One of the Two Best Days of My Life: The Day I Bought My Boat

May 15, 2011 by

It’s an old joke.  The two best days of your life are when you buy a boat, and when you finally sell that boat.

So I got myself a boat.  I took the plunge, which is not necessarily the best turn of phrase I could have chosen.  I live in a condo right on the Hudson River, and can see the river from pretty much every room in the house. It seemed crazy to live right there on the water without being able to take advantage of it. So for the last year or so, I’ve been determined to get myself a boat.

Imagine it.  A boat docked right outside my condo, literally a two-minute walk from my front door.  Beautiful Saturday afternoon, we pack a lunch, invite some friends, take a spin around the Hudson, maybe even take it into Manhattan for dinner and avoid the traffic.  So cool!

Now, I should point out one minor flaw in my plan. Namely, that I know nothing about boats.  Literally, nothing.  I don’t even know how they don’t sink, big heavy things sitting out on the water. Something about buoyancy, I’ve heard, but to me it’s magic.  I don’t know how planes fly, either.  Honestly, I don’t know anything.

You know how in the movies people travel back in time and they’re able to take advantage of their superior technological knowledge to get rich or whatever — like, they can make gunpowder or cure illnesses and stuff like that?  Well, if you sent me back 200 years into the past, I’d be totally useless. I’d be all like, “hey, there’s this thing called ‘electricity’ and we can use it to power our houses,” and then people would ask me to explain how it works and I’d basically tell them that you plug cords into outlets in a wall and there you have it!  Electricity!  SPOOKY MAGIC MAN FROM THE FUTURE!

You’d pretty much have to send me like a thousand years in the past for me to have any sort of technological advantage over the people from that time.  Maybe all the way back to the cavemen.  I’m pretty sure I could kick some real ass in a caveman society — the wheel, fire, washing your hands.  I’d be the king of the cavemen.  Otherwise, totally useless.

Anyway, back to boats. I know nothing about them.  I’ve ridden in them, and probably driven piloted a few over the years, but most of my boating memories involve all the times I’ve broken propellers.  I break a propellor virtually every time I take a boat out, on rocks, sandbars, human flesh — basically whatever gets in my way.  It’s actually deeply hard-wired into my genes: my dad used to take us out on boats down in Florida, and pretty much every trip involved us all getting out and trying to push ourselves off a sand bar.

All that said, I’m getting a boat. I figure that things will be different now that I’m all grown up and all.  I have enough free cash to cover the cost and the myriad expenses that I expect will pop up. And I’ve heard that boating on the Hudson is pretty easy — deep water, no sand bars, clearly marked waterways, etc.

But the real reason is that I just want one.  I’m a grown man, I make a good living, and if I want to throw away some of my money, well, then, I’m just going to do it.

See you out on the water!

 

 

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

Why Everyone Should Own a Dog, Including and Especially Single Men

January 22, 2011 by

We’ve had the Kozy dog for a little over a year now, and I will say without reservation that it is the best decision that I have every made, other than marrying my wife, a clarification I feel obligated to make because I do enjoy the occasional sexy time that I would almost certainly never have again if I said that buying a dog was a better decision than getting married. Not to mention that, with the real estate market struggling like it has, I don’t quite have the wherewithal to give up half my money.  So the wife is the best decision, no question.  But the dog was a pretty good one, too.

Here’s why: no one has ever been as happy to see me, at any point in my life, as that dog is every single time I come home.  I’ve never seen such joy. It’s at a level of Times Square at the end of World War II, but EVERY SINGLE DAY.  I come home, and he’s practically quivering with joy, shaking his tail so vigorously that he basically is shaking his whole body.  My wife? She might rouse herself from the couch to give me a kiss hello.  But my dog loses his mind.

So far, that’s really the best part about living in the suburbs. I never wanted a dog in the city, because I could not bear the thought of having to climb up and down those stupid stairs every day to walk him all the time.  But in retrospect, I was wrong.  I should have gotten a dog years ago, although that would mean I wouldn’t have THIS dog, and I honestly can’t imagine having any dog than Kozy.  Yes, I know that if I’d gotten a dog five years ago, before Kozy was ever born, I’d love that dog too and be unable to imagine owning any other dog.  But that hypothetical imaginary version of me is simple wrong: THIS dog is the best.

So I should have gotten a dog back when I lived in the city.  Frankly, everyone should have a dog: urbanist, suburbanite, people living on the moon.  Get a dog.

