Shit Hole

I live in a shit hole.  I finally admitted this to myself as I sat on the edge of the bathtub scooping out coffee mugs full of water because my husband had taken a shower an hour ago and the tub had yet to drain.  As I emptied each mug in to the bathroom sink I listened to the tea pot whistle on the stove.  There were three more pots of boiling water heating up on the other three burners.  This is because the hot water heater in the house I rent barely supplies enough water for a five minute shower, let alone a bath.  At this time, however, I have a broken foot and taking a bath is just easier.  After manually emptying the tub I had my husband bring in the pots in the boiling water, which I mixed with the small amount of hot water and the large amount of cold water available from the faucet.  The house I rent has hopelessly clogged drains, no hot water, very poor insulation, no screens in the windows, and rattles every time the washing machine is on the spin cycle.  My child’s room does not have heat or an electrical outlet.  As I lay in the steaming, but rather shallow bath, I thought about why I live in a shit hole.  

I do not really live in a shit hole, at least by my standards.  Let me explain.  I have been to India.  I briefly stayed with a family in their home, which had bad plumbing and mold on the ceiling.  Their housekeeper washed all the clothes by hand, hunched over by the side of the bathtub, and then hung them up to dry.  To take a hot shower you had to turn on a hot water heater.  After waiting 20 minutes you could then take a warm shower for five minutes maximum.  They were an upper middle class Indian family.  During countless rickshaw rides through Delhi, I saw huge shanty towns.  Walking around at night, I would pass groups of people from the shanty towns huddled around trash can fires.  I have been to a third world country and seen how a lot of people around the world live, so when someone makes the comment, “oh, you don’t have a dishwasher”, which has happened more than once, I can’t help but think that individual is a stupid entitled pretty princess.    My experience with shit holes, however, extends beyond my visit to India and my current home.  

1998: I live in a house with five people and one bathroom.  Thankfully one of my roomates takes showers at the gym and two are filthy hippies who rarely bath.  The house is infested with ladybugs.  The walls are literally crooked.  The carpet is soaked with beer and cigarette.  It is beyond cleaning.  This house was condemned by the county two years after I moved out.  

2001: I live in the upper unit of a two flat in Chicago, which was once the attic of a single family home.  People who come over are in utter disbelief that my roommate and I  live in an attic in Chicago during the summer and do not have even a window air conditioner.  We are just that Boheme.  The fire escape, which is the only exit on our level of the house,  is one of those scary super steep wooden staircases that was added just to fulfill some housing code.  It is terrifying.

2004:  I live in an apartment with four people and one bathroom.  In this situation I am the pretty princess.  I have a futon; my other three roomates all sleep on the floor.  Aside from being crowded and lacking furniture it is actually a really nice apartment.  It is super cheap because it is in a seedy neighborhood.  The lease actually had some sort of clause stating that being a drug dealer was grounds for eviction.  Ah, Chicago. 

2007:  At this point I live in Seattle and I finally have my own one bedroom apartment with no roommate!  The worst thing about the building is the elevator.  It is a glass elevator that runs up and down the outside of the building.  A cab driver once told me that the building had been erected to house employees of the 1960 World’s Fair and that people used to drive by the building just to see the elevator.  The day I looked at the building for the first time one of the glass walls was cracked.  Gradually pieces of glass fell out until one was practically left standing on an open platform five stories above the ground.  The glass was eventually replaced, but that did not matter since the elevator was out of service half the time anyway.  Did I mention that it did not have a motion sensor and would just close on you?

The unit has gross carpet and these weird rolling closet doors that slide out of the door frame all the time, but for the most part it is a nice place.  I live there for several years.  The third year  I came home from a trip to find that the heating pipe above my bed had burst open.  For months there is a moldy dripping hole in my bedroom ceiling.  After putting in three repair requests I decide to not pay my rent to get some attention.  I get some attention in the form of an eviction notice.  I decide to continue this war with my slum lord by reporting him to the city.  He finally starts fixing it after he getting busted by the building inspector, but I am ready to move by that time.  My boyfriend has moved in with me by that point and we want a bigger home anyway.  Which brings me to my current shit hole.

