$20.09

Back when I was a gas station attendant at Johnson's Garage in Sterling, I often had the misfortune of pumping an amount of overpriced gas that would total somewhere between $19.30 and $19.94--the misfortune being that it would invariably incite the payee to comment on how good or bad that particular year had been. I remember $19.75 being regarded consitently as a "good year." The only times that such a comment would be followed up by any evidence, it was often obtusely sexual in content, and with all such things from my employ at Johnson's Garage, I have blocked it from memory. Sadly, I have not been able to get the memory of emptying the beer can barrel purged from the cache...

I imagine that, at some time in the future when our economy continues to suck, I'll go back to working the pumps at some fuel depot in the suburban wasteland of North Raleigh. As I pump precious hydrogen into a plastic fuel cell car for some bugger who got rich fleecing retirement accounts, the price guage will read ¥2009, and I'll think, 2009, huh? What a bummer that year was.

Face it: 2009 was the capstone year in a fairly shitty decade all around (at least for Americans). When we collectively ruminate on our past--passing around a shotglass of "water" leaking out the ass end of a car at the old hydrogen station--and try to determine where things went wrong, we'll all point to the era from the Y2K scare to the economic shitstorm of the late 00's and say... yeppp... 2009... not a good year. (We won't be able to label the whole decade a pile of shit, because we still won't know what to call it. Naughties? Oughties? DoubleOs? How about "the Shitties?").

Despite the dystopia we are sprinting towards, there is some hope in turning over into a new decade; if nothing else, we'll at least know what to call it. And things can't really get worse, right?

Right?

The Furniture Store of Tomorrow

I lost my IKEA virginity this weekend.

I thought, living 160 miles away from the nearest IKEA, I could let my guard down and not worry about the Swedish furniture retailer's siren song. But then friends started doing it. They would tell me about their amazing experiences, but in such vague terms it was hard to "feel" it. But me? Nah, I don't mind waiting and collecting my furniture a little bit here, a little bit there. I have a couch--what more do I need? A couple side tables... alright! Good enough! Some homemade plywood stuff from many years ago...

Well, it turns out I needed some chairs in a hurry. And I don't have the kind of vehicle that would allow hauling hoity-toity pre-assembled furniture. And I don't have gobs of money spilling out of my wallet. And... damn, Scandanavians are cool. And I love Swedish meatballs. I got sucked in. Who could blame me?

IKEA is amazing. Scary and amazing. They could lay tracks for an automatic peoplemover and charge admission. This is definitely The Furniture Store of Tomorrow. Every step in this store is carefully planned and choreographed; every font selected on purpose; every color used to elicit a specific emotion or reaction. Information pods. Puzzle stations. "Shortcuts." Lost? Look at the map--it tells you exactly where you will be next, even if it doesn't help you know where you are now. The in-store Swedish cuisine restaurant (and cafe!) promises to be around the next bend, never more than an overhead sign away. The peoplemover takes you right there, hands you a tray, and scoops you ten neat little meatballs before you realize you're not looking at furniture and home decor anymore.

But that's not even half of The Furniture Store of Tomorrow experience. That was just the opening act. Foreplay. A mere cattle chute before the big ride. When you finish your meatballs at 10:30 in the morning, you are strapped into a shopping cart that would only be commonplace to a European--all four wheels are independently swiveling! No fixed axles! You can shop around in perfect circles! Feel like pushing your cart sideways? At and angle? In constant pirhouttes? Please do! Steer your cart around the track with a stream of humanity. Grab your items. Watch the young newlywed brides and coeds and young moms in their casual Saturday shopping jeans. This place is paradise.

And now the big reveal, the money shot, the climax. You thought THAT was The Furniture Store of Tomorrow? That was just the salad course. That was just the introductory movie before the ride. You have not yet even penetrated the real experience. Welcome to the Self Service Furniture Warehouse. As the stream of humanity empties out into the sea of 3-story palette shelves, you drift into a Choose Your Own Adventure. Used to getting lost at Home Depot? You better get ready to hunker down here for a few days. If what lies behind you was choreographed within an inch of its life, the Self Storage Furniture Warehouse is purposely designed as a freeform free-for-all. Did you keep score with your IKEA half pencil on your IKEA scorecard? If not, you have a lot of searching to do. Forgot to grab an extra cart back there? Good luck navigating your purchases through the warehouse! Scale doesn't exist here. If IKEA sold houses or cars, they would be on the shelves, disassembled into "flat pack" boxes for your handling convenience. What can't IKEA flat pack? Is the Arc of the Covenant in here, and if so, is it in one box or two? Does it come in Alne Natural? Don't forget to compare the label on the box with that on the bin. It's on the sign.

