Suburban Rite of Passage: Filling Up Your Kitchen With Appliances You Never Use, EXCEPT a Juicer.

July 10, 2012 by

One of the things that happens to you when you move to the suburbs is that you start accumulating a lot of new stuff.  I’ve written before about how one of the big challenges in making the move is buying all the new furniture you need to fill up your new home, after spending years in a cramped city apartment relying on “transformer” furniture: tv trays that become coffee tables, couches that fold out into guest beds, collapsable end tables that turn into seating for six, stuff like that.

The effect is even bigger in the kitchen.  When I lived in the city, I pretty much had one appliance: a toaster.  That was it.  To the extent that I might have had any culinary ambitions, they were pretty much limited to recipes that relied heavily on browning slices of bread.  The funny thing was that I don’t actually eat a lot of toast — I rarely eat breakfast, and toast is not really a dinner food.  But when I got my own place, my mother got me the toaster, telling me that having a toaster was a sign of maturity, a sign of settling down.  I honestly never knew that a humble toaster could say so much about a person.

Nevertheless, that toaster stayed with me for years, prominently featured in my tiny little kitchen, just sitting there like a scrub basketball player at the end of the bench waiting for the coach to call him into the game, patiently biding its time until the day that I would have a dinner party featuring 15 different varieties of warmed bread

Now, of course, it didn’t really matter back then, because I never cooked.  Two people with full time jobs living in a small apartment with no kids and access to about 100 restaurants that will deliver food to their door have little need to roll their own pasta. But now that I’m in the suburbs, and well outside the Lenny’s delivery zone, I’ve suddenly found myself cooking more.  And as a result, my toaster has suddenly spawned a whole new array of cooking appliances:

  • A food processor, which according to most people who cook is the one indispensable cooking appliance.  To me, it seems like the one indispensable way to cut off a few of my fingers.
  • A pasta maker, which I haven’t actually used yet because I can’t figure it out.  I’m not sure that I have all the pieces, because it just looks too flimsy.  I need to do some research.
  • A slow cooker, which I think we might have had in the old apartment in the city, but it was always stored in an upper cabinet above the refrigerator, and required me to get a stool to pull it out, and it was heavy, and I am very, very lazy, so that was pretty much it for slow cooking back in the city.  Now it sits on the counter, just waiting for me to fill it with vegetables and meat and then find something else to do for six hours or so.
  • A waffle maker, which is just about the most frivolous appliance you could possibly have.  It does one thing. One thing!  And moreover, you only need that one thing at most once a month, unless you really, really like a lot of waffles.  To paraphrase Robin Williams, a waffle maker is God’s way of telling you that you have too much space in your kitchen.

That’s all on top of all the new pots and pans we have stored away in our ridiculously big cabinets, including a couple of cast iron pans that I like using just because it makes me feel like I’m some scrappy short order cook in a diner or something.  COOKING WITH IRON!

One thing I will NEVER get, though, is a juicer.  I’ve had a juicer. It was horrible.  I think a lot of people at some point in their life fall victim to the hype about juicers — that we all need to drink more juice, it’s so healthy, so tasty.  What no one ever tells you in those commercials is the amount of sheer pain that goes into making a cup of juice.

First, you have to buy an absolutely ungodly amount of fruit.  I had no idea how little juice there was in an orange until I tried to make orange juice. You need like a whole SACK OF ORANGES to make a decent glass for just one person.  You want to make juice for your friends coming over for brunch?  No problem, just back up the car to the produce stand and start emptying it into your trunk.  Why haven’t those geneticists come up with an orange that is nothing but juice, that you can basically stick a straw into like a coconut?  Something to work on, you scientist geeks!

Second, once you have your crate full of oranges, you have to actually CUT them before you can stuff them into the juicer’s big scary sharpy maw.  But doesn’t that defeat the whole purpose of the juicer?  If I wanted to sit there and cut oranges all day, I could just squeeze them to make my juice.  I don’t even need you, Mr. Juicer.

Third, once you’re done stuffing 87 orange halves into the juicer to make a small cup of juice, now you have to actually clean the juicer.  And it’s not like cleaning a juicer is like cleaning a pan — the juicer has this sharp, complicated blade that is perfect for severing more of my fingers, and which ends up all matted up with dismembered orange parts. “Scrub scrub scrub the blade,” sings the juicemaker!

