Paean to living in a human filing cabinet

It's the day before Valentine's and the Taj Maheeb is vomiting pink. Every section of this uber-grocery-opolis offers a way to tempt your loved one. Even the home improvement section has little gift packages with hammers and wrenches. If I hadn't already hog-tied my husband into marriage I would be pretty stressed out right now staring down the bewildering gauntlet of pinkness trying to find the thing that exactly expresses my sentiments.

Instead, I plan to draw for him. My card will probably incorporate anthropomorphic vegetables and robots (my two favorite themes right now). The best thing about Valentine's Day when you're married is that he knows that robots and vegetables mean "I am humbled and blessed to be your wife." Plus, we're still broke.

Ironically though, we've been thinking about buying a house at our next duty station and then renting it out to another military family when we move. Somehow this works out to being cheaper than renting an apartment, and could actually earn us a profit when we sell the place later on. Imagine! It could be like setting up franchises, one in every state with a base. We could be state-sponsored slum lords! Frankly, the idea of a house freaks me out-- the separateness of it, the Responsibility. Having grass on all sides of you seems to indicate that you're capable of existing as an Independent Unit, that your shit is sufficiently together to merit distance from your neighbors.

With the exception of my parents' home, I have always lived stacked on top of and wedged in between others. Fights, footsteps, enthusiastic copulation, howling animals and babies, booming stereos-- it's all been only a thin layer of sheetrock and insulation away. But this closeness is also something of a comfort. Not only is an apartment almost by definition a temporary place to live, it's also part of a collective entity, something over which someone else is watching. Living collectively in a rented space is also an exercise in hope-- some day I will move out into something better, but for now I will do what I can to make this place, and these people, familiar.

I've read that in China, apartment and even dorm-style living is far more common and even preferable to owning a house. In a society that places so much emphasis on working for the betterment of the group, collective living must seem like a natural and comforting extension of that doctrine. Even in my own brief experience of hurricanes, I've taken some perverse comfort in the knowledge that whatever happens to my place happens to all of my neighbors' places as well, and that possibly our being built together might even protect us a little.

But before I go too far in romanticizing the apartment, let me be clear that I have had my share of what I call "Walden Pond moments." A Walden Pond moment is one in which you become so violently adverse to human company or the burdens of being part of society that you just want to say, "Fuck it. I'm taking my sleeping bag and my pocket knife and I'm going to go watch ants and talk to nobody for a year." A few of those moments, in brief:

*A rat the size of a chihuahua gnawed its way into my first apartment and sparked the first of my inter-species wars over a living space. Humane "sticky traps" with long, cat-like hair and little turds plastered to them were hurled into the middle of my living room, as though in disgust that I would use anything so puny to trap him. After four long conversations with my property manager in which I employed all of my threatening SAT vocab words, I was supplied with an old-fashioned spring-loaded not-fucking-around trap that was actually called The Ratinator. The Ratinator tasted blood at 4 a.m. one morning, but the rat actually fought the thing for at least five minutes, dragging it across the kitchen and slamming the whole aparatus repeatedly against the wall. I have new respect for the durability of the spinal cord.

* A serial rapist operated for several months in the same apartment complex, Shitheap Commons in case you're in the market, picking locks and attacking single women. Alongside the ads in the laundryroom for a "like-new leather couch!!! $100!!!" was a police artist's sketch of the attacker. So you could, you know, just ponder that while you're folding your whites.

* Someone went deer hunting with a long-range rifle one night in the greenbelt just outside the window of my last apartment, in the middle of the city. The cops came out, but rather than tromp through the foliage in search of an armed hunter, they yelled at him through a bullhorn. Had it been me with the bullhorn, our one-way conversation would have been markedly less cordial.

* A parade of less than stellar neighbors over the years who I've come to know only by their obnoxious habits: the Clydesdales (girls who stomped drunkenly up three flights of stairs in their clogs every night), Mr. O'Crap (who yelled "oh crap!" repeatedly at the top of his lungs when he played video games), the Sea Hag (a woman with scraggly gray hair down to her butt who so detested my mid-volume music that she would crank on her hot water whenever she heard my shower start up-- I did the same to her after a while), and Pumpkin Guy (a gone-to-seed frat guy who owned an orange cat named Pumpkin and would stand on in his doorway and bellow "Puuuuuuuumpkiiiiiin!!!" at all hours of the night).

This is all to say nothing of the various roommates with whom I shared apartments over the years, some of whom were so flagrantly evil that I actually broke out in hives from living with them.

Apartment living definitely has its flaws, but right now it's all I know. Buying a house is a big step, like moving from dating to marriage, and considering our nomadic lifestyle, it seems almost promiscuous to buy a house knowing you'll be moving out in a few years. But if it really is cheaper in the long run, and a "good investment decision" (whatever the hell that is), maybe I should keep an open mind.