maenad.net : jnl

musical golden ratio

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 21:18:20 -0800

Saturday night, we sang the last page of the Debussy in the increasingly-blinding rising footlights, our final Alleluia! triumphantly corroborated by the orchestra, and then darkness. Applause. Bows for everyone: MTT; the dramaturge; the counterintuitively un-waifish dancer whose image had ecstatically writhed on fringed scrims above the orchestra; our Ragnar, in tails just for the ovation. As we filed out of the chorus balcony, Elaine called to me and pointed to the first box, where Daniel was putting on his sweater.

I haven't seen him in nine years -- not since he was my college orchestra conductor, since we had doughnuts and read through the Brahms Op. 120 viola sonatas, No. 2, on the concert-grand Steinway in Lang with the green-leafed arboretum shining up at us through the glass back wall at the tail end of my senior year of Swarthmore, when we both probably should have been studying. He yelped as I stuck my head into the box, said I hadn't changed at all (but I found a wrinkle on my face later that night! But I'll take it), and we started jabbering like we'd just finished the last bar of the Brahms in 2003.

Over a glass of Bandol rosé (okay, two) at Zuni after, we compared notes from the last decade: Where we'd been, who we'd played with, current jobs, my house. Old friends are always wonderful to catch up with, especially when neither party is substantially changed from whatever chemistry made the friendship work to begin with. Even more gratifying than having wine in San Francisco with my decade-ago orchestra conductor, though, was the underlying continuity he represents for me: He knew me -- worked with me -- when I identified as a musician.

I do again, now: Even if IOC has been gratifying, it's still an amateur choir; the Symphony Chorus, on the other hand, is objectively the big leagues. And Daniel praised the night's Debussy -- not just the staging, or the wonderfully French texture MTT conjured by waggling his fingers mysteriously at his orchestra; but the chorus: our tone, our vowels, our sound.

You realize I've wanted to do exactly this, without knowing it, for years? This is what everyone has told me I couldn't do, wasn't possible: To have a fulfilling, demanding job in a fully other field, for which I am handsomely paid, and to do music professionally. (Professionally!) It's the perfect balance: Since music isn't my day job, I'm not grumbling at having to memorize the last few pages of Debussy or at its unfamiliar French phonemes. Nor have I lost the wide-eyed infatuation, the sheer joy of lifting notes off paper and throwing them into a hall -- any hall, even the rehearsal room Zellerbach C. I used to fear the magic would crumble, as it clearly had for my stand partner in that sophomore-year Shostakovich, as it seems to have for some of the older members of the Symphony Chorus. But it hasn't for me. And not for the company I keep: IOC, amateurs in the literal sense; Alana, fellow alto since 1989; Elaine, who urged me to audition for the Symphony Chorus, who adores every performance, and who posts lines from choir songs on Facebook daily; Nick, with whom (and some red wine) I sang the middle lines of Rachmaninoff's vespers on a balcony under the Golden Gate Bridge the summer of 2008, who then convinced me to join his choir; Ragnar, who is clearly in it for the love; Daniel, undiminished after nine years.

I kind of can't believe I've done this, that this balance is working. I've struck the golden ratio here in California. I'm so gratified.

liminal gold new year's

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 18:03:56 -0800

That it was close to 70 degrees and gloriously sunny on New Year's Day in San Francisco helped. That my house, though strewn with dirty champagne flutes, expired Old Fashioneds, and remnants of munchies, was full of friends when I woke up (both those who had intended to crash, and those too drunk to make it back across the bridge) did too. My new gold leggings shone gleefully in the afternoon sunlight, and yesterday on the walk down 18th Street to brunch, my misanthropy index (Emily's term) was at zero.

I love New Year's: Both eve and day are equally affirming for me, the former an intentional homecoming and celebration of things I've chosen; the latter a fresh, unencumbered start. Yoga on Penultimate Day and the 31st stretched hamstrings and heartstrings both (somehow urdhva dhanurasana will do that to you); later, mere hours before 2012, I achieved closure on my recent palpitations with a frank discussion sitting (aptly) beneath my closet's chandelier; thus disburdened, I could focus wholeheartedly on my party and my friends. And the homecoming this year was both sweetened and deepened by my new permanence: Usually, when my late-December flight from the Midwest touches down at SFO and I relax into the back seat of a cab, watching the city lights reflected in the bay as we speed up 101, part of my thoughts go to the evanescence of this Californian fairyland; arriving from Madison (from Chicago (from Berlin)) last Thursday, those thoughts were answered by the surging remembrance that I now own a house, and, the city so reified, I may stay. Funny how paying property taxes affects the soul.