Bottom line, if you want a nice cup of juice, expect to spend about half an hour between the cutting and the stuffing and the cleaning.  And that’s for oranges, which actually have a decent amount of juice in them.  You want, say, carrot juice, with all those helpful anti-oxidants or whatever it’s supposed to have, figure on an hour.  For a cup of juice. A cup.

The one thing a juicer does is give you an enormous appreciation for those stores that will sell you a big glass of freshly squeezed juice for like six bucks.  After you’ve owned a juicer, you’ll never begrudge paying that money for juice again. Six Dollars!  Think about it — it’s the same price as a large cup of coffee, but I can make all the coffee I want pretty easily at home.  I don’t even know how those juice places can stay in business, or keep their employees for more than one shift.  I’d rather dig ditches than make juice for other people.

So my advice to new suburbanites is this: never ever under any circumstances ever ever EVER get a juicer.  Otherwise, when it comes to appliances filling up your kitchen counters and cabinets, go crazy, if only so that you can make your visiting toast-eating city friends jealous.

Filed Under: Humor, Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs, Suburban Rites of Passage Tagged With: , , ,

What’s the Manliest of Holidays? The Fourth of July, Although Not for Men Like Me

July 6, 2012 by

I love the Fourth of July.  Not only is it the best holiday of the year, and the most suburban holiday of the year, but something else just occurred to me this past week: Independence Day is the manliest of the holidays.

Everything associated with the Fourth is manly:

We celebrate the achievements of manly men.  The whole holiday commemorates a bunch of men deciding to declare their independence.  Independence! What’s more manly than that?  Now, of course, it’s absolutely HORRIBLE and SEXIST that only men signed the Declaration, and my wife has pointed out that “all men are created equal” doesn’t at all imply that any of them are the equal of women.  But it is what it is: the Fourth of July celebrates men doing a manly thing.

What do we celebrate on other holidays?  Christmas is about a woman giving birth, or more secularly about a big fat man giving away free stuff. Not manly.  Thanksgiving?  All about having a big meal, which is relatively manly except that the main thrust of the holiday is COOKING the meal, which isn’t manly at all.

We blow stuff up!  What’s more manly than taking fistfuls of gunpowder and setting them off for no reason other than to see what the explosion looks like?  It’s the ultimate peacock display: lots of noise and flashes of light, accomplishing absolutely nothing. And if you’re like me, you get the potential bonus of blowing up your house when you try to connect a propane tank by yourself.

Blowing stuff up!  Now, THAT’S a manly holiday.  Christmas? Putting up decorations, buying gifts, writing cards. Yeeesshh. Thanksgiving?  Cooking.  Halloween?  Dressing up.  All these are girly holidays.

We cook manly food in a manly way.  Indeed, the Fourth of July is the one day of the year that men are expected to do the cooking, mainly because the “cooking” is simple enough for them to handle.  Here’s the recipe: (1) take meat, (2) put on hot grill, (3) cook until done.  No measuring, no mixing, no ingredients, no setting a timer.  Simple. Easy. Manly.

All that said, I should be clear that I am not at all a manly man.  It’s sad, really. I don’t know how to fix things, or make things, I work in an industry (real estate) that is about 90% women, and my main job requires me to basically type a lot. Put it this way — at a costume party a few years ago, the theme was that people had to dress up in a representation of their “uniform,” and most of the men had ACTUAL uniforms to wear: doctor’s scrubs, fireman gear, manly stuff like that. I wore a tux.

My glaring inadequacy, in fact, has become more pronounced now that I’m living in the suburbs.  There are just more manly men living out here. You live in the city, you’re surrounded by bankers and lawyers and other girly men like me.  All the manly men — the cops, the firemen, the contractors, they live out here in the suburbs. You see them at Home Depot on weekends picking up lumber and table saws and pistons, or whatever,, when I’m usually there to get replacement light bulbs or batteries or something. I’d like to say that it was 17 years living in the city that made me so soft, but I was pretty much a marshmallow my whole life.  Living in the city just hid the fact, since I had a super and stuff like that.

