from the process of peer review.

Here is what I am about to say about tenure: I wish that there were more "perspective" on tenure. One of StraightMan's friends from graduate school remarked that tenure is proof of ability to self-exploit. Funny how many tenured and tenure-track professors do not find this, well, hilarious, as StraightMan and I do, sitting at our adjacent desks, preparing classes, then glancing and muttering at each other, "Self-exploiter."

What happened to irony: The kind that is so not what our high school English teachers meant, but that having come of age during Reagan and Bush I apparently cultivated. Or what happened to humility and the ability to see, like Straight Man, that "promotion in an institution like West Central Pennsylvania University was a little bit like being proclaimed the winner of a shit-eating contest. Certainly such success did not reflect greater worth on the open academic market. To move to a better college, we'd have to give up something - tenure or rank or salary, or some combination of the three" (27).

In other words, I do not want to make too small or too big a deal about tenure.

It might be b/c I am turning 40 this year, therefore feeling a bit more reflective than usual even, but this bit from Richard Russo also makes sense to me: "I sometimes tell myself that I might have found another book in me if I'd been in a different, more demanding environment, one with better students, a shared sense of artistic urgency, the proper reverence for the life of the mind. But then I remember Occam's Razor, which strongly suggests that I am a one-book author. Had I been more, I'd be more" (27). Which I quote not to be self-pitying or self-deprecating but b/c I think stating things so unpityingly and undeprecatingly, in fact, helps me to keep trying in any case. I think that it is necessary to recognize that research universities do not just hire researchers, but that they produce them. Similarly, teaching colleges produce teachers. Tenure, then, is academia / higher ed's brand of quality control. It ensures that the research universities produce researchers and the teaching colleges produce teachers, to more or less their specification.

BTW, I find Occam's Razor, how shall I say, a bit ethnocentric. Whose version of simple? What is so simple about your version or mine in the first place?

Which brings me to my intended topic: I hope I get tenure. When I do, I want a kitchen!

At first, I had been browsing magazines and books and Web sites like The Not-So-Big House, but I kept finding ideas and inspiration for not-so-small kitchens. Why does everyone think they need an island?

Then I stumbled upon Apartment Therapy and their Small, Cool Kitchens Contest.

I esp. like the kitchen with the old file cabinets in the International division.

Whatever my tenure kitchen looks like, it will not have an island.

Spring cleaning, part 3

During my break, I indulged in a little spring cleaning of the small stack of magazines that I have not read: Back issues of Bon Appetit (for which I confess to having not much taste, but which we felt forced to accept when Conde Nast shuttered Gourmet, after we had renewed our subscription), The Nation (which I read for Katha Pollitt, for arts and books coverage, and for the occasional need to feel righteously enraged), and The Economist (which might be the last newspaper standing to cover international news and science journalism in any meaningful way).

I skimmed. I clipped. I recycled.

It was from The Economist that I clipped an item on “The rise of the handyman” in Britain. The Economist reports:

Domestic help has long been a mostly female preserve, involving nannies, cleaners and laundry maids. That is changing, according to a forthcoming study by Majella Kilkey of the University of Hull and Diane Perrons of the London School of Economics. The pair reckon that nowadays 39% of domestic helpers in Britain are men, up from 17% in the early 1990s.

Now, the article, in its lede, gives the impression that professional men themselves are hiring handymen to take on odd jobs so that they can spend more time with their children. Not until the penultimate paragraph does the report note “it is mostly mothers who contract and supervise the workers.” (The article also adds “for the most part fathers do – whatever the cynics suspect – spend the time thus liberated with their families, rather than in the office, at the gym or in the pub.”)

I am curious to know about whether or not the trend holds in the United States, but I can imagine that here, too, not only are traditional men’s odd jobs being “outsourced” (e.g., the task formerly known as mowing the lawn being assigned to landscaping companies that employ migrant workers), but the outsourcing itself creates another form of house work (i.e., domestic management) for women. In my experience, it is typically the women who trade suggestions and recommendations and circulate the names and numbers of plumbers, electricians, contractors, and so on. Not to mention the women who make the arrangements to be at home for the service call or take the car for the oil change or the repairs.

In other words, as odd jobs become outsourced, the task becomes "shopping" for service, which falls into line with already existing ideas, in American culture and society, about what men do and what women do.

(For the record, StraightMan and I look on this type of home management as work that we share. Like laundry and meals and parenting. Which is part of the reason why I like him so much.)

