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04:21:2002 Entry: "An incomplete life"
An incomplete life
Lately, I've had a problem of not being able to finish anything I write down for my journal (except my dreams because they are relatively short). As soon as I begin to write down a recount of the day or a story or whatever, I get interrupted and by the time I get any time to complete the entry, I've lost the passion. Take my most recent attempt on December 30th:
"Last night Tim called, a surprise because I wasn't expecting him to come back to Madison until after the holidays. Seems like the "contractor" finally showed up to fix his bathroom ceiling and wall. Actually, the contractor isn't a real contractor, but a handyman who is a boyfriend of a female friend of his. Tim helped out the woman in the past and she wants to repay him the favor, and I suspect boyfriend wants to impress girlfriend, but I'm not sure of the details. Stan was suspecting that he might have to rescue Tim's bathroom problem himself, but fortunately the contractor came through. The problem was started when Tim's ex-roommate, Matt, and former co-owner of the condo, got the not-so-bright idea that he wanted to "open the bathroom ceiling up more because it was so low." Well, Matt is one of those slackers who never finishes anything he starts. And so the unfinished bathroom stayed for months and months in this state, exposed pipes, cement. I suggested to Tim after Matt moved to make it sort of like the ceiling of a dance club...spray paint it black, take advantage of the industrialesque grunge ambience. However industrialesque grunge is not really Tim's style, him being more of the classic persuasion of home decoration. Tim held out, hoping the contractor would come through. Finally, to all of our surprises, he did.
"There's just one small problem..."
And that's where it ended I won't even bother finishing it...it's not important now. But before that, I tried writing out another saga:
The case of the Whacky Mackydamia Demons
"Most weird indeed. Earlier this month my mom wrote me an email to tell me that she won't be sending me Macadamia nuts and caviar as she usually does for a holiday gift. Seems like their favorite grocer rearranged their store and now she can't find them. Well, considering that my parents are getting on in years, running around town to find these things is probably out of the question. I don't really miss them, as I can probably get ahold of them a lot easier myself, and as far as I know, the fresh Salmon eggs available at our local Seafood Market are much better than the caviar she has traditionally bought for me anyway...and less salt. So when I received the news, Stan and I bought a jar of Macadamia nuts at our local neighborhood Kohl's store a little over a week ago. When we got home, Stan noticed that the jar had already been opened. We decided to go back to the store to return it. However when we got there, there was a very long line for people waiting to cash their payroll checks. The store was freezing. People were staring at us with our jar of nuts. It was not a pretty scene. We decided to take our loss, go back home, and give the local hungry grey squirrels a once in a lifetime treat.
"They would think we were gods. I figured that maybe this was a sign that I need to lose weight.
"Tonight Stan gave me an unexpected gift of a different brand of Macadamia nuts. I twisted open the jar, and much to..."
Yup...left you hanging again. Still, it's not important enough to finish. I just have no desire. And before that, I wrote this epic piece...I had great plans for it:
The Room
“I just don’t feel like sitting upstairs at my computer today. It’s very cold out, single digits, I think, even less with windchill. The computer room is the only room upstairs we keep heated as it is the only room on that level that is inhabited constantly, either by myself for more than eight hours during the day, and the dogs for eight hours at night. It’s a nice room, maybe 10x13 or so, with two long (old fashioned) windows that face the neighbor’s house. The windows are screenless; they were screenless when we bought the house...too difficult to change screens that high (yes, we still have four windows in our house that we add screens to in the spring and storm windows to in the fall by hand...it’s the old way, and modernization is not really in our budget for something that insignificant). There’s not much air circulation being that close to the neighbor’s house and all...this is a city lot where houses are sometimes quite close together. We don’t see the reason to invest in new storm windows with screens being that my computers are right there, there’d be too much dust let in. There is a door at the back of the room that once led to a little balcony that we never knew. That balcony is long gone, long rotted off. Because of city codes, we have to keep the door boarded shut from the outside (Just in case a burglar decided to exit out that door and broke his neck on the two story fall down...he could sue us, is their reasoning). The door has a screen window that we still install every summer though. Now it is just a door that goes to nowhere, doubling as a window. It has a great overlook of our garden below. Despite my desire to have a deck out back, or at least another balcony, it probably won’t happen in our lives.