So when I say that the Fourth of July is a manly holiday, I say it mostly in appreciation for OTHER men, the manly ones, the guys who can actually do stuff and fix stuff and make stuff. And I was brutally reminded of my own shortcomings in this area this year.  We were having our annual party at my mom’s house, which we’ve done for many years because she has a pool.  She also has a grill, but it wasn’t working.  So, in the classic family fashion, she didn’t actually try to fix the grill, she just bought a new one.  That’s really the way we do things in the Rand family, which might explain my basic inadequacies in this area.

Unfortunately, she couldn’t get the grill delivered, so I had to pick it up.  Ideally, a real manly man would have a truck or something to go pick it up, and maybe one of those dollies or something to move it.  Of course, I have an SUV, not a truck. And I don’t have any dollies, other than the ones my kid plays with.

So here I am, on an incredibly hot day, trying to get this giant grill into my SUV. Again, this is a challenge I never had to deal with when I lived in the city. First of all, I would never have had the need for a big grill, or a big anything, in my old apartment.  Second, no one would have ever expected me to bring it home.  What would I do?  Strap it to the top of the cab, like Mitt Romney’s dog?

Now, to give myself a little bit of a break, I will point out that grills are VERY HEAVY, and so it was never going to be easy to get in, even for a manly man.  But I tried. I actually lifted it into the air, pulling out some tendons in my back (if backs have tendons, I guess) and almost getting it in.  But it was too big.

Which brought me to the next great divide between the manly man I wish I were, and the girly man that I actually am.  A manly man would have tools to take apart that grill to get it in the car.  I, of course, had no tools in the car. But I did have something almost as good: twenty dollars of cold hard cash.  So in the great Rand family spirit that led us to buy a new grill rather than just fix the one we had, I proudly took that crisp twenty dollar bill and slipped it to a guy at the store who actually had tools. In fact, a whole STORE of tools. So he helped me take the grill apart and get it into the car.  Of course, by “helped me,” I mean that he did it while I watched with an attentive look on my face designed to indicate that I could do all that if I only had remembered to bring the right screwdriver, or wrench, or plunger, or whatever it was that he was using.

Once that beautiful display of basic economic market dynamics was completed, I sped off to my mom’s house to start the reassembly.  And I’m proud to say that I actually was able to put it back together, or at least at the very end I didn’t have any leftover screws or bolts — which is not always the case when I put something together, when I usually reassure myself that that most manufacturers put in a couple of EXTRA bolts JUST IN CASE.

Even better, the grill worked, once my manly friend Mike helped attach the propane tank, something that I’m not quite ready for at this point in my development. But I did do most of the cooking, so there’s that.

Burgers for everyone!

Filed Under: Best of, Humor, Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs Tagged With: , , ,

Why Independence Day is the Most Suburban of Holidays

July 3, 2012 by

I’ve written before that Independence Day is pretty much the best holiday of the year.  Compared to other holidays, it’s a breeze. You hang out by the pool, throw some stuff on a grill, and watch other people blow stuff up.  You don’t have to do a lot of traveling, or feel the pressure to visit family you don’t really like, or do a lot of difficult cooking (4 different types of stuffing!).

But something else recently occurred to me: Independence Day is the ultimate suburban holiday.  It’s the one day of the year when it is incontestably, incontrovertibly better to live in the suburbs than in the city.  Why?

