Domestic life

Mission Impossible VI: Car Share Protocol

Dec 10, 2012 7:54 pm•By: •What say you?

Christmas tree is up, finally.   It turned into a rather dramatic affair, as do most otherwise mundane outings, now that we have to utilize a car sharing service for running errands.  When we still owned a car, the when and where and how long of going places and getting things done was completely within our control and at our discretion.  We didn’t hurry unless we were actually in a rush.

Now that we pay by the hour to use a car, we are always in a rush.

Hourly car sharing is a frustrating see-saw of signing up for too much time or too little. If you are conservative with your estimate you waste money paying for hours you don’t use; if you arrange for too little time, you end up pulling over on the side of the road frantically trying to extend your reservation to avoid being slapped with outrageous fees.

We allotted an hour and a half to stop at the grocery store for mayo, Best Buy to pick up a pre-ordered phone, and Home Depot to grab a Douglas fir.  In retrospect this was beyond optimistic – it was bordering on delusional.

In a perfect world, this would have taken us no more than the 90 minutes we planned on.  In a perfect world, the phone would have been ready and waiting at Best Buy instead of lost somewhere in inventory.  In a perfect world, Home Depot employees would have shown just a little bit of hustle on the job.  In a perfect world, the Russian lover would be able to truss a tree to the roof of an SUV in three minutes without needing to have a ten minute quarrel with me about how my help wasn’t helping.  In a perfect world, at least some of the traffic lights on the way home would have been green.

When you are loaning a car at an hourly rate, the bumps in the road reach into your pocket.  Inconveniences – long lines, slow staff, snarled traffic – are not just annoyances stealing your time; they can become robbers taking your money.  And you can’t plan for all the obstacles – you can only go as fast as possible.  Now that we’re car sharing, every grocery trip turns into Supermarket Sweep and every drive feels like a game of Grand Theft Auto.  Running errands involves actual running.

In the end, we’re kind of maybe saving a little bit of money by car sharing instead of car owning.  It has also introduced more efficiency and more panic into our efforts as the sheer adrenaline of trying to beat the clock with every shopping trip gives new purpose to those routine outings.  I won’t go so far as to call it fun…but it certainly is engaging.

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Salmon, illustrated

Jul 24, 2012 9:35 pm•By: •What say you?

A gourmet kitchen is not a prerequisite to eating well.  Conversely, an SLK* is not a consignment to endless nights of instant ramen.  I know people with sixty-thousand-dollar kitchens whose idea of making dinner consists of heating frozen chicken fingers and microwaving easy mac; then there are people like the Russian lover and I who make everything from scratch in a two-foot square kitchen.  Really, cooking is nothing more than the art of making do, but in the recent and soon to be bygone era of affluence, cooking became another means of measuring yourself against the Jones’s.  Have dinner parties! Be fabulous!  But only when someone is looking.  Otherwise, cold cereal and take-out will suffice.

A kitchen shouldn’t be a credential, and it shouldn’t be an excuse. Eat well for yourself, not for an audience. Although when eating well, an audience sometimes appears anyway.  Especially if your idea of eating well involves a large fresh wild-caught salmon:

*Shitty little kitchen

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Shitty little kitchen

Jul 20, 2012 5:48 pm•By: •What say you?
My SLK Featuring a shelf-drawer stove.                                                                

True story: One time I was meandering through the model rooms at Ikea and an upper middle class middle-aged couple was strolling down the main isle along with me. As they peered in room after room, the woman finally remarked, “But all of these rooms are so tiny!”

In America, we like things big.  Big portions, big waistlines, big boobs, big cars, and big houses with big rooms.  We live in a big country with wide open spaces, and the people that left the crowds of Europe to settle here seem to have had an instinctual need to try and fill all this empty space, and now our cultural has a residual obsession with having large spaces to occupy, and to fill.

So Ikea, purveyor of the efficient and unassuming for the dwellers of modest square footage, is certainly a baffling store to the non-urban demographic of our population.  But those of us who live in cities–in particular, those of us who live in cities on a budget–understand the limitations of space.  While my suburban friends make frowny faces about their ugly laminate kitchen countertops, I marvel that their half-baths have more counter space than my entire kitchen.

I like to think my shitty little kitchen bests pretty much every other shitty little kitchen out there.  It’s not just small.  It’s decrepit and outdated and I can literally tuck my stove in at night before bed.

As much as I hate it in so many ways, I also have an affection for it.  This is the kitchen I learned to cook in; this is the kitchen the Russian lover cooked for me in.  Fond memories have a way of varnishing the worn-out surfaces of this little kitchen and making them more beautiful than expansive granite and brand-new stainless steel…

Psshhht.  I’m kidding, of course.  I can’t wait to trade this thing up.

 

 

 

 

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