Suburban Rite of Passage: Shopping at Marchalle’s

February 2, 2010 by

I have never been a big clothes horse.  At least, compared to what you see in the rarified air of Manhattan, where even straight men do things like get bespoke suits (a term I only even learned a few years ago), and read GQ, and actually, you know, have a sense of fashion.  I don’t keep track of whether my lapels are supposed to be wide or narrow, or what kind of vents I’m supposed to have in my suits, or, frankly, what vents actually are.

Essentially, the extent of my fashion knowledge boils down to some basic points that I’ve gathered over the years:

  • Three button suits, which were really in a few years ago, are not so in.
  • Double-breasted suits, which haven’t been in for a while, are still not in.
  • Pleats go with cuffed pants, flat fronts with no cuffs (I think).
  • In casual wear, don’t tuck your shirt on (it took me a long time to grasp this).

My only real fashion principle is that I throw out my ties every few years, sometimes if only because of the tomato sauce stains that end up on the ones I have.  But I also know that the fashion police have realized that ties are the one relatively affordable item that even fashionphobics like me will bother to replace periodically, and so they reinforce that impulse by making ties the one “fashion statement” that even schlubs like me can grasp and follow.  So ties get fat, then they get skinny, then paisley is in, then paisley is out, etc.  That’s why when you watch a late-90s sitcom like Frasier, where all the characters were ostensibly fashion plates, you see Frasier and Niles wearing dark shirts or those goofy ties, and realize just how old the show is.  Essentially, replacing your ties is a lot cheaper than replacing your suits, so the fashionistas change tie styles often enough to at least force the schlubby to go shopping every few years.

So the general point?  I’m not a big fashion guy.  That said, I’ve always had at least some degree of “Manhattan fashion sense,” which basically boils down to having a lot of black clothes.  Now that I’m in the suburbs, though, I’ve started to notice a change.  Less black, more jeans, more super-casual wear.

It’s a slow change, but it’s starting to happen. I can feel my impulse to put on dressy clothes when we go out ebbing, as I realize that I’m very overdressed for the crowd at the local restaurant or even at a bar or something.  What passes for normal on the upper west side, or even the lower east side, seems like pretension in the local Nyack eateries.

Thus, it was with some degree of fascination mixed with revulsion mixed with anticipation that I stepped into Marshalls for the first time.  Marshalls, the epitome of the suburban “place to buy clothes where you don’t really care what you look like anymore” mall store.  Or, as we call it in the suburbs, “Marchalles,” with a frenchified accent.

And, you know what?  Not so bad!  Lots of ridiculously cheap stuff that is clearly not “trendy,” but reasonable looking and ridiculously cheap and, have mentioned, ridiculously cheap.  I’m not going to buy a suit there, I haven’t fallen over that cliff (at least not yet), but got a couple of pairs of jeans (one fashion principle I refuse to accept is the idea that, one pair of jeans is different from another pair of jeans), a bunch of very discounted “Life is Good” t-shirts that I wear around the house or theoretically if I ever go to the gym, and some socks. Socks are socks.  These ones were socks like other socks, but cheaper.

From a SUMA perspective, here’s the way to think about Marshalls. If someone opened a “remaindered” shop somewhere in Dumbo, or in some burned out storefront on the lower east side, and didn’t put a sign out, and spread the word through Twitter or whatever about the amazing deals you could get on cheap jeans and tshirts and stuff like that, all the trendies would flock to it in that “semi-ironic so we don’t admit that we’re doing something uncool but really in our hearts we know that we’re being ridiculous” way.  They’d all be telling their friends about this super-great discount store that popped up, and they’d be staggering out laden with all sorts of cheap booty that they’d wear ironically.  Take out the burnt-out storefront, and the underground viral whispering campaign, and replace it with a big airconditioned supermarket clothing store filled with suburban housewives, and that’s Marshalls.  Same stuff, just a different attitude.

So Marshalls is okay in my book.  I just have to squint a little to blur out what it is I am actually doing, and keep repeating a mantra to myself that an $8 tshirt that I’ll wear about 100 times in the next few years is a great buy.  Fingers crossed, though, that I never get to the point that I’m buying my suits there……

 

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

The SUMA Life: Finding Dim Sum in the Suburbs

January 28, 2010 by

The whole idea of building a “SUMA life” in the suburbs is to try to find ways to recreate and fashion an urban experience in the suburban environment, in what is probably ultimately a failed attempt to retain some semblance of the life you lived before you exiled yourself.  It’s not easy.  But it’s not supposed to be easy.  The whole point of living in the city is that you can have experiences that you simply can’t replicate when you live in the suburbs.  But as with many things, there is heroism in the attempt.

