The Unbearable Lightness of the Return

I like returning things. It brings me an enormous sense of relief and almost, dare I say it, a high. This is partly due to the fact that I'm cheap. Spending money makes me nervous. But the true underlying impetus is that I get off on feeling unfettered. I'm a freedom junkie with an almost physiological need to purge. My shopping trips are roundtrip: I almost never escape a purchasing excursion without a return trip scheduled for the not-too-distant future.

My mother is a bit of a hoarder. To this day, she won't let anyone into the basement as it's so full of stuff. She lives in a three bedroom house with a full footprint basement and every room is at saturation point. She's definitely not a full-blown hoarder. Nothing to Oprah-expose levels or anything like that. But the woman certainly clings to things and feels physical stress at parting with even old magazines or well-worn clothes.

It doesn't take more than a semester of Psych 101 to draw the connection here. Many of us feel compelled to remake ourselves in the inverse image of our parents, and I am no exception. Material possessions equal burdens. So I unburden myself.

I am in the process of buying a wee house. Not a small house, mind you. A wee house; an almost midget house weighing in at a mighty 810 square feet on the main floor with additional basement space. I'm beyond thrilled about this, yet cautiously thrilled as our inspection won't happen until tomorrow. It's so cute you could puke at the cuteness. It's hobbit meets hello kitty with all the class and sass of old Hollywood and art deco. It's both old and moderne--a cozy hidey hole perfectly proportioned with curves in all the right places. And soon it will be mine!

But as mentioned, I'm a compulsive returner. So what am I doing? I'm continuing to scout the house ads every day, just to torture myself. Is there anything else? What else is out there? I feel a manic need to compare and contrast. Just in case. My itchy trigger finger longs to release, daring me to back out, to run before it's too late. But like many a well-chosen Target purchase before it, my gut tells me this house is staying with me. It's already chiseling out a little castle-shaped hole in my heart.

And if we buy it, if we really truly buy it, I'm already excited about all the purging of my possessions I'll get to do before we move in. A small house demands disciplined streamlining of objects. I can hardly wait!

Que sera sera

Whatever will beeeee, will beeeee.

Or at least that's what I'm telling myself. Over and over. As I rock back and forth. Baaack and forth.

We lost out on the house we bid on. Bid on, and, I might add, shelled out four hundred dollars for an inspection on. And wasted god only knows how much psychic energy on. Bah. Apparently some fucker paid cash and offered more than us. I hope they get mauled by a bear.

The hippie/spiritualist in me says "it wasn't meant to be." The really bat-shit crazy superstitious freak in me says, "you offered a number comprised entirely of threes and sevens and there were 13 offers. What did you expect?"

Does anyone know what the fuck I'm talking about? This is what happens when you're the only one of your friends who attended Sunday school. You can take the girl out of the church, but you can't take the church out of the girl.

So back on the horse or bike (neither of which I can operate, I should point out). Tomorrow is another day.

What Brown Can Do For You

I'm dead serious about chocolate. I don't fuck around. When it comes to general sugar I'll eat just about anything, from Necco wafers to peeps. I'll even down a stale marshmallow circus peanut if I'm desperate. But for chocolate, I have standards. I won't eat a Hershey bar, for example, and Snickers are taken only grudgingly. And while I might scarf down Halloween candy at a friend's house or from the front desk at work I certainly won't buy most mass-manufactured chocolate.

I like the good stuff. High quality, well-sourced, local, organic and fair trade if possible. 3400 Phinney and Theo's, Fran's, oh my. Or Vosges from Chicago. Or Dagoba and the sinful semi-sweet ultra dark bars from the co-op. Dear Lord.

I was just reading about how Seattle's Fran's Chocolates (a.k.a. "The Best Overall Chocolateir in the United States" according to the "Book of Chocolates" and more importantly, yours truly) is opening another shop in the belly of the new Four Seasons Hotel. Sure, I'm excited about this, but I'm also still smarting from my last visit to Fran's.