Nothing feels urgent today, or yesterday. I love the liminal space we afford ourselves at the end and beginning of each year. Work and its monotonically increasing to-do list begin again tomorrow; the Symphony Chorus starts its Debussy madness tonight; I'll barely have a free evening for two weeks. But for just a few days (after the few weeks of Berlin-then-family), to lift out of the n dimensions of one's life and view it from the n+1st, to do nothing but breathe in yoga and celebrate one's home and friends, and to dance through the Mission in brilliant gold leggings for coffee, pumpkin beignets, and Bloody Marys with those you love: What a gift!

10 years of light and handwarmers

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 01:04:44 0100

When "winter" comes to San Francisco, the bike messengers put on long sleeves, and I dig out my otherwise-unused orange umbrella. We complain if the the temperature stays in the 50's all day, are shocked every year on the few days it stays in the 40's. Some Twin Peaks residents collectively hallucinated a few snowflakes last year; icicles are strings of lights, not frozen stalactites of water. If I can't find my fingerless gloves, a tiny Americano from Four Barrel is the perfect substitute: Hot coffee (do the LPs playing on their vintage turntable in their shop on Valencia make it taste better?) warms both my palms through the small paper cup, exactly the way two roasted chestnuts were my gloves in Vienna ten years ago. The parallel struck me suddenly Sunday morning as I walked out of their warm, wallpapered cafe, out toward the parklets on the curb (empty of caffeinated patrons in this "weather"); I stopped in my tracks, briefly suspended between two ends of a decade.

I'm flying back to 2001 today as well, this time on a 747 headed for Berlin via Frankfurt, where real winter (but also Glühwein, and also Trisha) awaits me. Q4 is once again abruptly over -- what's done is done, and what's undone not worth thinking about for two weeks; brainpower is now needed for recalling what remains of my German food vocabulary. Das Spinoff (the reality TV series Traffic-Team-XX would have, if we did) has as yet no plans in Deutschland beyond figuring out how to top up borrowed local SIM cards, and finding hot chestnuts, modern art, and Pediküren (whether or not that's a word).

These flashbacks aren't limited to the gustatory. In the fourth row at Tori Amos's show at the Paramount last night, I stared fixedly at the candelabra chandelier suspended over her [perplexingly closed-top] concert-grand Bösendorfer, not hearing her lyrics so much as reciprocating the glass candles' luminosity back from my heart. When was the last time I identified with a light fixture? Oh yes: April 2001, when I was a sophomore quoting Eliot and lilacs, beaming like a sparkler along the wooded path behind the music building; through November of that year, when I realized from a Stehplatz at the Wiener Staatsoper that I no longer thrummed along with the sconces. And here I've thought this whole time that that was just because I was 21.

I let the author of this luminescence buy me dinner the other night; I then bought him a cocktail. No idea if I'm playing these cards right, or even if there's a right way to play them. But oh, it's bright.

But (I remind myself) this is 2011, no longer (thank god) 2001. Then, I was a college student unsure of my major, perennially behind on my homework, and I warmed my hands with chestnuts like a Dickensian orphan; now, I'm a Senior SRE, I own a fabulous house with my own external chandelier, and I need ersatz hand-warmer hipster Amer-au-laits only when I forget my hipster gloves. Should this brief candle also gutter (or really, fail to catch), I'll still be in such a better place. What a difference a decade makes.

pronouncing postprandials

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 19:05:51 0200

It was the correct decision, this time, to go to Dublin for work first, and only after to take advantage of my employer's having already paid for the transatlantic flight and the 8-hour time difference, and to hop across to the Continent for a spell. I knew this even before I landed in Italy on Saturday, having that morning checked out of The [Twice-The-Hotel-Cap] Dylan at some horrible pre-dawn hour, jumped on a plane to Naples, and only woken up from my daydreaming doze as the bus to Sant'Agnello rounded a sharp corner around some ancient castle on a cliff, exposing the Neapolitan Bay: A swath of brilliant, sunlit blue framed by more cliffs and those iconic umbrella pines. No, it was apparent even in Dublin -- this is the first time in three years that my low expectations of that town have been surpassed, if not fully disproved. And since it was my first stop in the tenuous EU zone, Ireland got to take full credit for the initial European charm I often exhaust in (say) Paris.

