Does Living in the Suburbs Make You Healthier? Maybe for Some People….

June 20, 2011 by

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that suburbanites are actually healthier than people who live in either the city or in rural areas.

For many urban dwellers, the country conjures up images of clean air, fresh food and physical activities. But these days, Americans residing in major cities live longer, healthier lives overall than their country cousins—a reversal from decades past.

***

To be sure, city dwellers live with more air pollution and violent crime. They also have higher rates of sexually transmitted diseases and low-birth-weight babies and are more likely to drink excessively. But overall, urbanites tend to rate their own health more highly and are less likely to die prematurely than rural Americans, according to the county rankings report.

In many measures, residents of suburban areas are the best off. They generally rate their own health the highest and have the fewest premature deaths than either their urban or rural counterparts. Suburbanites also have the fewest low-birth-weight babies, homicides and sexually transmitted diseases.

The emphasis is mine, gloriously mine!  How about that?  Live in the city, and you’re more likely to drink excessively (very true, in my experience), and you’re less healthy from all the air pollution.

Move to the suburbs, though and you reduce your chances, according to the article,  having low-weight babies, getting murdered, and getting the pox.  That’s a pretty good tradeoff off for lousy Thai food, amirite???

Not that moving the suburbs has helped me at all, frankly.  That is, I have not gotten a sexually transmitted disease or been murdered or had a low-weight baby, so that’s good.  But it’s not like I’m exercising more than I did when I lived in the city, which is to say that I did virtually no exercise back then and I’ve continued that rigorous campaign now in the suburbs.  The only change is that I haven’t joined a gym yet, so my lack of exercising is free, a nice change from the city, where not-exercising at my local Crunch cost me like $75 a month.  I’ve put that $75 savings into more cigarettes and booze.

But just from reading that article, I feel healthier already….

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

My Maiden Voyage: How Captain Idiot Busted Up His Boat, A Dock, and Almost Killed Two People and One Dog

June 18, 2011 by

Captain Idiot

Let me tell you about my first trip on the new boat.

So I get this boat.  It actually belonged to a friend of mine, who is a terrific boater and happens to be a mechanic.  He was selling it, and it made sense to buy (1) from someone I knew and trusted, (2) who was a mechanic, so he probably kept it in really good condition, and (3) from a friend who was willing to help teach me everything I needed to know about it.

And it’s a beautiful boat.  At 28 feet, it’s big enough to hold all the people that will now visit me in the suburbs so they can go on my boat.  It has two motors, which I figured was perfect because I would have a backup motor when I invariably busted a propeller.  And it has a cabin and a real bathroom, so my wife will actually come out with me.

So far so good.  Here’s the problem.  The day he delivered the boat to me, docking it at the condo complex, it was raining. We were supposed to go out so he could show me the ropes on how to drive (errr– pilot) it, but because of the rain we just skipped the lesson and figured we would do it sometime soon, BEFORE I ever took the boat out.

But then a week or so passed, and we couldn’t get our schedules together.  And it was an absolutely beautiful summer Saturday, and I just couldn’t wait any more.  How hard could it be?  You turn on the engine, you point the boat.  Simple.

So here’s what happened.  My wife and I packed a nice picnic lunch, grabbed the dog — because dogs love being out on the open water, right?? — and took down the cover of the boat, started undoing the ropes.  Being the master boater that I am, I remembered to turn on the blower before I started the engines, because otherwise the engine blows up or something.  That turns out to be the only smart thing I did all day.

The engines both start up. All the gauges and stuff by the captain’s chair seem to be working fine.  It’s a beautiful day. What a great moment!  Here I am, ready for my first trip out on my new boat.  I take a deep breath, tell my wife she can release the last rope holding us to the dock, and push the gear shift and throttle forward.

And the boat roars to life, zooms forward, and crashes into the dock across from me.

Okay, I should stop right here and explain something.  I’ve admitted before that I’m not a good boater, but I do have some experience. Unfortunately, my experience was always with boats that had a simple and intuitive engine set up. Namely, they had a “stick shift” that you basically pushed up to go forward and down to go in reverse.  One stick. Push it this way, go straight. Push it that way, go back.  Aim with the wheel.  Just like a car.  Very easy.  Very intuitive.