In fact, StraightMan and I talk about the fact that as much as we need a wife - the kind who packs lunches for her Brady Bunches - we also need a husband. The kind with a tool belt. StraightMan seems secure enough in his masculinity to admit to the fact that while he is handy enough, he is not especially handy. Also, coupled with the demands and pressures of working in Higher Ed, he is not especially inclined toward doing odd jobs on the weekends. He really sees as his priority to be with Beanie and Bubbie (and with me).

So, I see parallels between the devaluing of odd jobs and, say, cleaning. The devaluing of odd jobs both shapes and mirrors shifts in ideas and practices of what it means to be a man today. The devaluing of odd jobs for professional men is not unrelated to their outsourcing to other men - for example, migrants and immigrants who are paid less and seen or heard little.

I think about Beanie and Bubbie: If children grow up with parents who do not clean the gutters, regrout the tub, and so on, then they learn nothing about the existence of gutters or the need for grout, much less about the tools of the trade, to say nothing of the skills required. They lose not only appreciation, but the ability to appreciate at all the effort and energy expended and the practice gained. They simply do not know or even notice.

I also see a distinction that is made between these kinds of work and, say, cooking, knitting, and woodworking, which arguably always commanded at least a bit of respect as "craft" and today have become revalued. (As an aside, I think there is much more to say about the interest in "craft" in academia - for example, The New Yorker published this review of the books Shop Class as Soulcraft and Richard Sennett's The Craftsman.)
By revalue, I do not necessarily mean a "return" to previous value, but the assignment of still other (new-to-them) value.

Spring cleaning, part 2

Having been raised as an American and a female, too, I find that accessorizing improves my impression of almost any task at hand. For example: On a whim, I have enrolled, with a few friends, in a cupcake decorating workshop. If you know me at all, then I might as well have said that I will be taking a a class in organic chemistry or a seminar on strip tease. In any case, the point is that the workshop requires that I bring a cake decorating kit, which I do not, or until last week did not, own because I am more the butter-knife-and-a-can-of-Betty-Crocker type. So, I bought said kit because I started to think that a significant reason why I have no frosting / icing skills (aside from the availability of artfully decorated cakes for purchase, not to mention my complete lack of interest until now) is exactly because I do not own the right tools.

The importance and meaning of accessories do not end there.

Recently, I replaced our indoor broom with a Casabella animal print broom that I admit I had eyed for a time. The broom says: I sweep, but I also have a sense of style and humor. Grrr.

But wait, there's more!

I confess also that when we lived in a place with a Whole Foods, I spent inordinate time in the home products aisle, considering the virtues of bamboo-fiber scrubbers and the like. At our local natural foods market (formerly known as a health food store), I like to browse the bottles of Life Tree Home Soap and Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day All Purpose Cleaner. In my office on campus, I keep an Eco-Cloth in my desk drawer.

I am a fool for "design" and the marketing of consumer items pertaining to the green-and-simple house and home. Like other domestic arts that became reframed as drudge work that are becoming re-reframed as crafts - knitting and cooking come to mind - cleaning, too, is being packaged and sold.

Not production, but consumption - and I seem to be buying it.

Spring cleaning, part 1

From my wise and wonderful friend’s blog, I followed a link to wise and wonderful words from writer Anne Lamott – on how and why we need not be over-connected and over-busy. “Time is not free—that’s why it’s so precious and worth fighting for,” she writes.

I enjoyed Lamott’s musings about making time for living until this bit near the end:

Will they give me one hour of housecleaning in exchange for the poetry reading? Or wash the car just one time a month, for the turtles? No? I understand. But at 80, will they be proud that they spent their lives keeping their houses cleaner than anyone else in the family did, except for mad Aunt Beth, who had the vapors?

I would like to defend cleaning. Social anthropologist Mary Douglas described dirt as “matter out of place.” Cleaning, for me, is putting in place. At the end of the day, I sweep the Cheerios under the table into the dustbin, wipe clean the kitchen counters of coffee grounds, pick up the wooden train tracks and the building blocks on the living room rug and return them to their baskets.

Indeed, the tracks and blocks have baskets because everything must have its place - if not, then I will find or make one for it.

So, I am not talking about cleaning of the back breaking, shoulders aching, bones creaking, and clean squeaking kind, at least not on a regular basis :) The fact that we hire help on that front has contributed to the balance of 2 jobs + 2 kids.

I find the work of cleaning, and certainly its effects, satisfying. I take pride in having my house "clean" - that is, in order. It will be a fine thing to remember me by - or it would be, were cleaning not so belittled.