You can buy their gold bars all over the city, but to get their coconut gold bars, which are basically like crack to me, you have to actually drive to one of their retail outlets. Unfortunately, they hire what appears to be the slowest, most incompetent work force I may have ever encountered in a retail environment. Everyone who works there is frail, skinny and scared-looking and moves at a snail's pace, which are not attributes I typically associate with chocolate consumption.

Shit, if I worked around chocolate I would be ecstatic. I'd probably be about 50 pounds heavier, but I'd look like I was in the throes of an orgasm and greet each customer with manic energy and joy. I would move at a blur, slowed only momentarily to throw back a shot of hot cocoa between raucous bursts of laughter. How can someone look nervous and pinched around chocolate? Did chocolate beat you as a child? Does chocolate yell at you? No, my friends, chocolate only gives. Gives joy, gives pleasure, gives cellulite dimples to your ever-widening thighs, but by god it gives.

So there I was at Fran's, standing in line with my coconut gold bars, my mouth filling with drool, when I witnessed what can only be described as a new level of inneficiency playing out before me. There were maybe 15 people in the store, roughly ten of whom were, like myself, just trying to purchase items they could grab from the store shelves. The other five people were purchasing boxed chocolate. There were four employees.

Two of the employees, looking as if they might break at any minute, were sloooooowly and deliberately packing chocolates one by one for two of the customers who were picking individual chocolates. One of the employees was sloooooooooooowly and deliberately wrapping a box of chocolates and the fourth employee, who I assumed was the manager, looking very much like a praying mantis but without the sex appeal, was talking to a customer. No one was at the register. No one was ringing up the ten of us who just needed something rung up. This went on for 15 minutes.

By the end, I was literally sweating, I was so angry. I am horribly offended by innefficiency, to be sure, but this was amazing. I almost expected people to jump out and announce we were on Candid Camera or something--such was the ridiculousness of the situation. Finally, after loudly suggesting someone actually man the register, to the murmured agreement from my fellow patrons, I screamed "this is ridiculous!" threw my gold bars onto the counter and stormed out.

I haven't been back.

I miss my candy, though. I'm not willing to punish myself by living a gold-bar free life for the sake of driving home a point. But I'm pissed. So what's a girl to do? Slink back and admit defeat? Force feed the anorexic bitches running the place until they speed up? Complain directly to the company? I want my motherfucking coconut gold bar!

All Penned in and Nowhere to Go

My boss came in at 10:20 this morning, left for lunch at 11:30 and still isn't back at 1:48. This is normal. The guy is never here. He might be looking for another job. Lord knows I am. But the question remains- will my next job be any better than this one? Will I ever be happy working for someone else?

I was talking to knitsybitsycycler yesterday about how we're part of a whole generation rife with creative people who are stuck in office environments where they fundamentally don't belong. These are people who have taken cross-trained artistic abilities to a new level-they're often irritatingly talented in a whole pantheon of disciplines, with gifts in painting, drawing, photography, design, writing, music and general crafts. And they're not doing any of these things. They're sitting, usually in a cubicle, in some warehouse like environment where they are churning out uninspiring crap that doesn't matter for people who don't appreciate them. Don't get me wrong, I don't think most people enjoy the modern job market, whether or not they have artistic tendencies. But for those who do, I think the pain is taken to a new level, an uber pain if you will.

I told knitsybitsy that we're like veal cattle-young and semi-maleable big-eyed calfs penned into our little boxes, where our muscles atrophy, our coats lose their luster and our bleating becomes softer and softer until we finally go quiet.

This is not ok, people.

The worst thing for me is I have no solutions. I like to think of myself as a fairly skilled strategist but I have beaten my head against this issue until it was nothing but a mass of emotional scar tissue and I can tell you I've got nuthin'. Or rather, I have some ideas but they all scare me and the last time I up and quit to go out on my own I started crapping myself and was diagnosed with a chronic disease.

What I do know, however, what I'm sure of, is that we can't stop bleating. It might sound like just so much whining to the untrained ear but I am set on this point- keep bleating. Keep talking. Keep screaming until your voice is strained and hoarse but don't go quiet. Beat on the wall with sticks if you must-just keep making noise. Don't quietly accept this shit and tell yourself that this is just how things are. Nothing good has come in this world by just accepting things. Change comes from unrest and agitation.