This boat is different.  Not only does it have two engines, but two DIFFERENT types of sticks.  One stick is the shifter, like the transmission, that you push up to go forward and back to go in reverse.  So far so good.  And then there’s another stick, the throttle, which controls the power — the further you push it, the faster you go.

That’s where it gets a little tricky.  Because, for example, let’s say that you just drove your new boat straight into a dock, and the boat is trying very hard to actually climb up the dock and use it as a ramp to free itself from the surly bonds of earth and fly gloriously into the air and into the waterfront condo 30 feet in front of you.  And let’s also say that your limited experience in boats has taught you the basic lesson that if you want to go in reverse, you just pull back on the stick.  So you do that, and it doesn’t help.  In fact, what happens is that you hear the almost cartoon-like pinging sounds of little pieces of your gears flying apart.

Why? Because in YOUR boat, the gear shift and the throttle are SEPARATE.  So to go in reverse, so that you’re no longer basically half out of the water and beached on this dock, you have to push BACK on the gear shift and FORWARD on the throttle.  Back on one stick, forward on the other.

Instead, what you did, in a blind sphincter-clenching panic with piss dripping down your leg, is instinctively pull back on everything.  Which you’re not supposed to do, because it strips the gears, just like what would happen if you decided to shift your car into reverse when you were going 55 miles an hour down the highway.  And then you’re basically screwed.

Back to our story.  Here I am, about four seconds into my first boat trip, and my boat has crashed into a dock, is halfway up in the air, and is aimed directly at one of my neighbor’s condo.  My wife is screaming at me, the dog is barking, the engines are roaring.  As far as I know, I’ve opened a gaping hole in the bottom of my boat, and we’re minutes away from sinking, all of us drowning about ten feet from shore.  I pull back on the engines, stripping the gears, but at least the engine stops roaring, and basic gravity drops us back into the water.

But now I don’t really have any maneuverability, what with the whole “my gear shift is now a molten pile of metal” thing.  So we start drifting around, desperately using the pilings to push ourselves around, trying to get into one of the slips so we can turn off the boat and I can commence with tying it to a dock, going home, having a drink, and never leaving my house again.

To make things even better, there’s a big crowd of people watching. My dock is right next to a public pier in Nyack, so there are like 30 people who were having a nice day hanging out on the pier and taking in the sights, now getting the treat of watching a dumbass destroy his boat.  The only good thing that happened to me that day was that none of those people were quick enough to pull out their smartphones, so I didn’t end up in a viral Youtube video.

So that was my first trip on the boat.  Four seconds of abject terror, followed by about five minutes of blinding humiliation, followed by an unending series of new and unprecedented bills: a bill to repair the gears, a bill to fix my neighbors dock, a bill for all the alcohol I’m going to need to forget that day.

The best day of my life can’t come soon enough.  Never buy a boat.

P.S.  The picture isn’t actually from that day, but it’s probably a fair representation of what I looked like.  I’m wearing the hat ironically, of course, or at least that’s what I tell people….

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

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: , , ,

The Ultimate Suburban Rite of Passage: We’re Having a Baby! Or, At Least, We Will Be Having One

April 5, 2011 by

So we’re having a baby.  To be more precise, the baby has actually already been had.  He was born back in January to a young woman in Taiwan, someone I’m hoping doesn’t change her mind or anything in the next few months while we complete the adoption process.  His name is Tien-Yu, he goes by “Yo-Yo,” he’s absolutely gorgeous, and in a few months that will be unbearable to endure, he will be ours.

I’ve written before that one of the reasons we moved to the suburbs was that we were planning on having kids.  I didn’t mention that we’d been in the adoption process for the past few years, impatiently waiting for our name to get called.  It’s one of the most frustrating things I’ve ever had to do, sitting and waiting and filling out forms and waiting and checking in and waiting and listening to conference calls and waiting — it just drives you crazy.  You want to be a parent, you’re ready to be a parent, you moved yourself out of your comfortable home in the city so that you could have a home better suited to being a parent, and you’re not yet a parent.  Drives me nuts.