“The room originally was Stan’s studio when we bought the house over a decade ago. Then we got Hieronymus and it became his dogbedroom. Then I became a homeworker/freelancer for my typesetting job and it then it became the computer room. Now there’s three computers, each having some integral piece of hardware that I am both too poor to replace or too much of a non-geek to figure how to rig up to the new computer. Now it’s like a Macintosh museum...The Low-end Macintosh display, mid 1990s, early 21st century. The ViewSonic monitors are 15, 17 and 19 inch...it’s like Baby Bear, Momma Bear and Poppa Bear. I always wondered why Baby Bear never got crap from the other woodland creatures for being an only child. I know I did...like it’s something you can help.
“Just recently we bought a small plant stand to fit by one of the tall windows. The neighbor’s house shades out a lot of sun, but there’s still bright light that comes in. Right now all my coleus plants I rooted from garden clippings are in there. They’re quarantined from the rest of the plant collection downstairs. Just the other week I noticed invisible-to-the-naked-eye bugs were attacking the undersides of the leaves, perhaps they came in all the way back in the summer when I took the clippings. We sprayed them with insecticide and are now keeping them separate.
“The room is painted white with pale green doors and trim. It is probably the paint from when the previous owners bought the house in 1973. They didn’t do much remodelling if any, which in a way is a good thing. I’m not fond of the colors for a room, but am not exactly in the position to repaint it either. That room won’t get remodelled until the other rooms upstairs, my former studio and now catch-all storage area and my current studio, our former bedroom are done...I’ll need a place for my equipment and right now that’s the only place there is. I guess the green adds a sort of “nature”-colored balance to the high tech equipment...the only high tech room in the house. Would like to strip the paint off the doors and window trim some day as I hate painted wood.
“But I don’t feel like being in that room today. It is cold, and even though that room is heated, it’s still cold up there. There are only so many clothes you can wear, and your extremities still freeze. I freeze easily. This is why I don’t have a job working for someone else in their building...this is why I am a freelance artist...air conditioning and I do not mix. But that’s another story.
“So instead of easily typing this out upstairs on my desktop Mac, trying to maintain good posture, or as good as it gets posture--I’m a natural slumper and sloucher and feet-up-on-the-chair type--I’m sitting on our bed crosslegged with my iBook, watching an old lava lamp heat up and our newest lava lamp gloop. I’m looking at all my new plants that I’ve gotten this past year that have found a home in our new sunny bedroom that we just moved into in July...our unintentional “turning 40” present to ourselves.
“This bedroom is beautiful...well, at least to us it’s beautiful. It’s probably not that beautiful to the average spoiled suburban Craig or Cindi. It’s the most lovely room I’ve ever had. It’s about 10x16, which is also the largest bedroom I’ve ever had. There’s four windows in all, two tall windows facing our backyard garden (southeast), one tall window facing our front wildflower jack-in-the-pulpit garden (northwest) and one high sideboard or piano window facing our neighbor’s house (southwest). This room is directly under my computer room.
