humans are funny

Category: home

  • For Sale: 3-bedroom house. Close to great schools and racists!

    Last year I wrote about my home-selling heartbreak. The house where I formed into being was going on the market. I found it painful to say goodbye to the tree that was planted on the day I was born and the street I can feel with my eyes closed in the backseat of my mom’s car. Selling that house felt like giving up my childhood. As an only child, it’s that house that will share my memories as I get older. Nobody else knows about my hiding spots and the treasures I have thrown dropped down the heating vents (Those were only child experiments. I also was positive there was buried treasure in the couch cushions so I cut them open and sewed them back again, thinking my mom would never notice. She did.)

     Saying goodbye to that house would be like saying goodbye to a parent, a grandma, a best friend, a leg. Still, my mom wanted to retire, hang out with other hip senior citizens, and maybe drive a golf cart in Arizona. I couldn’t blame her. Golf carts are pretty zippy.

    We met with a real estate agent, and as fast as a Rascal scooter, we had a fake bed in the spare room and a ‘For Sale’ sign in the yard. I shed a few tears. I was officially bidding adieu to my childhood home. Heart. Breaking.

    And then I went to a bar down the street from that house and heard a few guys use the N word and light firecrackers inside. Then another told me how sorry he was for me because I wasn’t fully Italian. That’s my town, a Midwest Jersey Shore. (note: if you’re in the Chicagoland area and looking for a tanning bed, please visit Addison IL. We also have a bowling alley and shootings!).

    The encounter with the judgey Italian made me feel slightly better about leaving my town for good. Then with each open house, I felt more and more closure. I could always come back and revisit my nooks, my heating vent treasures, the window where the birds make their yearly nest, and the old treehouse I made out of tires and plywood.

    You know that financial/mortgage/lending crisis that seemed to affect everyone? I heard about it. I’ll admit that it hadn’t affected me much. I live on Venice Beach, right in the center of a touristy commercial hub. There are plenty of jobs in LA. I don’t own a home to lose. This lending crisis thing did not seem like a big deal. That sounds pretty ignorant, but don’t worry: there is some learning on the horizon.

    A few years ago, our house was worth about $250,000 (Hey, Mom! I’m writing about our personal finances! You look sleepy. You should go now.). That was before the guy on our street killed his mother and a hooker (long story) and the dad two streets away killed his wife and kids on Thanksgiving (not really a long story). Not that those things ruin property values, but maybe they do ruin property values. They definitely make me proud to be from Addison, IL, home of weird murders (Remind me to tell you about the guy who killed a woman but cut open her belly to steal her unborn kid.).

    Our real estate agent wouldn’t put our house on the market for anything more than $180,000. My mom almost had a heart attack, but we went with it. Anything to get closer to that golf cart.

    During my last visit, as I took a walk around our neighborhood and counted the plastic ducks dressed in clothing (there is a surprising plethora), I noticed several vacant, boarded-up houses. There is a surprising plethora. People have left our neighborhood. Fled. Some streets look scary and war-trodden.

    Those people probably got ARM loans and couldn’t pay. They should have invested in clothing for ducks, but they didn’t. They lost their homes. Those homes are on sale by the banks. Those homes are going for $60,000. Who would pay full-price for our house when they could get one for the price of a BMW?

    After six months on the market, we took our house off. No more nice weather on the horizon for my mom. Instead of a golf cart, she’ll have to rider her Pontiac through a town where people feel bad for her ethnicity (She’s ONLY half Italian! Gasp!).

    I was originally sad to say goodbye, but now my heart beats even more angst. My mom moved to the suburbs years ago so I could have a ‘normal’ childhood (if spending your childhood in tanning beds is normal). I want her to go have her zippy life full of senior activities in the sun.

    Now that it’s no longer a possibility, I am absolutely okay with never seeing my tree again. Bye.