In fact, I’d particularly recommend my single male friends looking for female companionship to get a dog.  First of all, having a dog is a signal to women that you have at least some basic nurturing skills, which women find sexy.  Nothing turns a woman off more than to come back to your apartment and find some long-dead plant festering in the corner, a sign that you’re so incapable of taking care of anything that you couldn’t even manage to WATER A PLANT.  You bring that young lady back up to your place, and show her that you’ve actually managed to keep a dog alive, and you’re well on your way to Sexy Time.

Second, having a dog is a pretty well-known way to meet women. You don’t realize how many other people have dogs until you have one yourself.  It’s like how when you buy a car, you start to notice all the other people who have the same car.  So now that I have a dog, I’ve started to notice all the people walking their dogs when I’m in the city, something to which I was completely oblivious back in my ignorant dog-free days.  And a lot of those people are young, attractive women who have clearly recognized the value of unqualified adoration, something they apparently aren’t getting so much of from the likes of you.  They’re out there, walking their dogs, waiting for you.  Not to mention how cute dogs, and my dog is awfully cute are like catnip (okay, mixing animal metaphors a bit here) to women.  Walk a dog, meet a woman. It’s that simple, and a lot easier than trolling bars.

Third, dogs are great for screening out women that you probably shouldn’t be dating or marrying.  If you’re dating a woman who doesn’t like dogs, that’s a really bad sign.  If she likes cats, that’s even worse, because cats are terrible, awful, evil things.  A woman who loves dogs has an appreciation for mindless, stupid creatures who give unbounded affection but make a lot of messes, which is exactly what men are. A woman who hates dogs is probably not going to like living with you, especially you, because you’re a pig.

Of course, all that wisdom comes too late for me, already happily married.  But it’s not too late for you.  You married people?  Get a dog.  Single people.  Get a dog.  Everyone should get a dog.

Filed Under: Advice, Best of, Having a Dog in the Suburbs, Humor, Living in Manhattan, Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs Tagged With: , ,

Return from Exile: Santa’s Five Rules for Enjoying Santacon

December 5, 2010 by

About five years ago, we were on the C train coming back from getting dim sum with some friends who were visiting from out of town.  We were toward the front of the train, and as we approached the 81st street stop we could hear some wierd chanting coming from the cars behind us.  It sounded like “Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh”, and it was getting louder as the train started to slow.  When we got off at the stop, and climbed the stairs up to the corner by 81st and Central Park, we realized what it was — a horde of people dressed in santa suits all chanting “HO HO HO”, who were now flooding off the train in droves.

It was frightening, if hilarious.  Hundreds of people in santa suits, all in red, with one small group of “reindeer” holding up signs indicating that they were protesting working conditions at the North Pole.  They just kept pouring out of the subway exits, hundreds of them, a sea of red, chanting “Ho Ho Ho” and herding toward the park.

I asked one of the Santas what was going on, and he explained that it was “Santacon,” a yearly “convention” of Santas that takes place in cities across the world, sort of a combination of flash mob and pub crawl that is scheduled each year by self-appointed (dis-)organizers who have created informational websites where you find out the where and when, download the dirty Santacon carol-book, and even now sign up for Twitter feeds so you can join the herd as Santa gets “on the move” from place to place in the city.

After seeing it that day. I was hooked.  I’ve been at every Santacon since.  If you’re going to do it, though, you need to follow the rules:

1.  You ARE Santa

The most important thing to remember about Santacon is that it’s your chance to BE Santa.  We’re all Santa.  So you have to stop talking in the first person, as in “I am hungry.”  Rather, it’s “Santa is hungry.”  “Santa is thirsty.”  When you greet people at Santacon, you don’t say, “hi,” you say “Hi Santa,” and they say “Hi Santa” back.  It’s glorious.