  • You need a pool.  You can’t celebrate the Fourth of July properly without being able to take a dip.  You want to spend the day in Central Park sweating your face off, that’s fine, but after a few hours you’re going to be thinking about jumping the fence on the reservoir or taking a wrench to the nearest fire hydrant.  Otherwise, you can go to one of those city pools, which are apparently very exciting.
  • You need a grill. And not one of those crappy portables that you can put out on your fire escape in violation of like a hundred building codes, which can barely singe a decent piece of meat.  You need a big, manly barbecue.
  • You need outdoor space. Now, some lucky people in the city might have a small backyard, or a deck or something, but that’s not enough for a proper Fourth of July party. You need grass. You need places to sit and take a nap in the sun.
No, if you want to do the Fourth of July properly, you need to be in the suburbs. It’s like the ultimate revenge for us suburbanites — you want to live in the city, with your hot people and your great clubs and fantastic restaurants and your culture and all that?  Fine, but on the Fourth of July, you’re going to be BEGGING to come visit me so you can sit by my pool and eat my hamburgers.  BEGGING, I tell you!
And that’s really what happens. You know how difficult it is for me to get people to come visit us out here in the suburbs?  Impossible.  No one wants to schlep for our annual super bowl party, much less a random weekend night.  Why would they leave the city to come hang out with us. The only hook I have for the Fourth of July:  a pool (not even mine, but my parents’ house is ten minutes away and well-provisioned), a grill, and a great view of the fireworks from my condo in Nyack.  Suddenly, people who won’t take my calls the rest of the year are lining up to hop a train to Tarrytown.
Sweet Revenge!!!
Filed Under: Humor, Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs Tagged With: , , ,

Understanding the “Bridge and Tunnel” Crowd, and Why There Aren’t Any Good Clubs or Lounges in the Suburbs

June 22, 2012 by

When I resigned myself to a life in the suburbs, one of my goals was to try to find nightlife opportunities that would give me some semblance of the experiences I used to get in the city.  Now, let me be clear that I was not a big nightlife guy in the first place.  In my 20s, my usual nightlife routine was a night playing pool at the lost and lamented Amsterdam Billiards or getting a beer in a neighborhood bar.  Part of that was that I was, as they say, “living in the 80s and making in the 30s”, so I didn’t quite have the bankroll to hit a club. It’s a lot more fun to go clubbing if you are (a) a rich guy, or (b) a hot girl.  I was neither of those things.

Even as I got older, though, and could afford the club scene, it was really only something I did once in a while.  Maybe if I’d been single, or liked dance music music, or liked standing, or liked tinnitis, or couldn’t do the math on the cost of buying a bottle of Grey Goose for $350, I would have been a bigger fan.  But it just wasn’t my thing.  Maybe once in a while we’d get together with a group, get a table at a club, and put a big hole in our credit cards to enjoy a night out, but it really had to be a special occasion.

Otherwise, as I got older, my main nightlife routine would be hitting a “lounge,” which is really a euphemism for “a bar that has the drink prices of clubs because it has couches.”  As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate having couches in bars.  The world needs more couches.  And I guess I like lounges because they aren’t as loud, so you can have a conversation.  The world needs more conversation, too.  You can’t really talk in a club, which is actually generally a good thing because most of the people in the clubs don’t have much of anything to say beyond “hey, nice shoes.”

So when I say that I was hoping to find nightlife opportunities in the suburbs, I’m really talking about those kinds of lounges — places with couches, where you can have a conversation, maybe with a bartender who makes interesting drinks that involve something called “muddling.”  Drinks that involve “muddling” are always much more expense than the non-muddling variety, but they sort of justify the fact that you went out at all — if you’re going to just mix vodka and soda, you can do that at home.  You need a fancy bartender in some couchy lounge to make you something with 15 muddled ingredients.

Here’s the thing — they don’t exist in the suburbs.  They. Don’t. Exist.  There are no lounges.  In fact, there are no clubs, nowhere that you can, if you wanted that experience, go to dance and listen to music and become insensate from the ringing in your ears.  What you have in the suburbs is simple: bars.  Just bars. No couches. No muddled drinks. No dancing.

It’s actually a lot worse than I thought. I figured that with all the people who get exiled from the city to the suburbs every year, some entrepreneurial type would realize that there’s a market for an “urban-style” lounge or club that would appeal to people who don’t want to just sit in a bar and, moreover, don’t want to have to schlep to the city to go out.

But I was wrong, and here’s why.  People who live in the suburbs who want to get an urban nightlife experience go to the city.  Whether they are 25 year olds who want to dance and listen to music without words, or 35 year olds who want to go to drink complicated drinks and sit on couches, they all have something in common — they want to do it IN the city. That’s the whole point.  They want to escape the suburbs for a night and feed on the urban energy and excitement.