    I recently heard a piece on the radio about how the mortgage crisis is the fault of all the house-flippers because they got shitty loans thinking they’d resell quickly. It won’t help to blame any group or the government or the banks. I want to, but it won’t help. Instead, I will say that this economy does affect everyone! And it stinks. And my mom deserves her golf cart!

    If you know of anyone who would love to pay full price for a house in an area where weird murders are abundant and there are parks and racists, please give me a call. I can tell you it will be worth it. There are great schools in the area. There is a movie theater. There is one bar. And it’s just a 20-minute drive into Chicago. Plus, there is a tree here that shares my birthday. And…  treasures await you in the heating vents (at least one Barbie.). Call while supplies last!

  • Home is where the drive-thru cigarettes are. Revisited.

    There is a FOR SALE sign in the only yard I’ve ever known. Eeek! Since I’m staring at it through the window of my old room, I thought I would re-post this essay from December:

    Home.

    Home is sometimes in a backpack. Sometimes in my head. Sometimes in California. But always in Addison, Illinois. It’s the place where I learned the beginnings of everything. As a teenager, I couldn’t imagine why anyone would ever choose to settle there. But now I see Addison as much more than an insignificant suburb just west of Chicago. It’s my mold, my cookie cutter, my frame. My parents taught me, but my house and my town sculpted me. If I had grown up anywhere else, I can’t imagine what I’d be like. Classier, maybe. More well-read. But I definitely wouldn’t know as much about Greeks and Italians. I wouldn’t know the ins and outs of a tanning bed. And I surely wouldn’t know that it is possible to buy cigarettes from a drive-thru. Whoever I am now was planted and watered in Addison, just like the tree my mom put in our back yard the day I was born. Or maybe the day after, since I don’t quite imagine her zipping home after birthing to plant a tree.

    Addison is my roots, and so is my childhood home on Yale Avenue (or Street– we never figured out which). For years I hated that house. It was never good enough even though it was totally good enough. But now that I’ve discovered my love for it, it’s too late.

    My mom has decided to sell it, and I’ve just bought a ticket for my last trip home. Ever.

    My house has always been there. And now it won’t be there.

    It’s not that I won’t have a home, but I really won’t have a home.

    There’s something about a childhood town though that makes it forever home. The faces of the houses. The way you can ride to yours with your eyes closed in the back of the car and know when you’ve turned onto your street by the curve of the drive and the shadows of the trees on your eyelids. The way each corner or alley reminds you of junior high bus stops or bike rides or games of kick-the-can. The way you know each house by its family’s last name even if they haven’t lived there in years. This town and this location are not just home. They’re a lifetime. They’re childhood. They’re me. My adolescence is stuffed into each sidewalk crack and garage hiding spot. But soon a sign in the front yard will offer it up to a new family who will paint over all my memories with their own.

    I don’t like this feeling. It’s abandonment. It’s fear. It’s sudden. Something that’s always been there will never be there again. I can always come back to the town, but I’ll have nowhere to stay. I don’t want to let it go. But some things and some dreams and some people have to go away. It’s time for a new era and new memories and for me to finally be a grown up. Fuck. I don’t want to be a grown up.

    I’ll have to make a list for the new family. I should tell them of all the treasure I’ve dropped down the heating vents and to make sure to water my tree in the backyard and how you can sneak out onto the roof at night and really feel silence and how you can hear the house creak when you’re sad as if it feels your pain and if you sit in the upstairs closet where my dad’s leather coat hangs, it smells just like him. My house knows. You can see its scars and its character if you peel back all the layers of wall paper. Orange flowers in the seventies, black stripes in the eighties (sorry about that– my idea), shiny blue in the nineties. Hey, house, remember when you had shaggy carpet and I would hide in the corner with the scissors and give you a haircut? Remember the baby birds that were born in Grandpa’s construction hat in your garage? Remember when Grandma chased me around your backyard with a paddle until she was laughing too hard to continue? Remember when I rode my tricycle down your stairs and broke my collarbone? Remember when I took baths with an umbrella and turned on the shower? You knew I was a genius then, didn’t you?