2. Wear a Suit
Most women don’t wear classic Santa outfits, God Bless their beautiful hearts, but get creative with some outfit from Ricky’s or something else that puts a feminine spin on the Santa theme.  But if you’re a guy, put on a suit.  No hanging out with the group in your jeans and t-shirt, with some lame-ass Santa hat on.  You’re not too cool to be Santa. This is like a black tie affair at which you’re going to look like a dumbass rube if you’re not in costume.
3.  Layer Up
 The worst thing about Santa suits is that they’re usually made of paper-thin material that doesn’t exactly provide warmth on a cold December day.   The nice thing about most Santa suits is that they’re big and baggy, so you can put clothes on underneath them.  Do that.  Nothing worse than a frostbitten Santa. And if you’re a woman putting on some sort of sexy costume, wear it OVER tights or something, not just because of the cold but because you’re going to be hanging out with a lot of increasingly drunken and occasional lecherous Santas.
4.  Have Fun, But Not Too Much Fun
Take a huge group of people, add alcohol, and you’re likely to end up with at least a few people getting arrested or breaking things.  Don’t do that. While it’s hilarious to see a Santa carted off in handcuffs, think of the children…
5.  Stay with the Herd
A few years ago, we were at Santacon down in Tompkins Park and ran into Ted, a friend who happened to live in the area.  He didn’t know it was going on, so he wasn’t dressed, but he enjoyed the vibe so much he hung out with us for the rest of the long night while we traveled from place to place as part of the herd.  All night, he complained about feeling out of place, as the only one in the group who didn’t have a suit on.  Late in the night, though, the Santa herd moved on, and we just stayed at a bar we liked on the LES.  After about midnight, he looked around, turned to me and said, “Santa, the worm has turned.”  Sadly, at that point, I was the only Santa in the place, and looked like a complete jackass.  Never leave the herd.
See you, Santa!
Filed Under: Advice, Best of, Humor, Living in Manhattan, Return from Exile Tagged With: , , , ,

How Do You Buy Fancy Art When You Know Nothing About Art?

September 25, 2010 by

As I’ve said before, I know nothing about art.  Seriously. I can name maybe like five famous artists, all of them long dead, and mostly what I know is that one of them cut his ear off or something, which I have to say is pretty badass.  I know that there’s something called “cubism” and something else called “impressionism,” and have a general sense that it’s not really art if it’s painted on velvet.

That said, as part of this whole growing up process that I’m going through, with the whole move to the suburbs and all, I’ve started to become more interesting in getting pretty things to put on my walls. I have a lot more walls than I used to have, so I need to cover them with something, and I’m a little past the age when I can get by with the same cheap prints I’ve been lugging around since college.

So in the same way that we committed to having an actual professional help decorate our home, we’ve actually found someone to help us buy real art to fill up those walls. We met this lovely woman named Heather Flow who happens to be a private art buyer — someone who advises you about buying art, and collects a commission when you buy something, a fee that, just like with interior decorators, is supposed to be offset by what you can save buying through her.

It seems absolutely crazy that I actually have an “art buyer.”  Even writing the words makes me feel a little squishy.  But as hopeless as I was with interior design, I was practically [editor note: insert name of famous interior designer] compared to my capacity for buying art.  So she has been absolutely indispensible.

And it kind of turns out to be a fun and interesting process. She took us out to look at a lot of galleries, places that in all the years I lived in Manhattan I never visited.  Apparently, that’s where they sell the art.  Who knew?   I never actually went to those places, partly because I didn’t have money to buy any real art and partly because I was little intimidated by the whole concept, sure that I’d be immediately dismissed by some snooty gallery wisp in that whole “if you have to ask you can’t afford it” way.

So she arranges for us to go visit, asks us what we like and don’t like, and has helped narrow down our tastes to guide us to something that won’t embarrass us when it’s hanging on our walls.  So we’ve come to realize that we like abstract art, don’t like things like videos of eyeballs (which was one of the options, apparently), and like a lot of color.  Again, who knew?

By no means are we jumping into this with any type of real budget. I get the sense that Heather has far more sophisticated clients in far higher price ranges.  But even at our relatively modest level, we’ve had some interesting experiences.

The best part is that the gallery owners don’t know what pikers we really are, because we’re with Heather, so they don’t treat us like some slobs when we come through the gallery.  For all they know, we’re internet millionaires or something. And, to be fair, the idea that gallery owners treat people like slobs is almost certainly something a fiction I’ve created inside my own head, not an actual reflection of reality. They certainly seem like nice people.

 And we’ve even started looking on our own — and in the suburbs, no less.  A few weeks ago, we went over to Armonk, in Westchester County, for the Armonk Outdoor Art Show.  The show is part of a circuit that various types of artists hit during the year, setting up booths to display their stuff.  So now that we had a little bit of edumacation from Heather about what to look for, we actually had a good time hitting up the booths and actually, amazingly, appreciating the art.
So let’s just chalk one up for the kid, shall we?  All these years of living in Manhattan, and now that he’s living in the suburbs, he’s finally developing an appreciation for art.
Filed Under: Humor, Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs, SUMA Lifestyle Tagged With: , ,

What I Won’t Miss About the City: The Pressure to Go Better Myself

August 23, 2010 by

I’ve tried to be cultured, I really have.  When you live in the greatest city in the world, you feel almost a compulsion to do add a little refinement in your life.  The feeling just nags at you: what are you doing living here if you’re just going to sit at home watching “The Office”?