We found an adorable one bedroom house at an awesome price in the Columbia City neighborhood!  It was built in 1907 and has hardwood floors.  Okay, it does not really have hardwood floors, but it has that tile that looks like hardwood flooring.  It even has an office.  There are no electrical outlets of heating vents in the office, but we could always bring in an extension chord from the living room.  We moved in, painted the walls new colors, and found some amazing vintage furniture at thrift stores.  We even bought a piano.  While we are very happy in the house, its flaws gradually started to bother us.  There are bugs in the summer because of the lack of screens.  Our heating bill is ridiculous in the winter because of the poor insulation.  Two years after we moved in we got married and had a baby.  The room without heat or an outlet is now our son’s room.  We keep his door open and jack up the heat in the living room so that it will heat his room - further increasing our heating costs.  While there was plenty of hot water when we moved in, the supply gradually got lower and lower.  We were going to let our landlords know, but then they announced they were selling the house, so we don’t see the point.  The house has been on the market for five months now and no one is interested.  If I had money for a down payment and some home improvements I might buy it myself.  As of yet, however, no one is interested.  Maybe because it is a shit hole.  

Throughout my twenties, I watched acquaintances, co-workers, and people in my family who are my age or younger buy houses.  Note that I did not mention “friends” in this list, because most of my actual friends live in homes similar to mine.  Like I said before, I do not really think this is a shit hole because I am the type of person who is grateful to have a roof over my head.  I can not help but ponder, though, do I think this way because I am a gracious and unmaterialistic person, or do I just have extremely low standards?  Do my low standards in housing carry over to other areas of my life.  Do I live in a mental shit hole?  Do I live in an emotional shit hole?  Do I live in a career shit hole?

As I ponder this, I think about one shit hole I managed to get out of: my job shit hole.  As a struggling musician I have worked many low paying day jobs were I made just enough money to get by.  I thought nothing of this when I lived in Chicago, because there are a lot of people who barely get by in Chicago.  As a single person in Chicago I worked with women who had multiple kids to support and made less than me, so I thought I was doing pretty well.  My idea of how much money I deserve to make changed after I moved to Seattle.  

Washington has the highest minimum wage in the United States.  There is no ghetto in Seattle.  Generally speaking, everyone has a higher standard of living in a city where the cost of living is about the same as Chicago.  For years I worked at a rather slow, overstaffed restaurant.  The management was a bunch of idiots.  The longer I lived in Seattle the more I realized that I was grossly underpaid.  I constantly met people who worked at Microsoft and Amazon who never went to college and lived in posh condos.  I figured that if they could make a decent living, I could too.  I raised my standards and admitted to myself that my job sucks and that I could do way better.  I got up one morning, went to the jobs section of Craig’s List, printed out of stack of resumes, and found myself a new job.  I still work there almost four years later, and am much happier and more financially stable.  My point is that I once I decided that I deserved a job where I am respected and paid well, instead of just being grateful to have a job, my life changed for the positive.

While I will never be the type of person who snubs a nice home because there is no dishwasher, I have decided that I should raise my expectations in housing.  My next home will be properly insulated and have enough hot water available to take a bath.  It will not have plumbing problems.  Maybe I should apply this practice to raising my standards to my music career as well.  While I will never be a total ingrate, as a whole lot of people are, my resolution for 2012 will be to have higher expectations my myself in general.  Perhaps the the first step to moving out a shit hole is not moving my belongings, but moving my head.

Keith

I met Keith when I worked in the dish pit in Thomas hall in 1996. He had a shy smile. He wore a goatee and had chin length sandy brown hair. Often he would put it up in a ponytail to reveal that the underneath layer was shaved. What first drew me to him was the K Mart vest. While washing dishes and frequently around campus, he would don a red vest worn by K Mart employees. It featured the K Mart logo as well as a white pin-on name tag that read SATAN. Alas, I imagined a trip to the fiery depths of K Mart, being forced to walk the isles of disposable crap made by Asian slave children, only to find that the journey ends by handing your cash to Satan himself, standing erect behind the register in his molten red vest and name tag.

We somehow started talking and were drawn to each other as he was an Art major and I was a Music major. He had a crush on me, and I found it hard to return his affection, as I was not all that physically attracted to him. I tried to avoid him, but it was impossible as most of our classes were in the same building and we frequently worked together. If I managed to avoid him I would come home to my dorm room to find that my roommate had scrawled “Satan called” on the dry erase board. His was persistent - and that was certainly worth something.