It helped that the weather was mostly lovely, almost Californian for a few days, and then subsiding into crisp fall, with only an interval of Irish rain. It helped that coffee snobs so serious they don't serve soy milk (we had a long discussion about this) have set up shop a block from the office. It helped that the office itself is in a new, beautifully-decorated building, with what I can without reservation call a proper Google cafe (in the old building, standard lunch fare was the double-asterisk, unadorned **Potato (internal convention says one star for vegetarian, two for vegan)). It helped, no doubt, that by now I know where to go in the evenings to get the kind of food on which I thrive -- the perfectly nice tapas place with a good list of Spanish wines; Conucopia, my hippie haven in the emerald Isle, for the little pepper-and-basil savory scones, bought three at a time and meted out for office breakfasts over desktop tea and setting up for being oncall at 10am -- but I think also more and better food has cropped up even during the few years in which I've been making these annual trips, to the extent that I probably could have stayed fully vegan if I'd desperately wanted to.

I'm sure others noticed it in me, as well -- Ryan & Susan certainly did. I didn't complain that the wine wasn't French or overly lament the drink selection in the gilt-but-Guinness-and-Jameson-serving establishment of Café en Seine; I complained only that the rain soaked the cuffs of my jeans, and then resolved to bring a skinny-leg cut, and rainboots, next time. I must have been altogether much more pleasant to be around. There was Conall & Ciara's wedding in County Wicklow (we found the church only by tracking the groom on Latitude; I pushed champagne on the driver and the bride; my camera battery died early, so I took silly iPhone photos all night, with which I'm actually quite pleased); a brief weekend drive to Kilkenny, Cork and back; a mini-Oktoberfest and new friends and pints and loud clubs and late evenings. Shall I confess that I even enjoyed myself?

And then to fly to Italy (the Europe of my first travels at age 16, the foreign language in which I first tried to communicate with natives, armed with only a month of Berlitz-tape study and the lyrics of romantic canzonette) was certainly the right order of operations. I arrived early on Saturday, then waited for Mike by napping with the balcony door open onto the white marble terrace (Carrara everywhere!), and then with Falanghina and olives as I began the historical novel about Pompeii my mom had sent me for my birthday. Just about everything in that country charms: The vibrantly rolled rrr's, the understanding that caffè means "espresso," and the assumption that you would probably like one after dinner; the mere existence of such ambrosiae as crema di limoncello, nocillo, and finocchietto. The coasts of Campania are as breathtakingly beautiful as the postcards, more so when you take the pictures yourself (leaving the SLR behind, because only the point-and-shoot, and your iPhone with its silly Hipstamatic app, will fit in your cute new yellow purse). I walked sadly past the duty-free limoncello and mozzarella bar in the airport this morning, unable to fit anything more in my luggage; but I did have one last caffè on my way out -- not the pinnacle of roastery or baristaship, but an expression of deriving pleasure from life that I deeply appreciate. (Emily remarked to me some years after moving to Cambridge for grad school that the difference between Boston and San Francisco was that the denizens of the latter expected to have pleasure each day. Maybe that's one reason why I love my adopted city so much, and why Italy resonates with me.)

My Italian remains restaurant-level, at best; or opera-libretti-level (I've had the witches' chorus from Verdi's Macbetto stuck in my head for the last 5 days, if for no other subconscious reason than that it's a piece of fluent Italian my brain can recite). It's both pleasing -- I can command a glass of nocillo faster than Mike (maybe it's my confident geminate L) -- and annoying -- my dilettantism is laid bare. Mike & I saw a chamber piano recital in Ravello last night, a tiny venue with miniature vaulted ceilings carrying the commanding delivery of Chopin sonorously around the room. An Irishman spoke fluent French to me over a drink the week before. I'm going through this paragraph trying to reduce the number of "command"s, but I realize that I mean all of them -- that not only do I thrill at a trilled R, a well-enunciated phrase or two from a mouth from whom I least expected it, or a nocturne, but that I want more command over these things myself. My back-in-SF to-do list has increased accordingly.