So even if you don’t like opera, you try to go once in a while, even though opera is absolutely HORRIBLE.  It really is. I’m sorry, I know that it’s really great and all that, and I’m a terrible person because I don’t appreciate it enough, or really at all.  But to me it’s a lot of not-such-great acting and singing in that wierd voice that doesn’t sound all that human in a language that I don’t speak.  I pretty much only speak English.  Not a lot of opera in English.

And you also have to go to galleries and museums and all that.  I tried to do that, joined the Apollo Circle at the Met — okay, let’s be honest that it was my WIFE who joined and brought me along — which was fun because we got to go to parties and stuff.  And I like looking at art a lot better than sitting through opera, although I know almost nothing and, at this point in my life, don’t have the time to learn.  But I like me the pretty paintings.

The problem is that there’s just so much pressure when you live in the city to do those types of things, a built-in guilt trip every time you pass the Moma or the Guggenheim and realize that you haven’t actually walked inside in like five years. I’m sure a lot of people who live in the city have done a better job than me at all that stuff, and I tip my (baseball) cap to them.  But I’ll bet a lot of other people are more like me — more  in love with the IDEA of being in such a cultured city, but less in love with the actual, you know, going out and doing stuff.

So while I miss the energy and excitement of the city, I don’t really miss that guilt trip.  Now, I have an excuse as to why I haven’t been inside a museum in five years, or haven’t gone to an opera in as long as I can remember.  I live in the suburbs, after all!  So much less is expected of me now. No more guilt. No more pressure.  Sort of the silver lining in the cultural wasteland that is becoming my life.

So that’s one good thing about living in the suburbs — no one expects that you ever do anything cultured and refine.  So you don’t have to.

Off to the couch.  Law and Order is almost certainly on.

 

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

Why the Fourth of July is the Best Holiday of the Year — Particularly When You Can Watch Fireworks from Your Home

July 1, 2010 by

I love the Fourth of July.  It’s absolutely the best holiday of the year, much better than Christmas or Thanksgiving.

Christmas is great, particularly when you’re a kid.  But as an adult, Christmas is mostly a big pain.  You have to go buy a bunch of presents, stress about whether you need to buy presents for this or that person.  You have to figure out how much to tip various people in your life  (the guy who delivers the newspaper, seriously?) .  And I always end up having to go to like a million holiday parties all through December, which just leaves me a big soggy fat mess.  And, of course, not everyone celebrates Christmas, so we all end up in that ugly “if you say ‘Merry Christmas’ you must hate the Jews, and if you say ‘Happy Holidays’ you murdered the baby Jesus” fight every year.

Thanksgiving is great, and everyone who matters (i.e., Americans) celebrate it, but it’s also kind of a pain.  Lots of travel, all that cooking, and half the time I end up getting sick and lying on the bathroom floor groaning all day Friday.  That’s not a fun holiday.

New Year’s Eve sucks.  Don’t talk to me about New Year’s Eve.

Memorial Day and Labor Day are just three day weekends.  One of them starts the summer, the other ends it, and I can never remember which is which.

Valentine’s Day doesn’t count. If you don’t get the day off, it’s not a holiday. Sorry, honey.

The Fourth of July is just awesome:

  • We all get to celebrate. You say “Happy Fourth of July” to someone, you don’t start a culture war.
  • The weather is great.  A summer holiday.  Sadly, no football like Thanksgiving, but you can’t have everything.
  • It’s easy.  To celebrate the Fourth, you need a pool, and a barbecue.  You’re done.  You want to get a couple of sparklers, go nuts.  Throwing hot dogs and hamburgers on a grill is nothing compared to figuring out a stuffing recipe for a turkey.
  • No obligations. No church, no temple, no getting dressed up.  Bathing suit.  T shirt.  That’s the uniform.  I know that some towns have a reading of the Declaration of Independence, which sounds just wonderfully patriotic but a horrible distraction from eating more hotdogs.
  • It’s not a “family” holiday.  No traveling 200 miles in traffic to see that uncle who put his creepy hand on your knee when you were 12, or your mother’s cousin’s estranged aunt or whatever.  If you like your family, spend the day with them.  If not, no one’s going to guilt you for blowing them off.