As I got to know him I realized he was a wounded bird, and a scary wounded bird at that. He was from a small town and grew up in a trailer with his father. His mom was a long haul truck driver. He told me that when he was a kid he was so fat that the only clothes he could wear were overalls. A sensitive broken bird trapped in his personal redneck hell, Keith devoted his life to drawing and studying art. In his new found reality he conquered hell, rising up as Lord Satan, losing the weight of his pork rind childhood and leaving his weary hometown to be an artist. He did have a dark side. He was depressed and angry. His musical taste was Marilyn Manson, and bands I has never heard of with names like Cannibal Corpse. We hung out a few times. We made out a few times. Despite the fact that he had painted “I AM THE GOD OF FUCK” on the wall above his bed with laundry detergent (you know, so that you can only read it when you turn on the black lights), I found out that he was actually a virgin. I most certainly was not going to be responsible for deflowering this sensitive buttercup in a Cannibal Corpse T shirt. Even if he claimed he just wanted to finally get laid, I knew he was an artist and believed in true love. He wanted the first time to be with someone who loved him. I wanted that for him too. He wore this bad mushroomy cologne that many young men wore. His room reeked of it. And he had played me Cannibal Corpse and it was lame - in a mildly scary way. I told him I just wanted to be friends.

Soon after he found a girlfriend who did lay him. She was very tall and blond. My friend Mike and I frequently spotted her in Thomas Hall eating dinner in a yellow sweat suit. Intrigued by Keith and my stories about him, he took to calling his new girlfriend Big Bird. They were an odd pairing - the captain of the basketball team and the Prince of Darkness, who now could rightfully call himself a "God of Fuck". I would talk to him pretty regularly and he would freuqently remind me of what I was missing, as his new lady friend claimed his skills had become superb. He still wore the mushroom cologne. I was happy for him and glad he was obsessed with someone else.

As much as I accuse Keith of having been a tortured soul, I should admit that I was not much better - at all. I was terribly depressed and wrote awful poetry. Here is an example titled Soup:

Blood flows down moist flesh

Proving flesh is more than dust

Skin, more than a hollow crust

Enjoy being tragic

And being clique

In this party mask

This twisted clown face

This needle pen spouts the dark part of blood

Bitter syrup of pain

Cold spreads through densened bones

Growing like a fungus

Spreading, breeding snow and ice

Only this will end this chill

Watching insides run out

Bubbling soup of all endeavours

Warm, like before entering this cold, cold world

Little remains

One night that spring I was feeling terrible and lonely. As I had no one to go buy liquor for my under-aged self, I combined the remaining liquor I had, which was a bit of Montezema tequila and a bit of Skol vodka. I downed the nasty concoction and marched over to Keith’s room, poetry books in hand. I stood on his roommate’s bed and performed a poetry reading for him. I then layed on his roommates bed and let Keith sketch me naked. It was a beautiful drawing. I told him he could keep it for his portfolio.

Eventually Keith broke up with Big Bird and for the last two years I lived in our college town he had a girlfriend named Nina. He was excited that she was bisexual. I regularly socialized with them and Keith remained ever creepy. He and Nina went the the local strip club together and he had started decorating his room with raunchy porn. One weekend he was over at the house I rented with my friend Mike and a few other roomates while Mike’s mom was visiting. Keith was wearing a shirt that said “Fuck you, you fucking fuck”. His mom said she didn’t like him. She sensed that there was something truly evil about him and she was afraid of him. Mike placated her by telling her that it was all an act and part of his persona - he was really harmless. I understood where his mother was coming from though - I frequently felt the same.

In May of 1999 I was done with all my classes and left to student teach in the Chicago area. I remember my last night in town: It started out with me and one of my good friends drinking gin and tonics while skinny dipping in the baby pool in our back yard. It ended with Keith and Nina stopping by to give me the nude drawing. I treasured that drawing. Unfortunately I accidently left it hanging in an apartment I lived in in Chicago. I left it hanging until that last minute because I did not want to damage it and then forgot about it amid the chaos of moving. The next day I went back to get it and my former landlord, an old Italian man who barely spoke a word of English, claimed he had not seen it. I hope he is enjoying it.

REM

My first exposure to REM was hearing Stand as the theme to the short lived television series, Get a Life. I was probably eleven, maybe I was twelve. My Dad loved this show. It featured Chris Elliot as a thirty year old paper boy who lived with his parents. At the time I thought that thirty was extremely old, you’d have to be a total loser to be a thirty year old paper boy, and that Stand was annoying (my preteen ears were still accustomed to listening to New Kids on the Block and Debbie Gibson). All three of these opinions would change. I now think thirty is pretty young. I think that being a paper boy at any age is pretty hip compared to, say, working in a gray cublicle for some random corporation, and I love Stand.

When I was eleven my family moved to a suburb of Chicago that did not have a whole lot of culture. Fortunately it was next to another suburb, Elmhurst, Illinois, where there was a small college, meaning that that the coffee shops and art house theatre I would discover as a teenager where not that far away. Elmhurst also had a better library, as my mom soon found out. Whenever she would take us to the library I would explore the music department and check out cassette tapes that “looked cool”. Some things I remember checking out were classical music, all sorts of ethnic music, new agey meditation tapes that were mostly synthesizers, The Dead Milkmen, and Document by REM. I liked Document. I dubbed it with my double cassette boom box.  It got lost in my dubbed tape collection and I forgot about it.

