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: , ,

Why Do Parents Want You to Have Kids, Then Laugh at You When You Do?

May 25, 2011 by

Now that we’ve announced we’re going to be having a baby,  friends of ours keep giving us that whole, “oh boy, you don’t know what you’re in for” speech.

Have you ever noticed that?  When you don’t have kids, you can’t escape parents who constantly tell you about all the wonderful things you’re missing.  Picture after picture posted on Facebook, all those Christmas cards of the happy family, the occasional awkward question about whether you’re ever going to have kids.

But once you announce you’re having a kid, the tune changes.  Now, all they want to do is gloat about how miserable you’re going to be.  They laugh and laugh like hyenas — “oh, all that nice furniture you bought for you new condo, THAT’S all over,” “enjoy your nights out while you still can,” stuff like that.  Like the vampire at your window trying to seduce you into going outside, or the the old joke about the devil:

John arrives at the Pearly Gates. St. Peter tells John that he has arrived at a moment where the balance between Heaven and Hell is exactly equal. This event allows him the unique opportunity to take a look around at Heaven AND Hell and decide where he wants to spend eternity.

John takes a little stroll around Heaven … nice puffy clouds…people hanging around playing harps…smiling…peaceful. He thinks that looks pretty nice. Could be a good choice. With that he hops in the elevator down to Hell…

The doors open and the devil shows him into a big room….WOW…. What a party! People dancing, drinking up a storm, singing, laughing, having an amazing time. “Now,” he shouts, “THIS is the way to spend eternity!”

He jumps back on the elevator and runs to tell St. Peter that while Heaven is certainly lovely, Hell is simply an awesome party and that is his choice. John jumps back on the elevator and when the doors open he is shocked to see flames shooting everywhere, people screaming with fear and pain, etc….

John quickly runs to find the Devil and says, “What happened? I was just here and it was a giant party.. how could this be?”

“Simple,” replies The Devil .“Before you were a prospect… now you’re a client!”

Essentially, that’s what happens.  When you don’t have kids, you’re a prospect — all these parents want you to join the team, so they try to make it as appealing as possible. Then once you sign up, they can let it all hang out.  Jackals. Oh, how I hate them.

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

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: , , , , , ,

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: , , , , , ,
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