And, of course, you get fireworks.  Glorious fireworks.  The sun goes down, the fireworks go off, you eat some watermelon, you relish the fact that you’ve got another two months of summer.

So I love the Fourth of July.  In fact, it was one of the real, if minor, selling points of this condo we bought.  From our terrace we have a full frontal view of Memorial Park in Nyack, which is where the village has its fireworks show every year.  It’s like having an apartment on the Upper East Side overlooking the East River fireworks, except, of course, that it’s not.  It’s in the suburbs.

So not the same.  But fireworks are fireworks, and this year we’ll be looking at them from about 200 feet in the sky, almost eye level with where the explosions happen.  And I guess it’s not as good as having that Upper East Side penthouse, but it’s a lot better than standing on a crowded, hot street in Manhattan shoulder-to-shoulder with about a million other sweaty people and craning my neck to see the show.  I’ll be in a chair.  Drinking.  So that’s pretty good.

Happy Fourth of July!

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

Return from Exile: Take Me Out to the Ballgame!

May 10, 2010 by

One of the things I miss most about living in Manhattan was the ability to take a subway train to watch a baseball game.  As I’ve noted before, I’m one of those horrible heretical fans who roots for all the New York teams, so I used to love hopping the trains to go to either Shea or Yankee Stadium.  Going to Yankee games was always better, of course, not just because the team was better but also because Shea was a dump and the 7 train is a horrible, horrible train that seems to stop at every stupid street corner in Queens.  Seriously, can’t people from Queens walk a few blocks?

As much as I love football, there’s no question that it’s more fun to go to a baseball game.  Watching football live is a great experience, but baseball live is better for a bunch of reasons.

  • If you’re a football fan like me, the idea of watching only one game at a time is ridiculous.  You only get one day of games a week (other than Monday night football), so you have to maximize your football intake in that narrow window that you get.  So pretty much every Sunday, I used to hit the Gin Mill on the upper west side to eat the best and probably least healthy chicken fingers in the world and watch every game at once.  I do the same thing now, just at a bar in Nyack with much less tasty chicken fingers.  But watching just one game at a time is torture.  You don’t have that problem with baseball, since there are baseball games pretty much every day of the week and you don’t feel like you’re missing something if you’re actually at a game.
  • Watching football live makes you much more aware of all the artificial stoppages of play.  Moreover, you have to watch the halftime show instead of getting highlights, which is more torture.  In baseball, the play stoppages are more natural: at the end of innings, pitching changes.  Baseball is a terribly slow game, but at least you don’t get all these times where everyone just stands around waiting for the commercials to end.
  • Football is played at a bad time of the year in every kind of weather, usually very, very bad weather.  And because the tickets are so expensive, you end up going even when it’s raining and snowing and so cold that your testes freeze up (if you have testes, otherwise I guess some other plumbing freezes up).  But baseball?  Beautiful spring and summer weather, and if it rains they don’t play.  And if they play through the rain but you don’t want to sit there, you just don’t go and you eat what is likely a much less expensive ticket.

So going to baseball games is just the best. And being able to spontaneously decide to go to a game because you could hop a subway and be there in 45 easy minutes was one of the great things about living in Manhattan.

That’s one of the real pitfalls of living in the suburbs — the fact that you have to plan ahead, that you have to drive, that you have to park, and that you can’t drink because you have to drive home.  Just the worst.  No more spontaneity.  No more making fun of people sitting in traffic jams as you head to the subway, because you’re now one of those people.

With that in mind, I made my first trip into the city for a game this past week, trekking out to the new Yankee Stadium.  I only made one game to the new stadium last year, and only one trip to Citifield, what with the move and all, so I was looking forward to it.  And, of course, because I was so completely terrified of the traffic problems, I left like hours before I needed to.  The game was at 7:30, so I left at like 5PM, figuring that I wouldn’t get parked until 6:30 or so.  But of course for whatever reason there was no traffic, and no parking problems, and I end up in my seat at like 5:45, which is a ridiculously early time to arrive for a baseball game.  There were like kids running around on the field.

It did give me time, though, to check out the new stadium.  It’s actually pretty interesting how the Yankees and Mets took such different tacks in designing their new stadium.  The Yankees basically rebuilt Yankee Stadium as an exact replica of the old stadium, not just in the dimensions and the cosmetic touches but with everything. Yes, there are more luxury boxes and restaurants and food and stuff, and it’s a lot nicer walking around the concourse that is open to the sky rather than under a forbidding concrete roof, but it’s pretty much the same feel as the old stadium.  Nicer, but the same.