With that in mind, we wanted to try to find a place to get dim sum — the “Chinese brunch” experience that you can get in like a dozen places in Chinatown and, I would guess, in other urban Chinatowns, and, I would also guess, in, you know, China.  My wife is a Chinese-American, so dim sum became a pretty regular staple of our weekends. Most weeks, we’d just order dim sum-like appetizers from our local Chinese place, but that’s not the same.  Dim sum isn’t about the food, it’s about the experience, which requires certain atmospherics:

  • First, you need a huge warehouse-like space with a ton of people sitting, often community-style, about big tables.  You can’t get real dim sum in some fancy upscale Asian fusion restaurant.
  • Second, you need the carts, those metal monstrosities being wheeled around with all the little plates on them.  You can’t get real dim sum by ordering from a menu. Flagging down a cart, getting a plate, and then having the waitstaff stamp your “card” with some totally incomprehensible mark that eventually determines how much you’ll pay is part of the fun.
  • Third, you need a lot of food that the white people like me won’t ever eat. It’s not real dim sum if you don’t see stuff like bird’s feet or pig’s knuckles (or bird knuckles and pig’s feet, I can’t remember which) that isn’t, in my opinion, actual food, but which real Chinese people like.  (Indeed, one of the things I’ve learned about marrying into a Chinese-American family is that the greatest delicacies are precisely the foods that are most inedible, something I have learned at many Chinese wedding banquets where the only thing I could eat was the plain lo mein noodles served at the end like a palate cleanser).
  • Fourth, you need actual Chinese people eating there.  You go to Chinatown, you can tell that you’re getting authentic dim sum because there are a lot of Chinese people there. I’m not racially profiling, or whatever, I’m just pointing out that you can take certain comforts in knowing that you’re not in some tourist trap, and that the food must be good, or at least authentic, if you see them there.

All that said, I didn’t have high hopes for finding dim sum in the suburbs.  I can’t even get good everyday Chinese food like vegetable lo mein in the suburbs, much less a lip-smacking plate of bird feet.  It’s not like I’m going to eat the bird feet, but I like knowing that it’s there.

Against all odds, though, we found a place.  A simple Google search turned up an actual Chinese restaurant in Westchester called Central Seafood that’s about 20 minutes away and had some reviews mentioning the dim sum.   So we went, and it was perfect — big rooms, round tables, lots of Chinese people, food I wouldn’t possibly ever eat.  Not quite the Manhattan experience, but with some advantages like, you know, parking, and cleaner rest rooms (don’t ever go to the bathroom in Chinatown.  Ever).

So we found a small piece of SUMA, a place to get our dim sum fix  once a month, with the bonus that it’s very close to a great dog run where we can take the dog.  Although, obviously, we won’t bring the dog to the restaurant, both for the health code issue and, you know, (stipulate to a Chinese people eating dog joke).

UPDATE: We have since found another place called Aberdeen in White Plains that we haven’t tried yet.

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

Suburban Rite of Passage: Getting a Dog — The End of My Poop-Free Life

December 28, 2009 by

My wife always wanted us to get a dog.  She’s allergic to like every kind of hair except dog hair, oddly enough, so I think that part of her just wants a dog so she can curl up next to something hairy without getting all itchy.

But she bugged me for years about getting one, to the point that one year she asked if I wanted a hint for what to get her for Christmas.  I said, “sure,” and she responded by going like this: “Ruff Ruff.”  Which I think is unfair, insofar as barking like a dog is not really so much of a hint as it is a command.  So no dog for her that year.

It’s not that I don’t like dogs. I love dogs.  But I didn’t want to have a dog in the city.  It’s just too tough.  You can’t take the dog anywhere you go, you can’t even take a dog off leash in Central Park, and walking the dog seems like it would horrible to both human and dog.  Walking city streets is great, walking a dog is great, walking a dog on city streets is horrible: hard pavement, constant fear of passing cars, etc.  And if you don’t have outdoor space, you either train the dog really, really well to hold it in while you’re at work, or your apartment slowly becomes a poop zone.

On top of all that, it was the stairs. I’ve mentioned the stairs before. Four flights.  The idea of schlepping that stupid dog up and down all those stairs every time he had to take a poop was just unfathomable.

So no dog while we were in the city.  It was one of the few arguments I ever won with my wife.  My life was a complete poop-free zone.  No kids. No dog.  The only poop I had to deal with was my own, which was frankly all I could handle.

But then, of course, we moved to the suburbs — otherwise known as “Doggie Heaven”.  Big back yards, lots of dog-friendly parks, dog runs, people with dogs, kids with dogs, dog stores, everything a dog could want. And although we didn’t have a yard, we had an elevator, so walking the dog would be a lot easier.