The experience is not complete. Now you must wait in line... to leave. Rather than seeing long checkout lines as a liability, the Furniture Store of Tomorrow sees it as an opportunity to discourage you back into shopping. We have ATMs! We have a restaurant! A child care center! Restrooms! Comfy couches! YOU HAVE NO NEED TO LEAVE THE FURNITURE STORE OF TOMORROW. YOU ARE NOT DONE SHOPPING. START OVER. MORE MEATBALLS. MORE FURNITURE. YOU ARE MINE NOW.

All Souls

Whatever became of Halloween? I remember a time when trick-or-treating was a time-honored tradition (whatever the hell that means). Suburban residential streets would be filled with little kids in plastic and fabric costumes with their baggies or pumpkin baskets or pillow cases swaying to and fro. Adult overseers would watch from the sidewalk as their little goblin and princess skittered up the driveway to the front door of some 70's Bradyesque monstrosity covered in plastic decorations and the salvaged remains of the smashed jackolanterns the neighborhood miscreants had tormented the night before. This is the way it worked. This is the fun that was Halloween. This was the kickoff of the Halloween-to-Easter Candy Season. This was the pinnacle of the elementary school haute couture fashion season. But now? I was at a party in a neighborhood where there were hundreds of pleasant suburban houses mere feet apart--in fact, my first comment upon seeing this neighborhood months before was, "wow, this would be a great place to trick-or-treat!" It was one of those neighborhoods you could go back over two or three times with a different costume and really rake in the calories. But despite beautiful weather and the obligatory "we're open for business" lit jackolantern, we had all of four small groups of trick-or-treaters. Maybe ten kids, tops. Those were the kind of numbers we were used to living in a dark brown house at the top of a dead-end street on a hill back in Massachusetts (it was nearly impossible to even see the house as your approached it). It was pathetic.

What is motivating this cultural shift? Are parents fearful for their kids' safety? I remember when I was a kid there was the real danger of cars running over trick-or-treaters, but last night I could have driven up the front lawns of every damn house in the subdivision and not hit a single costumed child. And there were the annual scares about needles and razor blades in Halloween candy, which required parents to forensically analyze every Snickers and Reese's Peanut Butter Cup for hairline cuts in the wrappers, and immediately throw out anything that was in a hand-assembled giftie bag rather than a factory-sealed wrapper. Is it the religious component? All those families that don't believe in celebrating a "devil's holiday"... as if the devil wasn't the Mars corporation that makes the candy they're all eating at the church's alternative "harvest social" that night? Want a conversation stopper on Halloween? Just repeat what the little girl in front of me in line at the Rite Aid said to the woman at the counter when asked what she was going to be tonight: "oh, we don't celebrate Halloween." Silence. Perhaps it's the childhood obesity epidemic? Parents worry about one night of chocolate orgy but are oblivious as Jacob and Madison swim in Mountain Dew and chocolate milk the rest of the year. What happened to kids having a fun fucking night of dressing up and eating candy while supervised by vigilant parents in a non-threatening, non-satanic envionment? Is that so fucking hard that we have to just stop doing it? You people suck.

Anyway, I was a moth wrapped in spiderweb being attacked by a huge stuffed spider. The idea was great but the execution was lacking, and it broke my #1 rule for costumes: I have to be able to sit down. So the spider spent most of the evening on the floor, and my antennae kinda hurt, so for most of the evening I was a ball of spider web.

The Ides of October

Apparently Massachusetts is getting snow today, as evidenced by the football game I'm watching live from Foxborough. Today. October 18. Not even Halloween. Barely past Columbus Day. Ouch, folks. Does anyone question why I'm in North Carolina now?

Sure, it's cold here in Raleigh today, too--in fact, when I went out this morning to shop for miscellaneous household creature comforts at 10ish, it smelled a little snowy here, too. But the cold we're talking is, like, 50's. Sweatshirt weather. Slow-setting intermittant wipers weather. Reading the Sunday paper indoors weather. Not taking the TV out to the stoop to watch football weather.

Man, the Titans are really blowing. Sorry, Tennessee.