Hence — the “bridge and tunnel” crowd that everyone in the city complains about when they go to clubs and lounge.  Oh, boy, there’s nothing worse for the reputation of a club/lounge than to get tagged as a “B&T” place, because then no one who actually lives in the city wants to go.  So the urbanites stop coming, and eventually the B&T people realize that they’re schlepping 45 minutes and paying $50 for parking to hang out with people from their neighborhod, so they stop coming. And then the place shuts down, while the B&T people start chasing wherever the urbanites went to.  It’s a vicious circle.

And that’s the point.  The people in the suburbs don’t really care about the music, or the muddled drinks, or the couches — what they want is the feeling of being a part of the urban excitement for a night.  If someone actually opened a hipster club/lounge/whatever in the suburbs, it would be the absolute worst.  By definition, EVERYONE in the place would part of the B&T crowd, except that they wouldn’t actually have to cross a bridge or burrow through a tunnel to get there.  Even worse, the people most likely to end up filling the place would be the very B&T people who aren’t even urbanized enough to want that hit off the urban pipe.  They’d be like the junior varsity to the B&T crowd, people who don’t even care about getting that authentic vibe.  In other words, that suburban hipster lounge would be like the worst place on earth for an urban exile.

That’s why those places don’t exist.  And that’s why my nightlife over the past three years has narrowed down to the occasional trip into the city, or game night at the condo.  In other words, despite any ambitions I might have had to maintain any kind of urban cred, I’m a typical suburbanite.

Ouchy.

Filed Under: Humor, Living in Manhattan, Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs, Return from Exile Tagged With: , , ,

Does Moving to the Suburbs Make You a Conservative?

June 21, 2012 by

Is moving to the suburbs a political statement?  The reason I ask is that I’ve become increasingly aware of this raging battle between the forces of sprawl and the advocates of density, one that actually polarizes along familiar political lines: suburbs = conservative, and cities = liberal.

Now, it’s not just about how the cities tend to be more politically liberal and the suburbs more politically conservative. Yes, that’s absolutely and obviously true — you don’t get a lot of tea parties on the Upper West Side, and you don’t see too many “Free Mumia” banners hanging from the windows of high ranches in New City.

But it’s more about how the suburbs versus the cities arguments tend to reflect conservative and liberal values:
  • Suburbs:  Big houses, big lots, big cars, big highways, assimilation, personal freedom, ownership society.
  • City: Dense spaces, walkable neighborhoods, community involvement, concern for the environment, diversity, public transportation, renters over owners.
For example, check out this almost comical “suburban manifesto” put out by L. Brooks Patterson, the supervisor for Michigan’s Oakland County, titled “Sprawl, Schmall…Give Me More Development”, and tell me it doesn’t read like something being shouted by a guy in a colonial hat in front of a picture of President Obama morphing into Hitler:

Sprawl is not evil. In fact, it is good. It is the inevitable result of a free people exercising their cherished, constitutionally protected rights as individuals to pursue their dreams when choosing where to live, where to work, where to educate, and where to recreate.

***

The anti-American Dreamers would have you believe that suburban growth is at the root of all problems that beset our cities, both in Michigan and across our country.  They seem to believe that citizens left thriving cities, and that it was their departure that caused high crime, high taxes, invisible public services, and failing public school systems. Anybody who believes that line of thinking is taking denial to a whole new level. Sprawl did not cause the decline of the cities. Cities declined because they squandered their assets. High crime rates, high taxes, failing schools, foul air and a lack of open green spaces forced people to move.