So now that we have a “referral,” it’s more waiting while the adoption paperwork gets processed. More forms, more money, more interviews to make sure we’re not pedophiles.  You would think that it would get easier now, since at least we can see the endgame approaching, a trip to Taiwan to meet him and pick him up.

But it’s actually even more brutal. It’s amazing how quickly the bonding process starts for parents who have been waiting years for a child.  You get a picture of that baby, you get told that he’s going to be yours, and he immediately becomes your son.  That’s the good part.  The bad part is the torture of having a son who is right now being cared for by someone else.  I know it’s crazy, because I haven’t even met him, and all I have right now is three baby pictures and a report on his medical condition, but HE IS MY SON.  And he’s in someone else’s care. Someone else is feeding him, bathing him, taking care of him if he gets sick, putting him to sleep at night.

Imagine having your baby in the hospital, and then being unable to see him for six months while he sat in foster care.  That’s how I feel right now.  I have to sit and wait for probably the next six months while Taiwanese bureaucrats process a bunch of papers that will allow me to take my son home.  To paraphrase Billy Crystal in When Harry Met Sally,” when you realize that you are going to spend the rest of your life as a parent, you want the rest of your life to start RIGHT NOW.”

So I’m going a little crazy here, even while I exult in this new feeling of being a father.  This is, after all, what I signed up for.  Six months.

Filed Under: Best of, Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs, Parenting 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: , ,

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: , ,

Suburbs in the News: Is it Actually Cheaper to Live in the City Than in the Suburbs?

July 20, 2010 by

A really interesting article in the New York Times recently by Tara Siegel Bernard asking the question whether, contrary to popular perception, it’s actually cheaper to live in the city than in the suburbs.

The answer, of course, is that it is MUCH more expensive to live in the city.  There. Now you save a few minutes of your life, and you don’t have to go read the article.

But if you have some time, go check it out:

Here’s what we found: a suburban lifestyle costs about 18 percent more than living in the city. Even a house in the suburbs with a price tag substantially lower than an urban apartment will, on a monthly basis, often cost more to keep running. And then there’s the higher cost of commuting from the suburbs, or the expense of buying a car (or two) and paying the insurance.

The Times says the city is actually cheaper for a family making about $175,000 a year, mostly because people in the suburbs have two significant additional costs: property taxes and cars.  The only caveat was that if the couple is going to put their kids in private school in the city, then the suburbs start to become more competitive.

Now, a couple of things about that.  I absolutely agree with the point that sometimes people miscalculate the additional costs of living in the suburbs from needing a car, or multiple cars, and having to pay property taxes.  I’m not so sure that the average family taking a lot of cabs every month doesn’t narrow that gap, but I will absolutely agree that property taxes in the city are ridiculously low.  My brownstone in the city had four units, which altogether were probably worth about $7-8 million, and the property taxes on the building were about $25,000. In Westchester, you pay property taxes like that for a $1M house.  No question that’s an issue.  Property taxes are horrible.

But I think that the analysis in the article missed a couple of things.  First, the article cheats a little, because the theoretical couple in question ends up buying a median priced ($675,000) home in Park Slope.  I know that the people in Brooklyn might hunt me down and pelt me with artisanal cheeses, but let’s be honest — Park Slope is itself a suburb.

(Sounds of a fine handmade gouda hitting flesh).

Seriously?  We’re going to try to compare living in the city versus living in the suburbs, and the Times’s idea of “living in the city” is Park Slope?  Why not go out to Bay Ridge?  Or Flushing?  I’ll bet it’s even cheaper there. Sheesh.

Second, on the other side of the equation, I would have liked to see the Times look at some homes other than in South Orange, New Jersey, where the median price for a four bedroom home is apparently about $600,000.  For one thing, that’s a lot higher than the median price in a lot of the other suburbs of Manhattan.  For another, if the basic gist of the article is to make side-by-side comparisons, I’m not so sure that a two-bedroom, one-bath coop in Park Slope is the analogue to a four-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath house anywhere.  If you have two kids, that two-bedroom is going to be a wee cramped.  Forget it if you have three. You’ll have all that extra expense of defending yourself in court when you kill one of them, or your wife, or a hapless cabbie in a fit of parental rage.