“A long time ago, when the house was first built, I believe this room didn’t exist in full. I looked at houses with similar architectural styles in town from the outside. I’ve found two others...one in the Tenney-Lapham neighborhood, and the other in the old Marketplace neighborhood, not far from Bernie’s Rock Shop. Both of those houses are in more original condition than ours. Ours has had extensive additions and remodels throughout the decades (except in the 70s and 80s when the previous owners lived here). But I can tell the original architectural style is the same from the way all three houses have (had, in the case of our house) the same half-starburst carved wood decoration over a square attic window in front which in turn is over two long 2nd story front windows, shake shingle siding on the 2nd floor, and another square window by a the staircase landing, not to mention the overall shape of the houses. When we tore off the fake brick siding on the front of the house many years ago, we found a residual starburst pattern over the attic window. It had been mostly chiselled away, probably during the strip-down Depression, to make the profile of the exterior flat in order to apply that horrid fake brick siding that still haunts parts of our house today (that will be gone shortly, this old house gods willing). People bought that stuff thinking it would add insulation and make their perfectly charming frame houses look “brick.” What were they thinking? Of course I do wonder what people are thinking with vinyl siding, too. When we discovered the remnants of the starburst, we were heartbroken. I’ve always considered the two front 2nd floor windows on old classical styled houses from early last century to be like eyes, and if there was an attic window, like our house, it was a third eye. Now imagine having a third eye and plucking out all of your eyelashes from that eye, leaving only the dead roots to show that once there were eyelashes there. That’s what it was like to find the destroyed starburst. We bought modern retro gingerbread trim from a Menards store and installed permanent fake eyelashes on the third eye. Not exactly the original starburst, but at least it’s pretty again.
“But getting back to the bedroom...it’s not as old as the rest of the house. From a bird’s eye view, our house is an irregular shape, not the original square shape like the other homes similar to it. It makes it unique for our neighborhood, which, despite its antiquaran era, has several old houses in identical styles that could have been precursors to the modern tract home. Even had our house not been extensively added on to, and retained its original form, it still would be unique for the neighborhood. There is no other house like ours in the Schenks-Atwood neighborhood. The other two houses I mentioned earlier in the two other neighborhoods are the only structures like it in Madison. Those houses do not have additions like ours does. So I suspect that where our bedroom is, and the computer room above it, it just used to jut out slightly, like a bay window, perhaps. When we gutted the room to remodel the floors, ceiling and walls, the underlying structure showed this was also probably the case. And our basement does not go all the way under that part of the house...there’s just a crawlspace that only brave cats dare crawl under.
“I suspect this bedroom is where the dining room used to be a long time ago. It would’ve been nice to still have the original architecture intact, a semi-octagonal bay window dining, a semi-octagonal bay parlor window (as the unfinished floor area in the living room hints to us), yet the decades of additions has provided more interior space to the house, giving it nearly 1600 square feet compared to the average 1200 feet in most other single family homes on our block.
“The first day we took possession of the house was coincidentally on my 29th birthday. The day before when we closed, the current owners hadn’t moved out yet. There was not a packed box in the house when we did the final walk-through. We were a bit panicked. But our neighbors later told tales of them moving all night long. By 9 am the following morning on my birthday, there wasn’t anything left of theirs in the house. It was amazing. My first duty was to tear up all the carpets on the first floor. We left only one rug in the living room, an old fashioned wool rug that was very worn and that was burried at the bottom of a couple eras of other carpets on top of it. But I liked the maroon color and I liked the organic plant pattern. They don’t make rugs or carpeting like that anymore. The reason we left this rug was out of necessity. Because the living room was added on to some time in the early middle of the last century, the new part was just a plywood floor...not wood like the rest of the room.
“The master bedroom was the ugliest room in the house. Remember, the former owners had not updated or remodelled in the 17 years they lived there. That room had dirty smoke-filled orange shag carpeting. It was dark and dreary, the impression given by the dark faux-wood panelled walls. The ceiling was a dropped ceiling, concealing the 9 foot high walls. The ceiling panels were some dreadful asbestos composite or something equally bad, and in the middle of the room, one panel was a piece of translucent plastic that was pushed aside to reveal the horror of all horrors...a single light bulb with a pull cord awkwardly dangling out from the ceiling. In 17 years, these owners had not even so much as bought a simple plastic cover to go over the bare light bulb.
“What were they (not) thinking?