    Too many memories. Thirty years full.
    Am I crying because those memories are gone or am I crying because there’s nobody left who can share them with me? Just my fleeting house, my beautiful creaking house.

    I know memories are more powerful than siding and windows. I know I don’t need my house to delight in the deliciousness of my past. But it’s too much of me to shed without a fight– so hard to let go. Letting go. Maybe that should be my lesson for the new year. I can learn to let go.

    I can let go.
    Or I can buy the house.

    I’ll think about it.

    [Note: Nobody’s really interested in buying our house. Maybe it’s because they don’t like it. Maybe it’s because a guy murdered his mom and a prostitute on my street not long ago. Either way, the agony of leaving this house is dragging on. So… if you’re in the market for a cute house in a town with drive-thru cigarettes, please do not hesitate to contact me. I’ll throw in a Mickey Mouse rotary dial phone.]

  • Home is where the drive-thru cigarettes are. Next to the funeral parlor.

    It’s that time. The time for boarding planes and bearing the snow in order to make my way home.

    Home.
    Home is sometimes in a backpack. Sometimes in my head. Sometimes in California. But always in Addison, Illinois. It’s the place where I learned the beginnings of everything. As a teenager, I couldn’t imagine why anyone would ever choose to settle there. But now I see Addison as much more than an insignificant suburb just west of Chicago. It’s my mold, my cookie cutter, my frame. My parents taught me, but my house and my town sculpted me. If I had grown up anywhere else, I can’t imagine what I’d be like. Classier, maybe. More well-read. But I definitely wouldn’t know as much about Greeks and Italians. I wouldn’t know the ins and outs of a tanning bed. And I surely wouldn’t know that it is possible to buy cigarettes from a drive-thru. Whoever I am now was planted and watered in Addison, just like the tree my mom put in our back yard the day I was born. Or maybe the day after, since I don’t quite imagine her zipping home after birthing to plant a tree.

    Addison is my roots, and so is my childhood home on Yale Avenue (or Street– we never figured out which). For years I hated that house. It was never good enough even though it was totally good enough. But now that I’ve discovered my love for it, it’s too late. My mom has decided to sell it, and this will be the last Christmas I ever spend at home.

    I just gasped when I wrote that.

    My house has always been there. And now it won’t be there.
    It’s not that I won’t have a home, but I really won’t have a home.

    There’s something about a childhood town though that makes it forever home. The faces of the houses. The way you can ride to yours with your eyes closed in the back of the car and know when you’ve turned onto your street by the curve of the drive and the shadows of the trees on your eyelids. The way each corner or alley reminds you of junior high bus stops or bike rides or games of kick-the-can. The way you know each house by its family’s last name even if they haven’t lived there in years. This town and this location are not just home. They’re a lifetime. They’re childhood. They’re me. My adolescence is stuffed into each sidewalk crack and garage hiding spot. But soon a sign in the front yard will offer it up to a new family who will paint over all my memories with their own.

    I don’t like this feeling. It’s abandonment. It’s fear. It’s sudden. Something that’s always been there will never be there again. I can always come back to the town, but I’ll have nowhere to stay. I don’t want to let it go. But some things and some dreams and some people have to go away. It’s time for a new era and new memories and for me to finally be a grown up. Fuck. I don’t want to be a grown up.

    I’ll have to make a list for the new family. I should tell them of all the treasure I’ve dropped down the heating vents and to make sure to water my tree in the backyard and how you can sneak out onto the roof at night and really feel silence and how you can hear the house creak when you’re sad as if it feels your pain and if you sit in the upstairs closet where my dad’s leather coat hangs, it smells just like him. My house knows. You can see its scars and its character if you peel back all the layers of wall paper. Orange flowers in the seventies, black stripes in the eighties (sorry about that– my idea), shiny blue in the nineties. Hey, house, remember when you had shaggy carpet and I would hide in the corner with the scissors and give you a haircut? Remember the baby birds that were born in Grandpa’s construction hat in your garage? Remember when Grandma chased me around your backyard with a paddle until she was laughing too hard to continue? Remember when I rode my tricycle down your stairs and broke my collarbone? Remember when I took baths with an umbrella and turned on the shower? You knew I was a genius then, didn’t you?