I'm amidst my inter-exam period, which means no need to do anything this weekend (aside from laundry, cleaning, grocery shopping, cat feeding, bill paying, cat pee deorderizing, etc., etc.). The next exam is Schematic Design, which is entirely drawing-based, meaning there really isn't "material" to "study." So perhaps I can get through the holidays with a minimal amount of exam study time suck.

To fill in that gap of otherwise enjoyable free time, I will be preparing a presentation on Raleigh planning for my professional colleagues, Christmas shopping (no idea where Christmas will be yet...), and outfitting my apartment one item at a time (I bought a plant today!). And keeping the volleyball torch going as long as possible...

Autumn commences

The seasonal shift from summer to autumn here in North Carolina is pretty abrupt, though by no means unpleasant. Heading into Labor Day weekend, it was consistently 90+ for highs with high humidity... reflective windshield screens were a necessity if you wanted to leave work without spending fifteen minutes blasting the AC before you could touch the steering wheel. Coming out of Labor Day, the temperatures dropped a full notch on the belt... warm, but certainly more pleasant, and noticeably more comfortable. Just last week, in time for the official end of summer, we dropped another full belt hole and now it's definitely feeling fallish--cool mornings, cold sand on the volleyball court, more leafy debris on my windshield, more desperate-acting bugs... I opened my front door to leave for work earlier this week and who should greet me on my front mat but a lone camel cricket looking for a fight! I kicked him away before he could sproing into my apartment--these cold blooded (or non blooded?) animals don't have much fight in them when it's 55 degrees out!

Eight weeks after my last exam, I finally got my results back--PASS. So, what could have been an enduring legacy of the mild social revolution of the summer turned out to have no grip; no failed exam, no permanently deformed finger... just memories that will stay as long as memories do. Oh, and an obscene credit card statement.

Next exam--number four of seven--is a week from tomorrow, and this one promises to be a corker. The subject matter is both broad and deep, and there are three--three!--graphic exercises, each of about an hour, and considered some of the hardest throughout all the exams. So if I'm bound to fail something, this will be the one. If I pass... I'm due to be a registered, licensed architect by next May. I mean, assuming I pass the other three exams that follow.

Volleyball and vball-associated friendships have been going well. First Friday a couple days ago, Korean BBQ yesterday, and an exceptionally pleasant night of doing nothing but drinking wine and watching Netflix alone last night. Best of all worlds. Now study, clean, study, TV, study, nap, study....

Of Crystals and Crickets

The Big Clean from my last post did not get wrapped up quite as tightly and quickly as I had hoped... apparently the scale of a "Big" clean changes considerably when you've increased the size of your home by 300%. My 200SF studio in Cambridge could be big cleaned easily in two days... I guess that means I should have budgeted a whole week for this one? Well, it continued into a second weekend at least, and more on that in a moment.

Naturally, after investing some time and capital into a steam cleaner rental, something had to happen to overturn all the value realized in short order. So it went like this: on September 10, I'm about to step out the door for work. I was several minutes early (which meant I had not shaven or had to pack a lunch) and Fenway intercepts me at the door in grand tripping hazard fashion. Rather than simply waiting for his customary three treats thrown in Olympic curling style across our faux wood floor, he started a meow... long, drawn out, low, and very unhappy-sounding. Definitely not normal. As he kept up the pained meow, I went to check on the litter box (feeling that perhaps he was getting uppity about how often I clean out the box and rather than retaliate with a huge cat poop on the floor as he usually does, he was going to launch a protest march instead). Well, the surprise was that it didn't need to be cleaned out at all, really, and there was one tiny little petrified piddle in the brand spanking new litter I has put in several days before. Ruh roh. Someone's having trouble peeing. Sure enough, when I went back to check on him, he had his belly exposed, his leg drawn up like he was trying an upside-down pee, and crying. Short of pointing at his penis and saying "it's broken, Dad! It's broken!!" I think I had all the information I needed from his end.

I was able to get him an appointment at the vet--his first since moving to Raleigh--that afternoon. The kindly vet and vet assistants left me in the exam room as they took him back to the equipment to, presumably, squeeze his bladder until he peed. Or perhaps there's a secret pee button I don't know about? Do cats have prostates? Anyway, after a fifteen minute wait, the vet came back and told me Fenway had "a lot going on" in his urine... I hope no one ever tells me I have a "lot going on" in any of my bodily fluids, because it just sounds horrible. It turns out that not only does he have a urinary tract infection, but he has bladder crystals (apparently common in boy cats) that may be impeding his flow, or even ready to cinch it off completely. Well, that explains the tiny pee nugget in his box and the pained meow at the door this morning...