I held out for as long as I could.  I really enjoyed that poop-free life of mine.  We’re going to have a kid at some point (the next great Suburban Rite of Passage), at which time my life will become heavily invested with OPP (“other people’s poop”), so my hope was to hold off on getting a dog until I had no other choice.

That said, I didn’t really hold out for long. I made it until Christmas, the first gift-giving holiday following our move to the suburbs.  So really, I didn’t hold out at all.  First holiday, new dog. A cute little half-Pomeranian, half-Shitsu puppy that we named “Kozy,” after a little stuffed animal called “Kozy Bear” that I’d gotten my wife a few years ago.  He’s a really great dog, and my wife is committed to teaching him how to poop in specially designated poop areas.  So I have some guarded optimism.

Move to the suburbs, then get a dog.  One of the great Suburban Rites of Passage.

Filed Under: Best of, Having a Dog in the Suburbs, Humor, My Life in the Suburbs, Suburban Rites of Passage Tagged With: ,

Sorry, Harry….

September 28, 2009 by

One of the great discoveries of my new suburban neighborhood was Harry’s Burritos, a Nyack branch of the Manhattan-based chain of yummy, cheap Mexican food. I’ve been eating Harry’s Burritos, particularly the chicken Bay Burrito, for about 15 years.

Indeed, one of my first Manhattan memories is getting together with my friend the Schloem-dog on a beautiful Friday early evening after work for Bay Burritos back when (a) it was all we could afford, and (b) we actually had jobs where we could get out of work at 5PM on a Friday and have an early dinner, back before we both exercised the poor judgment of getting jobs that require more of our time and he exercised the appalling judgment of moving to California.

So I was excited to have a taste of Manhattan here in the suburbs, particularly since Harry’s is one of the few Nyack restaurants that delivers. Even with the delivery, though, I got into the habit of calling ahead on the way home and picking it up. Takes a little less time, and avoids one of the problems in the new apartment — namely, that my buzzer doesn’t work and I have to go down to the street to pick stuff up anyway.

But I kept having a problem with Harry’s. I’d call them up, place an order, and get there to find that they had no record of the order. It happened like three times. I call in, make the order, pull up, park, go inside, and then have to wait while they make a new burrito because they didn’t get the order. And I was getting a little sick of it. Bad enough people keep stealing my paper, but now I have to deal with incompetent Harry’s staff that can’t even take a phone in order.

So the third time it happens, I was completely getting fed up. I’d been understanding the first two times, but this was nuts. And I was about to go off on the person at the counter, and it occurred to me that I should check my phone. So I pull out the blackberry, check the address book, and find that this whole time I’ve been calling my OLD Harry’s on the upper west side. I thought I’d put the new number in, but apparently I either had a false memory of doing so, or didn’t save the new number, or something.

This whole time, then, I’ve been calling the Upper West Side Harry’s placing an order, and then going into the Nyack Harry’s to pick it up, only to get annoyed at the staff for not having my order. Meanwhile, there’s some counter person at the Harry’s in Manhattan wondering why this “Joe” jackass keeps ordering bay burritos and not picking them up.

I felt a little — what’s the word — stupid.

So I apologized profusely to the Nyack Harry’s staff for blaming them. And I now hereby apologize to the nice people over on Columbus Avenue for leaving them hanging. I hope they’re not still holding my order.

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The Joys of Elevators, Garbage Edition

September 19, 2009 by

I wrote recently about the joys of elevators, particularly coupled with the nifty-if-battered-and-stolen shopping cart that I use to take groceries or other bags from my car to my condo unit.

But the joy doesn’t stop there. The elevator not only goes up, it goes down. Which means I can use it to take out the garbage.

I hate garbage. I particularly hate modern garbage. Old timey traditional garbage was nice and simple. You take anything you want to throw out, you put it in a bag, and three or four times a week you take the garbage to the curb and nice men take it away for you.

Modern garbage is different. Now, you have to separate out certain types of garbage from other types of garbage, with the delineation between garbage types often seemingly arbitrary. Some paper goes into the clear garbage bags, other paper into the black garbage bags. And if you get it wrong, the mean people from some sort of enforcement division give you a ticket.

Not only that, but in my old apartment on the UWS, garbage was even worse.
First of all, my apartment was a walkup, three flights to the street. So I’d come home at night, climb those stairs, and have to pick up garbage to walk down the stairs, only to have to walk back up if I wanted to sleep in my apartment. I hated climbing those stairs.