Command or no, though, superficiality will take me far enough: I've had minor linguistic triumphs throughout Southern Italy this week, and even a few on the connecting leg to Frankfurt just now (in which I did not fuck up my for-novelty's-sake order of Tomatensaft mit Pfeffer on the plane, and succeeded in making small talk about the price of a newsstand New Yorker in the airport). I'm pleased to have enough of all of the above: Of German, to enjoy Lufthansa; of Italian, to convincingly pronounce the names of after-dinner liqueurs; of French, to understand and reciprocate a sympathetic murmur; of piano, to delectate. And, not least, of computers, to underwrite most of this: This lifestyle, and these opportunities to travel.

pleased with my 30's

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 17:07:07 -0700

I'm somewhat ridiculously pleased with myself: I'm drinking an Old Fashioned on a plane, which I just made for myself in a baby 6-oz. shaker, with simple syrup and Angostura bitters brought through security in labeled, under-3-oz. little glass droppers and bottles. It's too sweet (N.B.: less simple next time), and is wanting a lemon twist, but hey, not bad for a first attempt at DIY SFO-LHR.

The simple syrup was left over from my birthday party on Friday -- I'd made a whole jarful, then filtered it into two spouted bottles, and gotten the rest of the amenities (some borrowed from TQ's stash; some ordered last-minute on Amazon) for six easy drinks, plus one secret cocktail (the Aviation seems to hold a special place in my heart). I shuffled all my commitments -- rearranged opera tickets; re-booked flights -- so I could have Friday night free to invite everyone over (my initial idea of "an intimate dinner party" turned, of course, into a catered, dolled-up, late-night soirée) to firmly establish me in my fourth decade. (Last year was the milestone; this was the affirmation.) I know it was a success by friends' comments the next day on the drinks ("Who made me that cocktail? Whatever it was, it was delicious!"), by reports of "the walking wounded," and by the dents made, as my inspector warned, on my original 1885 Douglas Fir softwood floors by guests' stilettos. (I feel guilty about that last one.) Around 3:00am, we hung the final crystal from the base of the chandelier, killed the last of the Bulleit, and attacked the leftover mushroom pâté with renewed vigor. Now I call that a party.

I'm also ridiculously pleased with myself about that chandelier. That whole closet, really. The closet started off beige -- the whole house did! -- and, just last week, I transformed it: three walls are now a glossy white; the back wall is a textured, large Damask-patterned black-and-white wallpaper; a floor-to-ceiling mirror frames more than the door, and reflects the crystal candelabra chandelier back through the transom, through the portal into my bedroom, and all the way down the length of the house, if the French doors to my bedroom are open. Half the party on Friday took place in that closet: glamor shots, friends touching the textured wallpaper, basking in the reflected light of so many crystals into the giant mirror, down onto guests' fabulous dresses and coiffures, refracting still further into their cocktails.

(I fear I'm getting the keyboard of this new MacBook Air sticky by futzing with the ice-to-cocktail ratio of my drink, and then going back to typing. It wouldn't be the worst my work computers have seen -- witness also the death-by-Mimosa of Spring 2010 of one MacBook Pro, all in the name of Saturday-morning capacity.)

And (further pleasure!) somehow in the midst of this, there was (I made) time for Mahler. Not just listening, as has been the wont of late -- champagne at intermission; pretty dress and lipstick -- but singing. Did I mention that, last spring, I auditioned on a whim for the San Francisco Symphony Chorus? And so here I am, sitting through all but four minutes of the two-hour symphony, but in the chorus balcony, under MTT, and singing the fifth movement as loud as I can. Four times over. It's fewer notes than if I were in the viola section, for sure; but on the other hand, I can keep my day job. And this is no slouch!