Citifield, though, is a complete departure from Shea, which makes sense insofar as Shea was a craphole.  While the Yankees had a stadium that was filled with all this great history and grandeur, the Mets had one of those awful all-purpose parks that was not so great for baseball.  But that freed them up to do a lot of cool stuff, and design Citifield along the lines of all those brand new baseball-only parks that have been the rage since Camden Yards opened about 20 years ago.  The end result is that Citifield is a MUCH better place to watch a game, which I know is heresy to Yankee fans but is simply the truth.  The team stinks, of course, which is more than a little important, but the ballfield is really nice.

That said, now that I’m driving to all the games and having to park, we’ll see how I like it when I have to stow my car over by the old World Fair grounds or under the Van Wyck.  At least I don’t have to make 45 separate stops on the stupid 7 train anymore, though.

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

Lessons for Exiles: Hiring an Interior Decorator When You Suddenly Have an Empty House to Fill

April 28, 2010 by

There comes a time in many a young man’s life when he has to hire an interior decorator. Not every man, of course. Many men go their entire lives without experiencing the joy of interviewing a group of what are invariably straight women and gay men who will explain to them about color coordination and fabric samples.

I am not, though, one of those men.

Most people who live in the city don’t need interior decorators, by virtue of the simple fact that they don’t have a lot of interior to work with.  It’s not worth paying someone to help you decorate 500 square feet.  It’s only the seriously wealthy with multimillion dollar 3 bedroom coops and condos who can even make use of a decorator.

But when you move to the suburbs, you suddenly find that you have to fill up all that new space, that you’ve gone from two bedrooms and a living room to four bedrooms and a living room and a dining room and a family/great room and a foyeur and maybe a few other rooms to boot.  It’s like someone leaving the military whose wardrobe consisted of uniforms, two pairs of khakis, and some tshirts suddenly needing to figure out what business casual means.

You don’t absolutely NEED a decorator, of course.  You can do it all yourself, if you have any kind of design sense.  But, man, it takes a lot of time, so if you’re a busy type who has a million other things to worry about for the new home, it’s not a bad idea.

We had actually used a decorator before to reasonably good results in the city, after we did a combination/renovation of our apartment to create a two-bedroom with a lot more space.  She helped us buy a lot of new stuff.  But even with that, we were going from 2,000 square feet to 4,500 square feet when we moved to the suburbs, so we thought it would be helpful to have someone help us with it.

With regard to the expense, it’s really not so bad.  The basic value proposition most interior decorators provide is that most of their fees are offset by “decorator discounts” that they get from furnishing retailers — that is, you have to pay them, say 30% of the value of the furniture you buy with them, but they get you a similar-sized discount off the retail price of that furniture.  I’m sure that really savvy shoppers can finagle their way to some of that “decorator discount” on their own, but, again, then you’re spending all your time trying to find furniture rather than, you know, your actual full-time job.  Decorators also charge a manageable hourly rate and maybe a consulting fee, but in the grand scheme of everything that you spend to furnish a new home, it doesn’t really move the needle.

So it worked for us. It might not work for everyone, but this was our first big new home together, and it’s a great space, so we wanted to do it right.  And, frankly, we didn’t trust ourselves (particularly me) to know things like what colors and patterns go together.  You’d be amazed at what is actually fashionable design-wise.  There seems to be a fine line between “bold” and “ludicrious,” and I’m not so sure that I can see it.

If you’re going to hire an interior decorator, though, a couple of things I’d recommend to keep in mind:

Fees in Writing. Get all the fees in writing, and make sure everyone understands what you’re paying for and what you’re not paying for.  We once had a problem with a decorator because she believed she was getting paid even for furniture we found on our own (which is not unreasonably necessarily, just not what we expected).

Get the Discount.  Make sure you’re getting that decorator discount, and even condition the fees on it.  We had another issue with a decorator when we were paying 30% of our purchases, theoretically getting a 30% or so discount off the retail price, then found our couch offered for about 40% off to the general public.