So if you were to look at, say, a 3 bedroom coop or condo in Manhattan, a REAL city (ducking a handmade wheel of brie), against a four-bedroom home in some other counties ringing Manhattan, you’d have a much bigger spread.

Third, and most importantly, I don’t see anything in the Times’s analysis of the increased cost of everyday living in the city compared to the suburbs.  That’s the real savings that you get for foregoing all the wonderful things that the city has to offer.  Everything is cheaper. Everything. Your food, your drinks, your dry cleaning, your toilet paper.  Everything.  I would think that this would add up.

Listen, I love the city. I lived in the city for 17 years. I miss it, and would still live there if: (1) I didn’t actually work outside the city (which makes me different from most people making this decision), and (2) I wasn’t looking to raise a family and realizing that I really wanted the extra space.  I recognize all the drawbacks of living in the suburbs — hell, this blog is basically one long post about the drawbacks of living in the suburbs — but increased expenses are not one of them.

Filed Under: Best of, Living in Manhattan, Living in the Suburbs, News 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: , ,

Is that a Big, Giant Pipe in Your Living Room, or Are You Just Happy to See Me?

May 27, 2010 by

The condo we bought in Nyack was on the market for almost four years. It was one of those brutal stories of a seller putting a home on the market at the beginning of a bad real estate market, and pricing it just a little too high for the market, and then continually reducing it time after time, each time just, still, a little too high.

One of the reasons I think the condo sat on the market for so long is that it was very idiosyncratically furnished.  It was gorgeous, with what were obviously very expensive furnishings.  But they were a little bold for most people’s tastes — think the Liberace suite at a Vegas hotel.  Okay, now ramp it up about 20%.  There you go!

It’s actually a decent lesson about real estate, from both sides.  From the seller’s side, it’s important when you’re trying to sell your home to “depersonalize” it as much as possible.  Buyers sometimes have trouble seeing through the visual effect of a very intensely decorated home. Usually, of course, the challenge to the buyer is overlooking stuff like dirty windows, ugly furniture, and the fragrant wafting of cat piss, but sometimes it can be something as simple as a very tasteful, but highly stylized, method of decorating.

From the buyer’s side, though, it’s the reverse. It’s easy to fall in love with an immaculate home, and tough to fall in love with a place that makes you gag.  But the smartest buyers realize that when the seller leaves, he’s taking that stupid cat with him along with all his disgusting furniture.  That’s where the deals are.  You buy a home in lousy condition (aesthetically, I’m not talking about something that’s falling down), you probably can get more of a discount than it will cost you to get it back up to shape.

So that’s kind of what happened with us.  The seller had the place decorated to her taste, which was not universal, and I think a lot of people had a tough time seeing through it for the underlying value.  But when she left, a lot of that stuff went with her.

One thing that didn’t go with her — actually, two things — were these giant plaster columns that were in the entry to the condo.  I don’t know anything about anything, so I’m going to call them Corinthian Columns, although that’s almost certainly wrong.  But you get the idea. Floor to ceiling plaster columns with intricate design work.  Perfect if you’re making a speech accepting the Democratic nomination for president, not so good if  you’re a relatively mild-mannered couple who has a greater need for, for example, a coat rack.

So we decided to take down the columns, which we would replace with something a little less grand and little more functional.  That’s when we discovered that one of the colunns concealed a floor-to-ceiling exhaust pipe.  Big, black pipe, all the way from the floor to the ceiling.  Ugly.  Massive.  Maybe that’s why they built a column around it.  The column wasn’t great, but it was better than this pipe.

Of course, it was too late to do anything about it.  One of the columns was already down, and we’d started demolition on the other.  So we’re going to have to get creative, maybe redirect the pipe into the wall or something.

All of this, of course, is costing me a good deal of money.  When people say that living in the suburbs is cheaper, they don’t count stuff like taking down columns and, maybe, having to put them back up again.

Filed Under: Advice, Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs Tagged With: , , , , , ,
« Previous Page
Next Page »