So what does this all have to do with the Big Clean? (Fenway is fine now, by the way, after ten days of antibiotics and special crystal-melting kibble.) The morning Fenway stopped me at the door, I'd sniffed a cat-musky scent around the apartment--the same smell most of his old toys have. Eww, I thought, hope that dissipates quickly, especially since I spent ALL LABOR DAY WEEKEND making smells leave my apartment. Well, it turns out that urinary infected boy cats spray their foul and pungent fluids all over the place. And carpets are preferred. Nice, clean, bouncy, accommodating carpets. So, within a week of their first major clean in over a year, my carpets now smell like super-concentrated cat pee. With crystals.

Suffice it to say, the Big Clean took to the outdoors last weekend. My chief outdoor task was to reclaim my patio closet, which had become a zoo habitat enclosure for large insects and spiders (you know, the dark little room where zoo creatures go to be depressed and disappoint wide-eyed children). I'd known since I moved in that a family of camel crickets had squatters rights in the closet--they all but helped me move my bike and spare kitty box in when I arrived. But I have to admit their presence bothered me. And their otherworldliness, as noted in a blog post last year. So part of the Big Clean was to evict the whole damn lot of them and once again feel comfortable that I could flip a circuit breaker in the closet's electrical panel without being beset by two dozen little aliens with huge tail thingies and heads and eyes and mouths and pokey things...

I'll spare you the grim details but will take credit for trying to remove them peacefully at first. They very much loved that closet, with its reliable moisture, darkness, half-open cans of wet paint, and smaller moving things to snack on. So they were resistant, obstinant even. A couple actually stood up to me--if they had convinced even ten others to do so simultaneously, it would have been enough to get me running off the patio flailing my hands like a little girl. But me and the broom got the job done, and until they regroup and mount a counter offensive, my closet is once again part of my human habitat to mistreat and ignore as I see fit.

The Big Clean

Once again I'm amidst a disruptive moving of furniture and hardcore cleaning of apartment whilst the sound of tennis pops from my TV. Spring cleaning, French Open. Traditional moving day, Wimbledon. Fall cleaning, US Open. This is, apparently, the best thing I can do with a 3-day weekend...

Yesterday was my first amateur use of a steam carpet cleaner. Actually, this one didn't involve steam unless I was using it wrong--just hot water, expensive soapy additive, a vibrating bristle brush, and a hell of a lot of patience. I was hoping for magic, I think--drag the Rug Doctor (trademark) across the carpet and all of a sudden... new carpet! Carpet I would want to roll around on nekkid and take a big ole sniff of. But, the reality was less spectacularly pseudo-sexual. What the Rug Doctor was able to do was take out the camoflage-patterned stain-and-Resolve-bleached matrix that was making it difficult to know the true color of the carpet. Or at least subdue it. What the Rug Doctor could not do, though, was make the highly-trafficked portions of the carpets at the doorways look like the rest of the carpet, which was the "magic" goal. So it looks like I'm due to be embarassed by my carpets for as long as they're there. I will say, though, after letting it all dry overnight, there is marked improvement in the look and feel. They are now ready to once again serve as the substrate for huge clumps of hair and cat barf. The stuff that came out of that tank--out of the carpet--was... well, let's just say I can't believe I let my feet touch those carpets before. Eww.

I had the opportunity to talk to a 56-year-old version of myself at the bar last night. Yes, I went to a bar on Big Clean weekend--my fatigue and disappointment with Day 1 required some medication. I brought my flash cards along to study as I imbibed, and the older gentleman sitting on the neighboring bar stool caught sight and decided to start up a comversation loosely founded on architecture. Naturally I looked a little distracted to begin with, but he was already an untold number of drinks towards oblivion, so he continued. Apparently, he's single and renting at 56. Very displeased with the quality of housing in the area. In a job with a potentially limited future and concerned about being laid off. So, I thought, better keep this conversation going and see where I'll be in 25 years. It didn't sound fun. Mostly boring, with a good dose of bitterness and regret. Is there hope for Warren, my 56-year-old self? Let's hope so. The world needs to cure its Warrens.