Hire someone you’ll like.   This is a bigger deal than you think.  If you meet a bunch of decorators, you’ll find that they’re all probably pretty good.  They’ll all show you pictures of their work, and most of them have a fairly broad palette so they’ll work with your particular tastes.  But you’ll also probably find that you just LIKE one of them more.  That’s actually important, because you’re going to spend a lot of time schlepping around places looking at furniture, so it’s kind of nice to have a designer that is pleasant to be with.  You might be inclined to hire some scary genius who intimidates you, on the theory that they must be good if they’re that overbearing, but you’ll have a miserable experience working with them.  That’s no fun. Life is too short to be running around sample stores with some jerk.

In our case, we had a bunch of good people come through to pitch the job.  We liked them all, really liked two, and ended up loving one of the two.  So far it’s been great, although we still don’t have any actual furniture yet….

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

Lessons for Exiles: The Challenge of Decorating an Actual, You Know, Home

April 22, 2010 by

When you live in Manhattan, the biggest challenge you face in designing your home is trying to find places to put all your stuff.  When you’re living in 800 square feet, pretty much everything you buy has to be multi-purpose — your dining table doubles as a desk, your living room couch is your guest bed.  Most of my life in the city, I ate dinner on a tv tray sitting on the couch.  Our dining table, which we only pulled out for guests, was this clever foldout that seemed to defy the laws of physics in its ability to convert from about an 18-inch end table to seating for six.

In the city, square footage is at a premium. I actually convinced my wife that we needed flat screen TVs with the argument that they were SAVING us money, because they freed up floor space that cost like $1,000 a square foot.  You put a TV on the wall, you open up like 10 square feet — that’s $10,000!  That was a good argument to win.

But when you move to the suburbs, no matter where you move, you’re going to double or triple your square footage, so you all of a sudden have this enormous obligation to buy a lot of stuff.   Now you have a dining room, so you have to buy an actual dining table that doesn’t fold up like an accordian when you’re not using it.  And you have actual guest bedrooms, so you need places for them to sleep.

Sadly, they don’t just give you all that furniture when you cross the border into the suburbs, you have to go and buy all that stuff.  It’s one of those hidden expenses of living in the suburbs, like property taxes and car insurance, that you don’t generally prepare for when all you’re thinking about is how much cheaper the actual real estate is.  Congratulations, you now have a 4,000 square foot colonial with five bedrooms!  Now take out your credit card so you can fill it up with a bunch of stuff!

And it’s not like you can put it off. There’s nothing sadder than popping in on someone who moved out to the suburbs a year ago, and you find that they’re still storing boxes in the guest bedrooms.  You gotta suck it up and buy some furniture for those rooms.

So that’s what happened to us.  We had a little bit of a head start, because in 2005 we combined our apartment with the one below us, so we went from 600 square feet to a relatively, for the city, roomy 2,000 square feet.  We bought a lot of stuff back then, but we still were going from 2,000 square feet to 4,500 square feet, with all sorts of new rooms to fill up.

Here’s what happens when you start trying to fill it up:

  • You’ll start to resent your friends.  The idea of spending a few thousand dollars for a bedroom set for guests is galling.  A bed is like $1,000 right there, plus they need a headboard, and a table, and some sort of dresser, and, you know, towels and stuff.  Who do these people think they are?  What is this, a hotel?  Bring a blow up mattress, you’re lucky I’m not making you sleep on the couch.
  • You realize how much stupid, useless furniture you need.  When you live in the city, every piece of furniture is important.  In the suburbs, you just need lots of stuff so that your place doesn’t look all empty.  Who has end tables in the city? Who has a foyeur?
  • You realize how expensive it is to cover walls.  In the city, you maybe have five or six actual walls to cover up with art and stuff, once you take out the walls with lots of windows, kitchen walls, etc.  Now, in the suburbs, you have like thousands of feet of bare walls.  Start shopping.

Assuming you end up keeping the stuff you had in the city, that you haven’t been living all this time with the milk crates that you bought in college as your bookshelves, you’ll probably at least be able to use some of your city stuff in the suburbs.  What happened with us is that everything we had got downgraded a level.  The stuff that we just bought for our living room ended up in the family room, requiring us to buy all new stuff.  And our bedroom set became a guest bedroom set (which frankly is more than you deserve, you freeloaders).  I guess it makes sense: as you get older, you hopefully have more money and can afford better stuff, so your new stuff is nicer than your old stuff.

So be prepared.  If you’re moving to the suburbs, don’t put all your money into your down payment, because your real estate closing is just the beginning of all the crap you have to buy…..