It's performance-review time at work, when we write self-evaluations, and then invite our peers to review us as well. I'm not up for promotion this time, which makes the enumeration more straightforward -- less of a hard sell in the prose, and more simply an honest list of things I've done in the last year. I made the list on my birthday last Tuesday, and it's a good one. And personally speaking, I haven't done poorly, either: London, Hawaii, Mexico; bought a house, transformed it into a thing of beauty; behaved as honestly and grown-up-ly as I could; made cocktails on a plane.

I'm officially enjoying my thirties.

FOMS (year off)

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 18:56:16 -0700

I swore last year, as Shawn, Cynthia, & I struggled to put up our eleventh-hour tensegrity structure in a rainstorm, with its canvas smelling of motor oil, and eventually succumbed to the neighbors' gin and shelter, that I wasn't going in 2011. Swore again sitting that night at the base of the Man, unable to find the friend who had said to meet him "by the marching band" (of which, of course, there had been several), annoyed and alone in a white, furry bolero jacket, until a group of lovely men carrying synchronized LED white children's umbrellas offered me conversation, a cocktail, and the comfort of their blinking toys. Swore again tacitly as the virtual gates for tickets opened in January, and I didn't queue, didn't buy one. Felt validated in late July as Burning Man itself sold out -- sold out! For the first time ever! -- and I remained resolutely ticketless. Had to swear every time thereafter that I mentioned it to a friend, an acquaintance, even a stranger after Cody's trolley party, a friend of his French neighbor at their new house (he and Ellie closed escrow a mere day before me), promised me an extra ticket at what must have been 2, 3am, implored, camp with us! --No, I had to say over and over, I'm not going this year.

And now it's Tuesday of the week of the burn, and lo and behold, I haven't gone. I'm on the shuttle home from work, having resolved a few bugs, finished a lingering bit of maintenance, helped a new guy through some hairy corners of our configs, gone to the weekly team meeting, had a beer in Jinnah & Astrid's office. I'll pick up our weekly coffee order at Ritual tonight, maybe also a library hold, have a glass of wine, some leftover gazpacho I made from my CSA tomatoes. It all sounds so quotidian -- remind me why I'm not there, again?? Walking home from Beretta last night (Laurence convinced me that the 50,000 people who descended on the Black Rock Desert every last-week-of-August would mean no line for cocktails and margherita burrata pizza in the Mission, which proved -- yet so early in the week, at least -- a lie), I passed the hot breath of Amnesia, the vocalist between sets cradling a glass of whiskey at the mic; passed the last seating at Delfina lingering at outdoor tables on 18th St., nursing the last sip of Carménère and counting out a tip under the eaves' heat lamps; passed a girl who leaned out of a van and asked directions to Valencia, and, having gotten them, yelled "Thank you! You're hot!" -- and I could almost see the dusty streets and the rising moon, the flicking on of headlamps and EL-wire, hear the sound of hammer on rebar and the first low-wattage glimmer of a rave that would become full-throated by the end of the week along the Esplanade. The veil between 18th St. and the 6:30 radius blurred; I reached across it with my heart and gave the girl in the van directions to Valencia.

I go every year because, as I remember these things, my pulse quickens. Excuses of binaries to deploy, money that were better spent elsewhere, negative vacation time, never hold, because this isn't zero-sum: I will find the necessary money and time to answer the sirenic desert.

I did dust off my costume bins this last weekend, though, if only to move them into the part of my new garage I'm not leasing out, the part I can use as storage for old chandeliers, the coffee urns from FnF, the old suitcases I should have unpacked years ago, to make room upstairs for my new roommate Katherine to move in. And I felt virtuous and justified in so doing: In my unintentional resolution for 2011 to Behave More Like An Adult, I have not only bought a house, but have gotten a roommate to help me with the mortgage, stated my boundaries when boys have been unclear, and now -- or so I'm telling myself -- not succumbed to my annual Fear Of Missing Something ("FOMS," a compulsion so strong that Toby even used to have an acronym for it) by going to the playa simply because it's the best place on earth.

But my colors are showing beneath my resolutions. Next year. Next year, with a fonder heart...