So agitate.

Gimme Shelter

By nature I'm a nester. And my nesting impulses have, as of late, swung into overdrive. These days I'm often found in the park, hopping quietly with twigs hanging from my beak, my feathers ruffling in the wind. Or up in a tree, regurgitating vole bones and fur into little pellets.

Or I'm just looking for houses. And thinking about houses. All. The. Time. I'm obsessed. It all started when HombreLibre regained full employment after a four month stint of spending even more time at the corner coffee shop. The second he got work a little light flipped on in my head and a little voice started providing non-stop fantasy scenes of glossy technicolor homeownership, with all the good bits and none of the hassle.

It isn't a space issue. Our apartment is huge. It isn't where we live, because I can biasedly say we're in the best neighborhood in the city right now. And we love our neighbors, despite their tendency to play Rock Band above our heads for hours at a time. It's just....some intangible desire to own a place, to have it as your very own, your preciousssssssss. And i've also found that I cannot sleep with anyone walking above my head, a lesson I have been fortunately spared until this, my first first-floor apartment.

I think it's a natural human impulse, or at least I'm telling myself that. I bet even cro-magnon man fell prey to such an emotional pull. He probably wanted a cave in a nice neighborhood with good access to tool shops and fire pits. Or some shit.

My issue with the house hunt, of course, is that Seattle is so bloody expensive it's hard to not get jaded and give up, or as I'm wont to do-throw fits. We went out on Saturday to poke around and the hunt devolved, as usual into me going quiet and sullen followed by a little hysterical rant about how "impossible this is and how are we going to do this and where do these people get all their money, the fuckers!" At one point I was shaking my fist at a row of Craftsman bungalows screaming "Give me your house! Give me your houuuuuuuuse!"

Shortly after the feeling sorry for myself bit, I also typically sink into a deeper pit of sorrow where I extrapolate into the greater unfairness of the economic system, the plight of the middle class, the yoke on the necks of the poor and how I am actually so priveleged and should just shut up, give away everything I have and dedicate my life to helping others.

Then I nap. And usually wake feeling better.

Rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat. I'm a veritable barrel of laughs, I am.

This will undoubtedly go on for several months, until such time as we actually put an offer on a house. And then I'll find something else to obsess and fret over. But in the meantime, if you catch me with a glazed look, I'm probably looking at house porn.

In the Belly of the Bat

I work in a building that is undergoing a remodeling facelift at present, and as a result is wrapped up like Britney Spears in psych ward wear. It's about that charming, too. My office is missing its windows and is currently host to a plastic-wrapped plywood wall with a little door cut into it. If I were nine, I would think that was pretty sweet, and you'd probaby find me reading comics out there during lunch. But being the old and semi-arthritic 29-year-old I am, I mostly regard the wee door with contempt as it's repeatedly flung open to allow the construction workers passage. So I simply sit, huddled over my space heater, clutching my cup of tea and try to channel the inspiration to edit another semi-literate article or answer another email about the rules of logo placement.

It's the first floor that really does me in, however. As charming as it is to stroll the halls of the now windowless second and third floors, I can somehow tune out the cave-like feeling that lingers; but the first floor is something altogether more sinister. The entry to our building now looks almost exactly like a bunker, but with less head room. I have to resist putting on a pith helmet and launching into my Winston Churchill impersonation as I traverse the passage, muttering "get Franklin on the phone. More victory garden propaganda posters, stat!"

And then there's the conference rooms, which have eschewed the clear plastic covering in favor of what appears to be black Hefty bags stretched over plywood. It's so unbelievably ghetto looking it's not even funny. I've seen more tasteful makeshift walls in Tijuana. I spent this Monday's cruelly-early morning meeting writing goth poetry about being in the belly of a bat as I sat through the minutes in that frigid, tar-colored pit of despair.

But it's not all bad. When I leave at night, blinking mole-like in the light I feel buoyed to even breathe the outside air and bask in the elements. And I have pleasant flashback memories of my days working in the dark room, huffing chemicals and listening to Elliott Smith with Churpita. It could be worse.