It will probably not shock you that Mr. Patterson is a Republican.  But my point is that the pro-suburban argument properly articulated is inherently conservative: the individual over the community, assimilation over diversity, highways over public transportation, personal freedoms over environmental protection.
Conversely, the urbanist perspective is almost inescapably liberal, stressing how dense walkable neighborhoods foster a sense of community, reduce environmental impact, promote diversity, provide for affordable housing, and reduce transportation costs.  From the urbanist view,suburbs are ridiculously wasteful and hideously (and often subtly) subsidized.
All of this puts me in a difficult position, as a liberal who actually lives in the suburbs.  Does just living here make a political statement that I don’t value diversity, or the environment, or public transportation?  Am I betraying my own sensibilities to drive an SUV?  Do I need to get fitted for my tri-corner hat?
Maybe not.  As Allison Arieff points out in a response to Patterson in the New York Times, there’s a middle way between the glorification and vilification of sprawl, a movement to bring a more community-minded sensibility to suburban environments not as an act of governmental or political will, but simply a response to basic market demand:  developers who realize that many of their clients want those smaller, walkable neighborhoods, and people living in the suburbs who are finding ways to connect and foster a real community.  As she says, living “better and smarter shouldn’t be a partisan issue.”
That makes sense to me. Like a lot of people who moved to the suburbs, I wasn’t making a political statement. I wasn’t taking sides in this battle, or foregoing my liberal sensibilities to adopt Mr. Patterson’s vision of the American Dream.
I just wanted more closet space.
Filed Under: News, Suburbs versus Cities Tagged With: , , ,

Who’s Moving to the Suburbs? Elisabeth Hasselbeck, That’s Who!

June 12, 2012 by

One of the regular features of the Move to Suma is our breathless reporting of celebrities who have made the move to the suburbs, in what is an obvious and thinly-veiled attempt to validate my own decision to leave the city.  I mean, am I really so uncool to live in the suburbs if people like Jonah Hill, Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively, Beyonce and Jay Z, and Usher are making the move with me (not, of course, really WITH me, but you get the point)?

Those are pretty cool people, amirite?  So, in the spirit of fairness, I have to report this little nugget from the Daily Mail:

For one TV co-host, changing her view was as simple as moving to Connecticut.

Elisabeth Hasselbeck, who serves as co-host on The View, has purchased a sprawling $4million estate with her husband Tim Hasselbeck an hour outside of New York City.

The bubbly blonde had listed her condo on the Upper West Side in March for $3.3million earlier this year. It is now in contract to sell.

Ms Hasselbeck’s rep told TMZ at the time that the family was looking for a quieter and less-hectic lifestyle, saying: ‘Tim and Elisabeth have decided to trade in city living for the suburbs.’

I have to be honest. I would have thought that Elisabeth Hasselbeck ALREADY lived in the suburbs.

This is not quite the get we had with Beyonce, but, nevertheless — welcome, Elisabeth!

Filed Under: News, Who's Moving to the Suburbs? Tagged With: ,

The Return from Exile in Reverse: Re-Creating the Suburban Experience in New York City

June 5, 2012 by

Jesse McKinley had a great piece in the New York Times last week about trying to recreate a stereotypical suburban experience within Manhattan. A native suburban, his theory was that the city is slowly becoming “suburbanized“:

 The ’burbs seem to be everywhere, from miniature golf in the Village to batting cages on the Upper West Side. There’s table tennis off Park Avenue South, an Applebee’s in Harlem and highway-style hotels like the Comfort Inn on the Lower East Side. Multiplexes are more common than art houses, and don’t even try to avoid trivia nights. If not for all the big buildings and honking, you could easily mistake Manhattan for Mahwah on some nights.

McKinley thinks that this might be the result of changing demographics, with people from the suburbs moving into the city and providing a target market for their “cultural traditions.”  Sort of like the way that an influx of ethnic immigrants create the need for more Pakistani restaurants, but far less spicy.  I would also add that, to the extent that his thesis is accurate — and I’m not quite convinced that a couple of bars offering ping-pong is a sign of the suburbanizing apocalypse — it might be that more couples deciding to stay in the city after they have kids might create a greater need for more “family-oriented” activities.

Anyway, as part of testing his theory, McKinley wrote a funny travelogue of a weekend he spent sampling these suburban diversions throughout the city:

  • A trip to the Manhattan Mall, which he found disappointing insofar as the “mall” doesn’t have a food court. No food court!  What kind of mall is that?
  • Trivia Night at a bar on the upper west side, which is I guess representative of the average suburban night out.
  • Two nights at a cheap chain hotel.
  • Dinner at Chevys, a classic suburban chain.
  • Mini-Golf at some place down in the Village.
  • Brunch at Applebees, the great “neighborhood grill,” if you live in the worst neighborhood in the world.
  • An Imax movie.
  • A few swings at the batting cages.