I became an REM fan in 1991 when I was a freshman in high school. Out of Time had been released and Losing my Religion was a radio hit. I bought the album (we’re still talking about cassette tapes here). The album felt like autumn. It had a haunting sadness to it at a time when I was just starting to discover haunting sadness. I thought the liner notes with the cartoon about the marble staircase were really deep. I listened to it on my walkman on the bus. A lot.

My first real romance was set to Automatic For the People. I was a freshman in college and I fell in love with an REM fan. He kind of looked like a young Michael Stipe with his blond fro. His band did a cover of Drive. That said, my first major breakup was also set to Automatic for the People, followed by a period of extreme lonliness and depression where I would constantly listen to the song Try Not to Breath. To this day both Out of Time and Automatic are a little painful to listen to - but in a sort of bittersweet way. They both take me back to a time in my life when emotions were extremely intense, probably because they were new and I did not know how to deal with them. Teenagers don’t know that everything will (usually) be okay. Knowing that everything will be okay leads to an emotional boredom young people have the burden and luxury of not knowing.

I continued to buy their new releases, and got all of their albums from the 80’s when I was too young to be a fan. Why am I such a fan of this band? Here are some reasons:

1. REM is “arty”. 

While I often regard arty as being pretentious today, I became a fan when I regarded “arty” as being mysterious. The mumble mouth vocals on some of the early albums are arty. The fact that they did not print lyrics (until the late 90’s) because - to paraphrase Michael Stipe - printing only the lyrics is like printing only the bass line, is ARTY. The fact that Michael Stipe suposedely recorded the vocals to all the early albums naked in a dark room? Really arty. These guys lived in the basement of a church and only shopped at the thrift store. While my own thrift shopping eventually became an economic necceccessy, it started in a quest to be as arty as REM. This band is shrouded in romanticism and folklore. I don’t even care how much of it is true. It is my fairytale.

2. REM is intellectual. 

 Their songs speak of Andy Kaufmann (Man on the Moon, The Great Beyond), Lenny Bruce (It’s the End of the World as We Know it), Andrew MacCarthy (Exhuming McCarthy), environmental activism (Fall on Me), Jesus (Talk about the Passion)....I could go on and on.

3. REM is sexy. 

I think Monster is the sexiest album. Tongue and * Me Kitten are the soundtrack to seduction.

4. REM is romantic. 

What is sexy without Romance? The entire REM catalogue is full of love songs, often in clever disguises. My favorites? Nightswimming, and At Your Most Beautiful.

5. REM is folksy.

Peter Buck on the Mandolin, songs about the working class (Wecome to the Occupation, Odd Fellows Local 151, Day Sleeper), not to mention the general folklore that surrounds the band.

I listened to Green twice through on my wedding day while I was confined to a bedroom so that no one would see me. I hadn’t listened to the album in a while because I had lost the CD. My fiance had recently downloaded it on to my laptop. You are Everything is a song I will always associate with that day.

"I think about this world a lot and I cry
And I've seen the films and the eyes
But I'm in this kitchen
Everything is beautiful
And she is so beautiful
She is so young and old
I look at her and I see the beauty
Of the light of music
The voices talking somewhere in the house
Late spring and you're drifting off to sleep
With your teeth in your mouth
You are here with me
You are here with me
You have been here and you are everything"

I was given Collapse in to Now as a gift from my husband for my thirty fourth birthday. Our son was six weeks old. I felt like a teenager again, in that I was actually experiencing new emotions for the first time in a long time. I felt an intense love for this beautiful creature we had produced and I felt an intense responsibility to be a good mother and a good person and to treat everyone with with newfound feeling of love, since everyone is someone’s baby. I also felt what extreme sleep deprivation was like. I immediately loved the songs on this album and it became the soundtrack to new motherhood. I would take my son on long walks and listen to it on my ipod when he fell asleep in the carriage.

The last song on the album is a sublime and climactic ending to their discography. While I am disappointed there is not a farewell tour I realize that it is part of their mystique. They are going out in style and have left us with a beautiful final installment, Collaspse in to Now.  And that is what I intend to do.

"This is my time and I am thrilled to be alive.Living.  Blessed.  I understand.20th Century, Collapse in to now."