    Too many memories. Thirty years full.
    Am I crying because those memories are gone or am I crying because there’s nobody left who can share them with me? Just my fleeting house, my beautiful creaking house.

    I know memories are more powerful than siding and windows. I know I don’t need my house to delight in the deliciousness of my past. But it’s too much of me to shed without a fight– so hard to let go. Letting go. Maybe that should be my lesson for the new year. I can learn to let go.

    I can let go.
    Or I can buy the house.

    I’ll think about it.

    Home. The place where I told my mom both that I never wanted to live without her and that I hated her.
    Also the scene of my first kiss and several crazy parties– sorry, Mom.

  • It’s hard out here for a hippie.

    I’m having the hardest time being a hippie lately. I had no problems last year– never brushed my hair or wore makeup, carried my life in a sack, lived wherever I felt like it. Life couldn’t have been better.

    But now I’m in Los Angeles.

    Chihuahuas wear designer clothes and you’re an oddity if you don’t have a German-engineered car. Plus, my adult acne requires I wear some fancy foundation for anyone to take me seriously, and I was forced to buy some decent jeans due to my exhibitionist butt crack. So, I’m now feeling like ‘one of them.’ I’m a paradox– surrounded by creative directors in Diesel jeans by day and meditating in lotus at night. It couldn’t feel more weird. I know a guy who just paid $50,000 for a couch (‘It is the focal point,’ he rationalized). Some of my friends are struggling to raise $400 to send a year’s supply of water to a village in Africa. Where the hell do I fit in the mix? If I could, I’d sell that couch, pay off my student loans, and go to Africa to deliver the water myself. Does that make me a hippie or just some chick who says she’s a hippie but is just lazy and wants to use travel as an excuse for never having to work?

    I don’t know. But the best part is that I don’t have to know. Because I live in Venice Beach! You could wake up in Venice Beach stuffed in a cannon. You could crawl out of that cannon and find an eyeless homeless man, a guy selling cotton balls and taser guns, and a yuppie jogger pushing twins in a five-thousand-dollar stroller. And none of this would seem weird. And you’d say to a man playing bongos, ‘Excuse me, do you know why I woke up in a cannon?’ And instead of looking at you as if you had five noses, he’d tap his friends on their leathery shoulders and they’d all help you find out why you awoke in this cannon. And all together you’d find a guy sleeping in the sand who remembered that you were at the local freak show (the one that features an assortment of 2-headed animals) and that you volunteered to shoot yourself from the cannon after downing a magnum bottle of Opus One (bought for you by this Hollywood big shot at a bar down the street for $749 plus tax). And then you’d hear that the freak show owner stuffed you in the cannon but ran from the cops right afterward because he’s also the owner of the medical marijuana joint across the street that was getting raided. You know the one, next to American Apparel. And so you fell asleep in the canon until now when you just awoke to the aforementioned plus a dude frying up worms on a pocket kerosene grill, not because he’s homeless but because he’s a shaman and these particular worms are from Tibet and will help him with his Tantric sexcapades, about which you don’t want know– trust me.

    It’s a strange place, this Venice area. On the beach, it looks like a scene out of Rishikesh, India– free yoga, dirty dreadlocks, street sleepers, seedy taverns, and marijuana. Lots of marijuana.

    Four blocks over is where the hippies become pseudo. Here the marijuana is legit, the bars have bouncers, and the coffee shop baristas draw hearts in the latte foam. The dreadlocks on this side of Venice were professionally installed by a guy with thick plastic glasses and expensive skinny jeans. The yoga classes run upwards of twenty bucks.