“As I started to tear off the orange shag carpeting from the floor, I realized that this would not be accomplished easily. The carpet was attached with some awful adhesive. After we removed the carpet, we closed off the room and covered the floor with tarp. We would begin demolition soon after. Removing the faux-wood panelling revealed sort of a quaint flowered pink wallpaper from decades ago. It was not salvagable; the wood paneling’s adhesive made that clear. There were many layers of paint under the wallpaper, each layer from a different owner, I suppose. The walls were original lath and plaster. If we were to be restorationists, we would restore the original lath and plaster, however, since we had a very small budget and zero time, drywall was the only way to go. Sorry, post-Victorian era purists. However because other things kept going wrong in the house, namely both bathrooms had plumbing problems we needed to fix quickly, the master bedroom project got put on hold. We had to do the work ourselves...we had/have no money to pay a contractor. The master bedroom stood for months, years even, with a floor that was covered with sticky black padding from the pulled-up carpet, partly demolished walls with torn wallpaper and a once dropped ceiling that was now just bare slats. We nicknamed it “The Green Acres Room” after the 60s TV sitcom which featured an old farmhouse in a similar state of internal cosmetic disarray. “At least WE don’t have a Green Acres Room” some ex-friends who became homeowners at the same time we did would tease us tauntingly. Screw them. At least WE still have a home. At least WE is still a WE, too. But I digress.
“We bought a headboard for our bed in preparation for our eventual move downstairs. Unfortunately, we couldn’t fit the headboard up the stairs to our bedroom there, so it stayed in the kitchen where we used it to place various things, mainly...cats. The headboard was a dark brown wood with a mirror, two lamps with a blue rose pattern. Ironically, when shopping at a Menards we found the very same blue rose pattern on a chandeleir. We now knew what would replace the solitary light bulb with the pull cord. We also bought a very nice wood door and closet doors. But it would be a while before we used them all.
“Stan is amazing. I guess I can’t think of a better way to describe in a way that people would understand, and I HATE HATE HATE this term, but Stan is undoubtedly, a Renaissance man. Not a DaVinci or Michaelangelo or one of those spoiled famous blokes supported by the DeMedici family, but a true Renaissance man with all the practical innate and acquired knowledge, ability, talent and whacky genius...just no wealthy patron is all. So while the little prodigies (read NEA darlings) of this world get the DeMedici treatment (read NEA grant) and squander their talents on ephemeral installations of politically correct multi-cultural inclusionary conceptuality that become relegated only to documentation in slide vaults of galleries and museums, Stan put his skills to use restoring our house. Single handedly, without even my help, he drywalled the walls and ceiling in The Green Acres room. He managed to come up with some sort of hand-made contraption or set-up to raise the 4x8 foot drywall slabs up to the 9 foot high ceiling.
“Eventually, the Green Acres Room was no more. It had finished walls and a ceiling and a beautiful chandeleir. But it was far from done. He had also redone two bathrooms in ceramic floor tile (fortunately, they are small bathrooms), both having gone through stages where both their floors were completely removed, enabling one to look down to the room below. This was inbetween doing external remodelling like removing the faux brick siding in front, painting the house in front where the faux brick was removed from, digging up gardens, repairing our cars, working full time and going to graduate school full time. And you wonder why it took so long for us to finish the room. I remember one time helping him paint the former Green Acres room. This was about 1993 or 1994...I forgot which. We splattered and flung paint for a sort of Pollack-ish wall treatment. It was much fun. In the late summer of 1996, Stan and Tim rented a floor sander and finished off the floor. But it would still be almost five years before the room was finished enough to move in to. He still had to trim the windows and stain the floor and install and stain the doors. He had to find a new job since his former place of employ went under. And he had to find a new job after that because the new place he worked for was evil. And then his dad died. And he had to find a new job after that because that place was only a temporary position. And he had to help his mom move out of her house a thousand miles away. And he finally got on permanent at the temporary place that he worked for a few months before that. Not exactly condusive conditions, either emotionally or financially, to finally completing that household project...”
And that’s where it ends. No ambition to complete it.
Maybe whatever I was saying just wasn’t relevant. But I think for my next entry I will try my hand at completing something that happened New Year’s Eve. It deserves to be told.