Second, they only picked up the clear garbage once a week, so you had to live with the clutter and stink of old cans and bottles for days and days until you could get rid of it. And if you forgot to drop them off Tuesday night, as I often did, you lived with them another week.

(Which reminds me of the time that I forgot, despite much nagging reminding from the wife, to bring the regular garbage down. And this wasn’t regular garbage, but three or four days worth of stinky garbage. So I oversleep a little the next morning, realize I forgot to put out the garbage, look out the window, and realize that the nice men have already come, and I’ve got two more days of stinky garbage and unhappy wife in front of me. Without telling her, I took the garbage down to the street, and nonchalantly (as nonchalantly as you can be carrying two bags of stinky garbage) carried it to the street, where I blatantly and illegally dumped them in the garbage can on the corner. I then slinked (slunk?) away, hoping no one saw me, and then cheerily went to work with the airy feeling of a man who has gotten away with something. That night, my wife sees me, and says, “was that OUR garbage in the can on the corner?” I still don’t know how she caught me).

And third, I hated the tying. I don’t know why this in particular bothered me, but I hated collecting all the newspapers — and I read a lot of newspapers — and tying them with twine. I hated doing that.

So one of the GREAT things about living in the suburbs is the joy of putting out the garbage. I still have the clear and the opaque, but here are the differences:

1. The elevator
Instead of walking up and down stairs, I take the garbage down in the elevator. I may not have mentioned this, but I hate stairs.

2. The shopping cart
My stolen shopping cart — stolen not by me, mind you — means I don’t even have to carry the garbage. I load it in the cart, and just roll it. Whoever invented wheels, I salute you.

3. The garbage room
I’ve never had a garbage room before. It’s a room, a very very very stinky room, in which we put the garbage. And we can put it there anytime we want, any day of the week. No more forgetting when the pickups are.

4. No twine
This is the best. No more twine. The nice guys who pick up the recycleables just want you to dump the newspapers into one of the bins — no bags, no twine. By itself, this change in my life has improved my daily mood by 8.5%.

So although I miss certain things about living in the city, my suburban garbage experience kicks ass.

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

The Joys of Elevators

September 7, 2009 by

The Joys of Elevators

I haven’t had an elevator in about 17 years. When I first moved to Manhattan, lived in a 20-story prewar on 34th street and 9th avenue. It was a lousy neighborhood back then, and is a lot better now, but I needed to be within walking distance of the LIRR to get to work every morning. That was the first of many homes I had in urban neighborhoods, since I always loved living in the city (NYC, SF) even though my work career later confounded me with a long line of suburban jobs (Long Island, Palo Alto, Brooklyn, Hudson Valley).

But I had an elevator, which was glorious. And a doorman, which was less necessary for a strapping 25 year old who had tip-ophobia and would have traded a simply keyed entry for the anxiety of figuring out the complex holiday gratuity ettiquette. (I’m apparently not alone in that.)

For the last 15 years, though, I had a walk up. I loved the apartment, hated the walkup. For the first ten years, it was four full flights. After we bought the apartment below us and did a combination, we lowered the entrance by one flight, which seemed like heaven.

But still, every trip to the grocery carried with it the dread of three or four trips up the stairs with heavy bags straining my increasingly weak and out-of-shape arms and shoulders. (My wife, who is otherwise pretty liberated, draws the line on carrying bags, having explained that it is one of the perks of the ring). And every holiday getaway was wonderful, except that toward the end of the trip I’d start thinking about carrying those bags back up the stairs.

So now, finally, I have an elevator in my new condo in the suburbs. And now just any elevator. We have the whole top floor of the building, so we’re the only ones who use the elevator for that floor, and have that cool keyed access — no one can take the elevator to our floor but us, and the elevator opens up into a private hallway leading to our unit. Pretty neat. Impressive when people come to visit. Not that anyone has visited, but theoretically impressive.

And on top of that, the prior owner left us with a simple but magical gift — an old shopping cart that she apparently stole from a supermarket. You wouldn’t think this was a big deal, but it’s like manna from heaven to me. I come home from the market, pull into one of my parking spaces in the basement garage, roll the shopping cart over (it sits unmolested in one of our parking spaces), fill it up with groceries, roll it into the elevator, take out my nifty key, take the elevator upstairs, roll the car into my hallway, unlock my front door, and just roll it into right into my kitchen. It’s like my favorite part of the condo, being able to roll groceries into my kitchen.

It’s the simple things.

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The Sad Realization of a 41 Year Old Man Living with His Parents

June 25, 2009 by

It just occurred to me that I’m a 41 year-old man living with my parents.

The fact that this is only temporary while I wait to close on my new home in Nyack is small solace. Mom made dinner the other night, Dad took me to go play golf. I feel like I’m 14.

