Standards

My last period of funemployment was wasted in a sea of afternoon marathons of Jon & Kate Plus 8 and Rock of Love Charm School (the good season, with Sharon Osbourne; none of this feud crap that’s currently on…which, by the way, I think Ricki Lake is handling remarkably well). While I’m certainly pleased that I had that time to catch up to the rest of the country in reality TV viewership, THIS time will be different. THIS time, I’m going to accomplish things—mainly stuff that I haven’t had time to do after work…mostly because that’s when I now watch my reality TV.

And since the end of unemployment coincided with a move, it’s a perfect time to consider this the beginning of a new lifestyle…one that’s organized, driven, goal-oriented, and something to be envied. I mean, who wouldn’t want to take time off work in their mid-20s? I didn’t even have to have a baby to do it! (I do, however, need to sell my car for cash money, something I was planning on doing anyway, and am counting on a tax refund when I finally get around to actually filing.)

The apartment is, of course, the most visible manifestation of my master plan, and since I’m now home so much more than Adam, it makes sense that 1) I’m bugged more by the fact that the whole place isn’t yet in order, and 2) It probably should fall to me to get most of our life’s possessions put away. Here’s the thing, though. When I left Boston for Denver over a year ago, everything I owned fit into my little Corolla. Adam was in a similar situation—he’d taken one Explorer’s worth of belongings to Denver. We had a sparse existence, and I don’t ever once remember saying, “Geez, what I couldn’t do with my milk foamer right now.”

It wasn’t that I was surprised when Adam rolled up to our new Berkeley apartment in December with a moving van full of things he had opted not to bring to Denver, but now needed to get out of storage in North Carolina. Grown-ups DO typically own stuff. And it’s not like that van was full of puppets (although there were some). It was packed with dishes and linens and DVD players and artificial Christmas trees—all things we use, and we use together, but…well, it’s not my stuff. And while most of it had a happy home in our Berkeley “storage unit” (a corner of the bathroom), now we’re at the top of three flights of stairs and have a utopian vision of having one of those cute little living rooms you see in Pottery Barn catalogs, where everything has a place and anything that’s not carefully filed away on a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf has been purposefully left out to indicate that we’re not uptight at all, and have led very interesting lives, and, really, we didn’t MEAN to leave that thank-you note from John Edwards out on the coffee table. We’re not sure how that ended up there. How embarrassing.

As you can see, we’re well on our way to realizing that vision:

But the rest of what’s going on here isn’t yet quite up to the standard I had imagined just a week ago. I’m not going to go into detail about The List Adam’s Given The Landlord, but when was the last time YOU needed to pre-dry your clothes before putting them in the dryer? Have you ever heard the sound of a dryer falling off a washing machine?

I’m not going to lie, though. I’m pretty proud of my innovation. It’s like living on the prairie up in here. In the days of yore, ladyfolk were always finding new ways to use the hooks on their overpriced kitchen islands:

And as long as I’m busy with laundry, I’m just not going to worry about the rest of it…like the fact that it looks like a band was executed in the corner of the living room.