Shoe Shopping

Today I went shopping for the shoes I will be wearing on my wedding day. I’d been window shopping and intentionally walking past the shoes in Nordstrom every time I cut through the store to get out of the cold and drizzle. However, today was the day I was officially going to make a purchase. I had seen a few pairs I liked at Nordstrom, but the thought dawned on me - why not go to the Payless three blocks away from Nordstom? After all, I was buying a pair of shoes I would probably only wear a few times in my life. As Payless was on the block where I got off the bus, it was my first stop.

As soon as I’d started browsing, the sales lady told me that everything in the store was -buy one get one half off! A lot of the shoes were only $14. I tried on a pair of white man-made-material sling backs that would make my (or anyone’s) feet sweaty and stinky, and a pair of too-tall silver heels that actually did look great. The whole time, however, this dirty feeling was washing over me. I had not gone into a Payless in at least ten years. There is no reason why a pair of shoes should cost $14. Ever. It seems like just the raw materials to make them should cost $14. When you add in shipping the raw materials to China, paying the Chinese Workers, shipping the shoes to the US, distributing then to different part of the US via truck, paying the sales people, and all the other expenses of running a store, $14. for a pair of shoes seems ridiculously low. Someone is getting screwed and by buying the shoes I am the person doing the screwing. $14. shoes make people forgot that the shoes were made out of materials from the earth by a poor person in another country. $14 shoes make people think that shoes are disposable and that it is okay to have 30 pairs in your closet. Of course, I am not naive enough to think that the distribution of money for a pair of $70 or $200 heels is much different. I don’t believe that the Chinese workers get paid more or that the materials are bought for a fair price or that they are shipped on a boat fueled by an Italian designer peddling a bike with solar panels. The more expensive shoes do, however, reinforce in me that the things we buy should be cherished and intended for long term use. To regard the things we buy as disposable crap is do disrespect the fellow humans that gave them to us - for cheap. I don’t mean to express that we should all dress like like the Amish. I love clothes and shoes and hair thingies and jewelry, but there is no need to constantly buy new things within the structure of a system that screws people over so we can get things for cheap. Woman can find great things at thrift stores, having clothing exchanges with their friends, or buy clothes from independent stores where your dollar will go the the right hands. That said, I do shop at several clothing stores that feature local designers, but I can not think of a way to acquire shoes in the same way. I don’t want to sound like a crazy lady who makes everything out to be some huge moral dilemma, but I certainly do not want to be a person who doesn’t give a fuck. On top of being forced to entertain my moral dilemma, some really irritating hip hop that made me feel like I was at my seventh grade dance was playing. I had too leave.

Since I was out shopping I went to look at earrings and hair accessories for the big day at another store. After purchasing some hair clips I went to a few other shoe stores and did not even try anything on. Walking around downtown I looked down at my trusty boots and pondered why this was such a daunting task. It is probably because I rarely were heels. I can’t help but feel that a woman in wobbly three inch heels is to a mugger what a mouse smeared with tuna is to a hungry cat.

Finally I went to Nordstrom and tried on the shoes I had been admiring in both silver and gold. They had looked more sturdy than the Payless shoes I tried on, but upon trying to walk in them I I realized they were not sturdy at all. Mainly because they were way too high. I ankles hurt from just standing in them. The salesman had also brought out some other shoes he thought I’d like.

Normally I would be annoyed by this, but the last time I bought shoes at Nordstrom, which was also the only time I’ve bought shoes at Nordstrom, the sales woman, who obviously understood my sense of style, brought out some shoes for my that she had picked out. I had seen the same shoes on display and thought - oh hooker shoes. When I tried them on I realized they were actually librarian-hooker shoes. I love the look of juxtapositioning the stylistic elements of street walker and guardian of the Dewey Decimal system. I ended up buying that pair instead of the shoes I had picked out myself. Today the sales person did not really seem to know what I was looking for and brought out two additional pairs of shoes I did not like at all. I tried on one pair and told him that the other pair, which were probably four and a half inches high, were just too high. I thanked the man and told him that I was going to continue shopping but that the first pair was on my list. He asked me if I wanted to put them on hold and I didn’t have the heart to say no, so I put them on hold with no intention of buying them and headed back to Payless.

The same lady that told me about the buy one get one half off sale was the still there and the hootchie cootchie music was still playing. I tried on the shoes I had tried before. After trying on the Nordstrom shoes the silver heels seemed sturdy enough and not that really all that high. For the record they were $19. and were made in Vietnam, so if you reread this please mentally insert Vietnam and Vietnamese worker every time you see China and Chinese worker.  I headed home in my sturdy, "don't fuck with me" boots with my purchase in hand, still feeling more like and ugly American than a pretty bride.