Now, as much as I liked this piece, as a self-appointed champion of the suburbs, I’m a wee bit nettled by the reductionist approach to suburban living.  We will not be MOCKED!!!  Or, rather, we can mock ourselves, in the way that only, say, Italian people can properly make Italian jokes.  But it hurts to see someone practically put on “blackface” like this.  Seriously, Applebees?  Ouch!

More to the point, I’ve lived in the suburbs for almost three years now, and I don’t do most of the stuff that McKinley put in his piece.  I get the mall, and the batting cages, and I guess I can understand the trips to stereotypically suburban restaurant chains.  But why stay at an Econo Lodge? Suburbanites don’t stay in cheap hotels — we live in cheap houses!  And what about miniature golf?  I haven’t even seen a miniature golf course here in the Hudson Valley area in years — they were all closed down and turned into McMansion developments.  The only place you get mini-golf is down at the shore.  It’s really more of a vacation activity.

So I don’t know if he quite captured the true modern suburban experience. If you really want that experience, and I don’t know why you would, here’s what I’d add to the agenda:

First, you can’t rent some small little hotel room at the Econo Lodge; rather, you should get some cheap suite hotel, because you need a kitchen that you can cook in.  Here in the suburbs, we don’t go out every night to fancy places like Chevy’s and Applebees — we cook.  So pick up some groceries, cook up a meal, and eat it in front of the TV like the rest of us suburbanites.

Second, when you’re done eating, skip the miniature golf and the batting cages, and get in touch with your true suburban self:

  • Take a trip to Costco, because nothing says suburbs like picking up 400 rolls of toilet paper.
  • Rent a lawnmower and start mowing a section of Central Park.  You’ll probably end up in jail, but you can’t spend a suburban weekend without cutting some grass.
  • Buy a car seat, and try to install it in a cab. That’ll take up a good half a day. The cabbie will be thrilled!
  • Clog up a toilet, and fix it yourself.

Buying stuff, cooking a meal, mowing the lawn — now, THAT would be a suburban weekend.

Filed Under: Humor, Living in the Suburbs, News, Return from Exile Tagged With: ,

More Unhappy People Like Me Grudgingly Moving to the Suburbs and Writing All About It

May 14, 2012 by

I think I need to start a whole new section of the blog just to cover all the OTHER people who are writing about their own decision to move to the suburbs.  Here I am thinking I have some clever new angle — a blog all about moving from the city to the suburbs!!! — and I find that I am, in fact, legion.  Even worse, I’m pretty much the worst musician in the band, the guy they put on, you know, the triangle or something because he has a big moving van.

On the one hand, it’s nice to have the validation that I’m not alone in the world.  On the other, it explains why writing this stupid blog hasn’t made me rich.

Just to sum up some of our recent coverage:

Now, I’ve come across the very funny “Daddy Confidential” blog mourning his wife’s decision –he makes it clear that it was not his — to move to the suburbs.  And, as always, a kid is involved:

We are doing this, of course, for our son of 20 months. We’re figuring that instead of concrete, city lights and the honking of cabs, he’ll be better served by woods, stars and the sound of crickets.

Toddlers, it turns out, are not ideally suited to apartment life. My son doesn’t understand why banging a rolling pin on the floor is not an acceptable musical expression. He’s perplexed that sitting on the sidewalk is forbidden, on account of the neighborhood dogs vying for territorial supremacy.

None of this should imply that New York isn’t kid-friendly. It’s just not parent-friendly. Applying to preschool involves the effort, expense and statistical likelihood of finding a kidney donor. Our elementary school is so oversubscribed that its playground bears the aesthetic composition of a crowded prison yard. The whole business fills my wife with a dread that can only be banished by the sight of a Talbots.

Admittedly, I am starting to panic. The skills one acquires in New York do not translate well into the suburbs. The city has made me impatient, vulgar, and arrogant. (Though I was probably already vulgar.)

It’s good stuff.  The post was from about a month ago, and it’s actually entitled “Sex and the Suburbs, Part 1,” in what is probably a play on “Sex and the City,” since there doesn’t seem to be a Part 2.  Perhaps it’s still pending a trip to Abu Dhabi.  I’ll keep an eye out for it, as well as any further Daddy adventures in the suburbs.