FnF XV (dancing all night)

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 18:22:11 -0700

The Milky Way was luminescent up in Saratoga Springs this weekend. I noticed it first as I lowered myself slowly into the hot tub Thursday evening, focusing on the sensation of the warm water on my thighs against the cooling night, and then tilted my head back to put my hair out of the water's reach. I gaped, frozen half-submerged and mid-ponytail, at the sky. It was also visible in the wee hours of Sunday morning from atop a picnic table, in a clearing through bushes and up the hill, the lights from the full-throttle dance party below visible over the trees but still earthbound enough to not spoil the galaxy's speckled glow.

Costumes are easier each year -- I now truly have accumulated the fabled costume bin at which I so marveled when visiting Tessa & Christoph's apartment in 2005, so it's now only a matter of washing the pieces out, and maybe throwing in one more tutu or pair of striped stockings for good measure. TQ organized matching vinyl corsets this year; mine stayed on through Saturday's dinner and opening ceremony, but had to come off (along with the platform boots) to be able to properly flail myself around the thumping dance floor that night. I paraded around earlier Saturday afternoon in my white knee-high go-go boots and polka-dotted bathing suit, carrying ice on my head back to chill my little coolerful of Tecate, then lounging poolside under a cotton-lace parasol. Jinnah handed me a spicy Bloody Mary; the music cranked higher and stronger all afternoon: A pool party for grown-ups, even as their children splashed adorably around the shallow end, wearing aviation-quality soundproofing earphones.

The communal food went smoothly (or at least dramatically more so than last year). The round-the-clock coffee was smooth (albeit pungent in my office and then my house, 50 pounds of fresh ground giving off such an aroma that I stuck it out on the front landing for the night before I drove up). The music and lights -- well, this is why one comes to an event like Friends & Family, isn't it? To witness what the collective passion of a bunch of grown-up ravers can do, when concentrated and put to the common good? The music and lights were off the chain, to use the vernacular. And the dancing, on a small dusty area with enough gear for a crowd ten times that size and a sixty-kilowatt generator, was nonetheless intimate -- you knew everyone there, even if you didn't: The boy with the fauxhawk and gold pants you saw poolside earlier in the afternoon; the DJ whose eyes you recognized through his 3D-printer-generated mask; the girl with the blue EL-wire wings; the cute Oakland raver you just met in the dinner line that evening, when your platforms made you taller than him. It was not a question of "could have danced all night" -- oh, but we did.

acting my age

Fri, 08 Jul 2011 17:56:45 -0700

The second after I turned my pager off last Monday afternoon, my doorbell rang. The movers, half an hour early, worked around me as I wrapped the last of the glassware in recycled brown paper packaging, zip-tied shut the last few bins, and pointed out which stray items also needed to be loaded into their magic truck. (/mu.verz/ (n.): People who move your stuff for you. Why did I never hire them before? Oh right: because I couldn't, or didn't think I could.) I walked the five blocks down Church Street behind them, carrying a half-full bottle of wine, my laptop, and some spare laundry detergent. Past the people eating crepes on sidewalk tables and the bread-and-pastry shop; past the Market Street Railway Mural of the city's past, present, and future public transit just south of 15th Street that Matt explained to me the first night I met him, now so many years ago; past the middle school, and, following the J, down the hill to 18th. Arrived at my new home, already painted the grey-purple, sage-green, unicorns-pink, and sky-blue that TQ had helped me pick out at the paint store a few week before (thanks to whom I did not choose the wrong colors), and directed furniture placement in a daze: Couch there, please. Bed facing this way. Those boxes? Oh, anywhere. I made pasta that night with leftover pesto I'd tucked into the cardboard box of the contents of my fridge and carried down the hill, the eight minutes after emptying the package of noodles into salted, boiling water a sudden, frantic search for the box containing the colander.

The house is a liminal mess right now, still awash in crumpled newsprint that hugged champagne flutes, in temporarily-placed bookshelves that seem to be growing roots, in various electrical cords and cables to nowhere and a gas pipe for the dryer that doesn't fit. But for every twinge I have of needing to not fuck this up, to do it right (to say nothing of the twinges when I notice a crack in the ceiling, or a loose bathroom tile, and realize those things are my problem now), there are three of affirmation. Life milestones come in hailstorms these days: Olivia & Charlie just gave birth to Audrey, and Chuck & Vinny to Marlaina; Flesché & Jacob are due in October. Elaine & David are getting married at the end of the month, Laura & Ted at the beginning of August, then Conall & Ciara. And I have a house.