Although that makes sleeping with my wife at night strangely salacious.

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

Everyone should move now and then.

June 24, 2009 by

Moving is a good thing. It’s like a re-boot, an opportunity to wipe off the slate and start from scratch. The best part was cleaning out what we called our “utility drawers,” which really were just places to stash random crap that we didn’t have an immediate use for. Found lots of interesting stuff there:

  • Many, many types of tapes, including the “original lost roll of tape” and many “replacement rolls of tape when the original roll of tape got lost.”
  • Same for batteries, lots of batteries.
  • Enough spare change to probably buy a couple of sandwiches from Lenny’s.
  • Menus from closed restaurants.
  • Proof of car insurance, something that was supposed to be in my car when I got pulled over by suburban cops a few months ago, and would have saved me about $100 of tickets and a few hours of my life.
  • Ipod headsets.
  • Phone charger cords, many many cords.

You get the point.  Moving gives you a chance — an expensive, time-consuming, debilitating chance — to clear out the detritius of your life and start from scratch. I don’t recommend it unless you’re actually going to a new home, though.

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

Why Movers Hate Me

June 22, 2009 by
You know who hates my stairs, the three flights leading up to my apartment?
Everyone.
Like, for example, every guest I’ve ever had. People show up here for parties, and as they reach the main level landing they invariably say something clever along the lines of “Whew.” Usually, it’s a call for a drink, very quickly, since the apparently Everest-like climb has made them extremely thirsty.
Then they realize that if they want to go to the roofdeck, it’s another two flights. Usually they sit down after that.
Another example: delivery guys. They trudge heavily up the stairs holding a rapidly cooling bag of food, and then shoot me a look that says, in Mandarin, “if I had known you wanted me to climb three flights of stairs, I would have opened up your moo shu and spit right into it.”  So I overtip them.
But no one hates my stairs as much as movers.  From the time that I moved in, I never ever had a mover who did not remark upon the heinousness of the task with which I have charged them — to carry heavy pieces of furniture and boxes up and down three or four flights of stairs.  They stop now and then, breathe out heavily, and say, always, the same thing. “Man, that’s a lot of stairs.”
I understand their feelings (both legitimate and an unsubtle attempt to wheedle a larger gratuity at the end of the day), but it always bothers me a little.  If it weren’t for the stairs, I wouldn’t need so many movers.  The very fact that there are so many stairs is what has created the need for the employment.
It’s as if I was at the dentist, and he looked at me and said, “man, teeth. I am sooo sick of effing teeth.”

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

Lessons for Exiles: How do you get city people to the suburbs?

June 1, 2009 by

So my wife and I are looking for a new place in SUMA, and we’re telling our friends about it. Trying to get them excited, because we’d like to, you know, stay friends with them, and it would help if they were willing to, you know, visit us now and then.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that we’re never going to see them again.

And I really don’t blame them, because I never visited my friends who left the city.  Once they left, it was like the Morlocks got them. We cast them from our minds. Chris and Kate have left 83rd and Third and they’re now in Rye, and let us not speak of them again….

So I was just as bad when I was on the cool, Manhattan side of that equation. I was never taking a weekend night to schlep out to Scarsdale or Montclair or God-Forbid-Long-Island to go visit someone who had the effrontery to leave this great city. Almost as if their choice to leave, by itself, rendered them somewhat less interesting.

I guess I deserve nothing better. I’m sure I’ll find nice, umm, replacement friends.

Anyway, I do have one idea.  When I’ve discussed the houses we’ve been looking out, I’ve detected a common thread in the questions I get.  No one seems interested in bedrooms or bathrooms or location or square footage or the type of oven we’ll have, but they seem very interested in one feature of some of the homes we’ve seen.

Whether it has a pool.

The pool is the equalizer, maybe the one thing that elevates a suburban household in the eyes of the sneering Manhattanariat.  A pool for those hot days in the summer when your Hamptons share is in an off-week, or you’re afraid to go back and face the friend-of-a-friend that you woke up next to LAST weekend.  A pool to escape Manhattan’s summer heat, a place to eat barbecue.

After all, the Hamptons are really just a suburb. I hate to tell that to all of you who just plunked down a month’s salary for four weekends in a five bedroom house on a one-acre lot in a cul-de-sac, but doesn’t that description sound kinda like a typical suburban house? So you’re spending all that income to drive out 4 or 5 hours on a Friday night to sleep in a bunk bed like a 12 year old, in a house that has as much relationship to the beach as Woody Allen, and you’re too good to come visit me a half hour north?   Did I, ummm, mention that we have a pool?

Great, see you then.

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