Anyway, as the self-appointed driver of the Disaffected Urban Exile Welcome Wagon, I’m happy to say: “Welcome to the Suburbs!”

Filed Under: Living in the Suburbs, Moving to the Suburbs, Parenting in the Suburbs Tagged With: , , ,

REVISITED: Does Having a Dog Prepare You For Having a Kid? The Answer — Not Really

May 5, 2012 by

About a year ago, before I ever had a kid, I wrote about how I thought that having a dog would prepare me, at least a little, for having a child.  After all, once you have a dog, you have to clean up after it, feed it, and you can’t go away for a weekend or something without taking care of it.  All true.

That said, now that I have a baby, I realize what a schmuck I was.  Babies are much tougher.  First of all, I never realized simply how stupid babies are. The dog is stupid, but at least has a survival instinct that keeps him, for example, from jumping off our deck.  The baby is not only stupid, but seems to have no interest in staying alive.  I spend a lot of time just trying to keep him from killing himself: babyproofing cabinets, putting up stair guards, etc.  Still, he keeps finding ways that could put himself in danger. Maybe he’s depressed.  Can babies get depressed?

Of course, there are other difference.  Having a dog didn’t prepare me for how needy a baby is.  The dog will usually just chill for a while, sitting in corner or in his crate.  Babies require a lot more attention.  I sort of knew that, but I sort of thought we could occasionally plop him down in a pack-n-play, away from all the dangerous things that he likes to sneak around to, and take a nap.  That doesn’t seem to be in the cards.

So, yeah, it’s a lot more work. But all that said, I do think that having a dog is one of those milestones on the road to maturity that you pass on the way to having a child.  That is, the “I am mature enough to care for others besides myself” continuum goes like this:
  • Get a plant.  Try to keep the plant alive.  If the plant dies, stop here. Don’t get any other living things that might depend on you for their survival. If the plant lives, though, then keep going.
  • Get a dog.  Try to keep the dog alive.  If the dog dies because you forgot to feed it for two weeks, stop here.  Go back to getting a plant and start over. If the dog lives, though, then keep going.
  • Have a baby.  Try to keep the baby alive.  Definitely do NOT kill the baby.  Practice is over.

So far, so good.  Most of my plants are still alive, the dog is doing well, and so far I have managed to keep the baby alive, despite all his best efforts to off himself.

Filed Under: Best of, Having a Dog in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs, Parenting in the Suburbs Tagged With: ,

Would Albert Camus Leave the City: Moving to the Suburbs as an Existential Crisis

May 4, 2012 by

Always good to know you’re not alone.  I came across this post from Gaynor Alder in the Modern Woman’s Survival Guide, who writes about her decision to move to the suburbs (in Australia — who knew?).  I think she captures the dilemma particularly well, describing her decision as part of an “existential crisis”:

I’ve always been a city girl, and my sense of self has always felt lovingly wrapped up in the joie de vivre of its energy. The way its streets pulse with life. The glamorous lifestyle it offers its occupants. Being surrounded by creative people. Quick commutes to the city. Strutting out my door to a cafe for breakfast. Shops within metres from my doorstep.

Leaving the inner city ring is like someone slowly switching off my oxygen, and my soul screams out as it drains the life out of me, suburb by suburb, street by street, home by home. JUST. NOT. ME.

But, something else has become important to me at this point in time. My independence. Having my own space. A sense of security. A sanctuary for my soul so that I can continue to create, without being at the mercy of other people. And as I continue to grow a successful writing business, I have a decision to make.

I could keep living in an inner city apartment that has a shoebox for a wardrobe, or I could move out for a year or so, into a 2 bedroom townhouse in the suburbs that has a space for my office and be financially buoyant. But it doesn’t make the decision any less excruciating, and this inner crisis is a doozy, because it pushes on my core fear. My very essence. Everything I’m about.

I hear you, sister!  

Man, and here I thought that I was only dealing with the loss of good ethnic food delivery. I never realized that I confronting the devastating awareness of meaninglessness.

Then again, as Albert Camus said:

As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.

He definitely would never have moved to the suburbs.

Filed Under: Moving to the Suburbs Tagged With: , , ,
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