Relatedly, in the past month, I have asked out a boy I liked, turned one down who wasn't offering me what I wanted, and, yesterday, nipped a new fling at the bud -- promising, but no promises -- unwilling to walk a primrose path I've walked before. I'm too old for that shit, and it no longer makes sense to optimize for the short term.

Adulthood: I'm feeling good about you.

new owner anxiety

Tue, 14 Jun 2011 23:49:58 -0700

All of last week, I couldn't figure out why I was so wrecked. Three hours of jet lag -- the result of coming back from visiting Olivia, her very-soon-to-be-baby, and briefly, Swarthmore, out east the previous weekend -- sounded like a good excuse, until I realized that flying east-to-west ought to work in my favor. Between vacation, illness (somewhere in the last month my body forcibly took a weekend, two 16-hour days of nothing but sleep), and choir obligations (IOC did two master classes in a row with Ragnar Bohlin, the conductor of the SF Symphony Chorus, on Friday), I've only been working three-day weeks of late -- what's so exhausting about that? Why should I need both that afternoon espresso and to pass out on the orange couch in my office for 40 minutes in the afternoon, my head on the stuffed-animal silver tiger we got in Vegas a couple years ago, my shoulder being embossed by the wales of the upholstery, the timed light eventually flicking off as it sensed no movement in the office? Bleary upon waking, my knees buckled under me as I walked to the espresso machine. Daily.

It occurred to me somewhere in the middle of a long massage Thursday night that this might possibly -- just maybe -- be new-house-related stress. My conscious set of stressors ended with the presentation of the keys the evening of Thursday, May 26th (actually rather anti-climactic: my agent hid them in a flowerpot for me, since our schedules didn't align to meet up the day of close of escrow): I retrieved the keys, got Claire to help me bring 6 bottles of champagne, one magnum of sparkling rosé, and 50 glass flutes over to MY NEW HOUSE as its first furnishings, I sent word out with mere hours' notice, and I demanded that everyone come VALIDATE MY DECISIONS, now if you please. They did: Benjy brought Redbreast 15 and Nick brought a Bordeaux; Justin turned up in a velour smoking jacket; Trisha arrived with 10 pizzas from Delfina (now just down the block!) and Nathan brought kumquats and cheese (Bi-Rite! also now just down the block!); Cooper brought flowers which I stuck in an empty champagne bottle; Cody scrawled "NORI" in blue ballpoint pen on the painted wood behind the empty nameplate outside my door (MY DOOR!), which I only noticed upon exiting, in lipstick and the bias-cut strapless black dress I'd thrown on for the occasion, and I nearly fell down the front stairs laughing. It was exactly what I wanted: Validation of not only my purchase (holy crap that's a lot of money) (holy crap the "July 01 2041" date of maturity on my mortgage is so far in the future as to be meaningless), but validation of my life milestone. Signed, sealed, and fêted.

I think I had about a week of elation, and then realized that I had a huge June to-do list: Choose paint colors, get samples thereof, put them on the walls, decide they're not perfect, pick out better paint colors, order more samples, decide they are perfect, get gallons of paint, find painters, hire painters, find movers, hire movers, hire a company to drop off recycled plastic moving bins instead of cardboard boxes, PACK, find a faster ISP, set up Internet in the new place, start gas & electric service in the new place, figure out if I need to shut the gas off in the old place to disconnect my dryer before I can discontinue gas & electric at the old place, decide on wallpaper for my closets, order wallpaper samples, measure walls to be papered and order more, figure out how to hang said wallpaper and then do it, get quotes on recarpeting vs. installing hardwood in my new bedroom, re-key all the locks, find my mortgage account number, meet with the HOA... Why no, whyever would I be stressed?