    It’s strange, this paradox of lifestyles. But I love it. Because I’m neither nor. I’m not one but both. I am a daily contradiction. I like chocolate and bread pudding. I want it all. I’m every woman. It’s all in me. And there’s no point in choosing now. So, I’m gonna ride my 400-dollar bike down to the free yoga and meditate the day away with the drum circle. And then maybe wash it all down with a plate of foie gras in truffle oil. (Ok, I would never eat foie gras, but the vegetarian shit I would like doesn’t sound fancy enough to make this dichotomy sound so astounding. So just imagine something really awesome & pricey on a plate served by a super cool hipster with funky pants and Converse.)

    Venice is it.

    Macho men that spend sunny weekends choreographing dances on their roller skates. Where else?

  • Dentures and house slippers: a warning



    Remember when you were little and you thought your parents were perfect? And then one of them filed for bankruptcy and you got the hint that perhaps they’re not? By my age most people have figured out that parents make mistakes and aren’t as angelic as once thought. But grandparents… those are a different story. Especially grandmothers, whose cotton candy hair and circulation stockings surely confirm their innocence and utter perfection.

    My grandmother lived with me up until fourth grade, and although she enjoyed a few sips of sherry once in a while, she’d never ever crossed that line into real mistake-making-white-lying adult. Ever. She listened to Cubs games on her small black radio and made little Woodstock dolls out of ceramic or felt. Woodstock dolls. She was shy, never changed out of her velvety house dress, and always drank from the same tiny glass. Nobody messed with grandma’s cup. Nobody messed with Grandma. (I did call her a bitch one time when she asked me how my day was while I was trying to watch Duck Tales, but that was a mere fluke.) She was pristine. She was the only one. She was Grandma.

    In 1989.

    Today, Feb 2010, I found out that lady is a lying sack of goat poo. That’s right. I said it. Circulation stockings a front!

    You see… long ago she made some pillowcases. I’ve always loved them. Always admired her embroidery and how she so sweetly designed the little PJs to accompany a head during sleepy times. How creative and appropriate. I see these pillowcases, and I say, “Grandma knew life. She just knew.”

    I’ve made a big deal out of these pillowcases. I’ve traveled with them. I’ve annoyed friends by insisting I provide my own pillowcases, therefore insulting theirs. I have loved these pillowcases. I have lived for these pillowcases.

    Last night, an old friend came to stay with me. As she toured my new apartment, she said, “I love your pillowcases.” And before I could proudly boast how my grandma had slaved over a hot embroidery needle in order to create their splendidness, she said, “My mom has the same ones.”

    Huh?

    HER MOM HAS THE SAME ONES? No she didn’t.

    I’m willing to bet my grandmother did not have an Etsy store back then from which to sell her wares. And I’m also going to bet that she didn’t have a secret underground pillowcase store running out of her basement. Which only brings me to this conclusion: Grandma didn’t make no pillowcases. That bitch probably bought them at Woolworths. And those Woodstock dolls… those ugly woodstock dolls I’ve been holding onto. Those are probably from Sears. Blasphemy. Cotton candy hair and cute little cup… bet those were a farce too. She probably drank from a big thermos hidden under her bed.

    Attention dead people: If you come across this woman in heaven, don’t trust her. And also beware because she’s storing a whoopee cushion in that housecoat. And she probably has a plastic pile of poo somewhere around your feet or a fly trapped in a fake ice cube. Sorry, grams. Your gig is up.

    I admit she didn’t look so sweet and angelic back in the day. She looks like a heartbreaker. I bet she had an affair with JFK.

    UPDATE: Turns out Grams did sew those pillowcases! She just happened to use a pattern, which she bought in Chicago, similar to the one I just found on Ebay for $7. So… I guess I take back the above. Sorry for telling everyone about your tricks, Grandma. You’ve still got the plastic vomit.