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

A Fan of New York: Confessions of a Sports Polygamist on the Eve of Another Glorious Baseball Season

March 1, 2010 by

Thank God it’s baseball season. Yes, I know that we’re only starting spring training, but March is an important month for sports fans, because it means that we’ve just gotten through the worst part of the year– the fallow cold depths of February, when football is over, baseball hasn’t begun yet, and basketball doesn’t matter yet.  When the highlight of the month is the Basketball All Star Game, we’re talking sports wasteland.

But once we stagger through February, we start a beautiful run:

  • March: March Madness, bracket pools, spring training.
  • April: the glorious return of baseball!
  • May and June: baseball in full bloom, and basketball playoffs.
  • July and August: more baseball, and football training camps
  • September: King Football!, and baseball pennant drives.
  • October: More football, and baseball playoffs.
  • November: Even More Football, and maybe some people get excited about basketball coming back.
  • December: FOOTBALL FOOTBALL FOOTBALL
  • January: Football playoffs, made sweeter by the looming specter of February.
  • February: You want to kill yourself. (Yes, I know you get the Super Bowl, which is fine, but it’s just one stinking game).

So we made it through another horrible, horrible February, which means that we have months and months of wonderful sports to come.

As you might have guessed, I’m one of those guys who loves sports, watches a ton of games, follows all the major sports (King Football, Baseball, Basketball), plays fantasy sports, all that stuff.  It’s the one “guy” thing that I do, since I don’t know anything about cars, can’t do much more than screw in lightbulbs around the house, have shot guns like twice in my life, etc.

And when it comes to sports, I have a confession to make: I am a New York fan.  As I’ve noted before, of course, I’m absolutely in love with New York City, which is one of the driving forces behind writing this blog — my commitment (however wavering) to maintaining my connect to this city that I love to death even while I was forced into exile.

But when I say I’m a “New York fan,” I’m more precisely referring to my relatively odd and unusual quirk as a sports fan — I root for all the New York teams.  Virtually everyone else pledges their allegiance to one team or another — if you’re a Mets fan, you hate the Yankees; if you’re a Giants fan, you hate the Jets; if you’re a Knicks fan, you barely can even muster up enough passion to be mildly disinterested in the hapless Nets.  For most people, rooting for a team is like making a commitment to a spouse — you have to forsake all others.

Not me.  I root for them all, as long as they play in New York.  I’m like a New York Sport Polygamist.  I root for the Yanks, the Mets, the Giants, the Jets, the Knicks, and try to muster up a passing interest in the hapless Nets.  I don’t really follow hockey, but I root vaguely for the Rangers, and don’t really have any hate for the Islanders or Devils.  I love them all, so long as they are from New York (let’s just ignore the fact that the Giants and Jets actually play their games in New Jersey, which is an accident of geography and good taste).  That said, like any good polygamist, I do have my favorites — Yankees over the Mets, Giants over the Jets — but that’s only when they’re playing each other.  Otherwise, I always root for New York teams over any other city’s teams.

Most “real” fans hate me for that. Sporting polygamy is heresy.  Even fans that have weird non-geographic allegiances, like New Yorkers who like the Mets or Yankees yet somehow became Dallas Cowboy fans (largely, of course, because the Cowboys were good when they were growing up, and the Giants and Jets were terrible), look down on people like me who root for two teams in the same sport. I also get a lot of flack from out-of-towners who insinuate that I root for them all so I can talk smack about whatever team is good, which is totally true.  My friend Scott, a true Boston fan exiled to LA right now, get apoplectic that I can mock him for both Bill Buckner (Mets) and Bucky Dent (Yankees).

I don’t get it.  I don’t understand how “New York” fans can root against New York teams.  I mean, I see their point about committing to one team, but how can they ever root against a New York team?  You see these Met fans, who are also usually Jets fans who absolutely HATE the Patriots, but who will root for the Red Sox over the Yankees.  I totally don’t get that. I wouldn’t root for the Red Sox if they were playing Al Queda.

And there are, of course, some great advantages to being a polygamist New York fan. I get to count all the championships when smack talking with people from other cities. I double the odds that I’ll have a good team to follow in any given year. I can cherish the memories of all the great teams: the 1986 Mets and the 1998 Yankees, the 1969 Jets and the 1986 Giants, the Patrick Ewing Knicks teams and, okay, not so much with the Nets.

Most importantly, I get to save all my hate for the people who deserve it, like the people who root for Boston and LA.  I don’t waste that hate on the New Yorkers that I love.

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