I feel not only that I need to do all of this now, but do it right. What if I pick the wrong paint color? I've painted rooms before -- painted them lots of very, very bright colors -- and never second-guessed my aesthetic judgment. As I stood in my yet-empty house tonight after the HOA meeting upstairs had concluded, applying swatches of color wherever I chose (I felt like a vandal, wantonly taking brush to wall), I felt a rising sense of panic: I'm doing it wrong, and I'm playing for keeps now. What if I've chosen the wrong shade of purple for the living room? WHAT THEN?!?

The counterweight of validation continues, of course. As I stood agonizing over shades of pink for the bathroom this evening, Francesca tapped on the lattice between my window and hers, so I crawled out the window through the light well into her and Carlo's kitchen, where they fed me pasta: neighbors! And my wallpaper samples came yesterday: one gold with blue and brown leaves, pomegranates, and the occasional stern-faced monkey; one bright orange (ORANGE!!) with gold dragon motifs. On unfolding them from their envelopes, I must have started giggling maniacally; I certainly took the orange sample and ran into Jinnah & Astrid's office next to mine, brandishing the design, no explanation necessary but my evident glee. This is exactly why I bought a house: I can put monkeys or orange-and-gold dragons in it if I want! Or both!!

The multiple punctuation (!!) (!??!!!) (!!!!!!) will outweigh the anxiety in short order, I have no doubt. Really, all I need to do is move, and everything else is details, doable one by one. And, as I slowly catch up on sleep, the world as it looks from five blocks south begins to take shape.

commitment

Fri, 13 May 2011 17:19:02 -0700

I sat next to Mamie on a full shuttle yesterday, and before we turned to our respective newspaper-reading and work-emailing, she inquired breathlessly about my new house. I eagerly showed her the pictures of it I've synced to my phone, carrying them around in my digital wallet like others might snapshots of their kids; she cooed over its pretty Victorian façade, its original 1885 Douglas-fir floors, its wide living-cum-dining room, its spiral staircase. "I bet it feels really validating to be buying a place all by yourself," she commented. Bingo.

The immediate appeal is obvious to everyone: The latitude to paint every surface (there will be no beige in my house!), invest in some proper grown-up furniture, mirror the wall of my walk-in closet. And sure, it's an investment, and I'll be locking in my cost of housing for as long as I care to stay put. All definitely good reasons.

But the fuzzier aspects are dawning on me more slowly than are visions of designer wallpaper: Not only am I committing to a city I so obviously love, in which I so obviously belong, but I'm doing it by myself -- no parents, husband, nor fiancé needed to co-sign, thank you. And yet it feels like as big a step as any marriage. Weddings are easy to celebrate, are a well-accepted societal milestone; and houses are something you're supposed to buy as a couple. I'm doing this out of order, but I don't care -- I can, and I want to. Do my friends understand the extent to which I'm actually donning a white dress, here?

I find myself surprised by the accompanying emotions around this process. I'm having anxiety dreams about the house, in which it burns down and my agent is left sadly shaking his head among the beautifully-wallpapered rubble; I'm mentally feeling around and making sure I'm doing the right thing, life-step-wise -- does the fact that I had more excellent intellectual conversations at Emily's 30th birthday dinner party in Boston last weekend than I've had here in an entire year mean I'm in the wrong city? (No, this city's other benefits far outweigh Boston's, and Emily took three unhappy years there to find that community.) Did the undergrads at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music performing last night alongside my choir in a master's composition recital convince me that I should be spending my money and time on a stated long-time goal of doing something bad-ass with my viola, rather than singing adequately with a good-enough choir and doing something merely competently (it still feels like that, despite promotions and feedback to the contrary) as an SRE? (No, though the old twinge was not fully absent.)

No and no, as the parentheticals say -- I'm settling down, not settling -- but still, in the same way I started scrutinizing every café, cornice, and corner store when I began to look in earnest for a house, now I'm trying to honestly turn over every stone in my mind, to see what relevant beetles may live beneath.

I'm pretty damn sure I'm making a great move, here. Anyone reading this blog already knows there's no place I'd rather be; and as for the music, well, I'll just have to buy a piano and host salons in my living room. And taking this step out of order though I may be, the upside is that I have no one's preferences but my own to accommodate. Future husband: I do not apologize for having painted the bathroom pink.