Saturday, January 15, 2011

Baby Call

Otterbot naps valiantly despite his father's heedless baritone phone conversation and the neighbor's hateful dog cursing God again for its very existence. In other words, I am at an uneasy peace with the world.

I feel like I'm slowly waking up from the fever dream of the first two and half months of my son's life to discover this wonderful, bright-eyed little man who makes smiling a full body wriggly experience and whose first proto-words, lilting little syllables really, are sometimes more satisfying than actual conversations I've had. If this blog dissolves into nothing more than a catalog of the cute things he does, I'll still consider it worth the effort. An example: I'm having trouble getting him to concentrate on eating because he wants to take frequent breaks to blast his sunshine smile up at me and buck his chin with a little "Ugh?" It feels exactly like he's cluing me in to a private joke between us, and I don't even mind that it involves a mouthful of milk dumped down my shirt every time. I have to laugh with him.

This is, I should note, is a complete 180-degree turn from the fried, shaky, stuffing-hanging-out way I felt not long ago. Medication and rest are wonderful things, but also, if you'll recall, I have the World's Best Baby and he has learned to do things like survive his parents' house hunting trips and nap in difficult circumstances.

Just now I'm supposed to be gearing up for a trip to the commissary, which constitutes my Daily Escape, a sanity-saving measure where I plan excuses to venture out into the world by myself for brief errands. Sometimes it's wonderful and I return to a quiet house, Pants and Otter peacefully cooing at each other, or napping. Other times I return to the swirling chaos of Otter's sudden realization that I am GONE, and that is not OK. The whole enterprise is weird to me-- I need these escapes but I'm increasingly reluctant to take them. It feels like I'm leaving a leg behind or something, and I'm surprised the outside world doesn't stare in horror at me in my amputated state. That makes no sense. Welcome to my new logic.


Thursday, January 13, 2011

Ponies, meth, shootings, and hoarders: Homes Priced to MOVE!

Pop quiz:

Does the history of a house matter when it's changing hands?

Take a minute before you answer and allow me to elucidate. I am no stranger to the colorful offerings of the ever-fluctuating real estate market. When Pants and I were newly-weds, we considered buying a house at one of our duty stations near Texas's swampy southern toes, but an afternoon spent viewing the prospects in our price range uncovered a house with a converted garage living room that was formerly home to miniature ponies who pissed freely on its indoor-outdoor carpeting, a fact which became abundantly clear immediately upon entering the house because the furnace was set to high. It also had a Cheeto-orange bathroom and a blood red kitchen. We also checked out a home whose resident had just died, and all the labels for his extensive library were still on the walls and a lonely cat prowled the home's perimeter yowling broken-heartedly. Then we saw a house with bullet holes across the front. We ended up renting a weird little place we called Frankenhouse, whose many dated upgrades included a pull down projector screen in the living room (my friend Antoinette piped up, "For your home snuff films! Popcorn anyone?") and a broken down tractor and dump truck in the backyard, which we laced with CHristmas lights. Frankenhouse was a great time in life for us, but thank God we didn't own the place or I'd be telling you about its total lack of insulation and the meth head next door.

Cut now to nearly four years later, post-(I hope)-housing market crisis. We managed to avoid calamity by renting again, though that house will now be forever known as the Drive-by House after my shitty neighbors (again with the meth! sheesh) pissed someone off enough to draw late-night gunfire, and then by moving onto base housing. We're leaving California this spring for a speck on the map of Nevada, a place where the financial boom and bust evidently marked the landscape quite profoundly. Pockets of half-finished McMansion neighborhoods abound and I've had to become conversant in the meanings of a variety of warning stickers slapped on outside windows-- this one's already foreclosed, these tenants have a notice to leave, this one has toxic mold.

A few other things I've learned: when people started getting behind in their payments and figured they'd lose the house anyway, many of them just walked away. Sometimes squatters moved in, as with one house we saw on a golf course, whose entire upstairs was painted blood red and festooned with lame "I'm so high" graffiti. Phrases like, "You're mind [sic] is like an umbrella, it only works when it's OPEN" and "WE FEAR CHANGE" and "Everything is HUMMING." Profound observations on the human condition notwithstanding, the house looked just like its neighbors on the outside, which is to say, brand new but somehow exhausted too.

Is that flaky? To assign human-like values and emotions to structures? Because check this out: one of the houses we still might be interested in was home to hoarders, who utterly trashed the inside with so much stuff that an industrial dumpster had to be brought in to clean it out. The story goes that they died within a month of each other, this couple, and then their son and sole heir came along with a group of pals, broke in and ransacked the place (though how you could telling ransacking from general living conditions I'm not sure), stole a gun collection and a classic car, and then headed out to California to MURDER SOMEONE AND END UP IN PRISON. Plus, the house gets very little natural light, which I'm clinging to as my main objection, "bad karma" not being an easy one to defend. Pants and the county believe in the power of rejuvenation-- a generous floor replacement allowance is being built into the selling price, which is well below market value in a lovely neighborhood.

This is not our only option. We're involved in another prospect which I'm praying fervently will turn in our favor, but I'm writing about this because I need to see the words in print and convince myself that that way they'll be out of my head. Plus, something about this font makes crazy thoughts seem less so. The fact is, house hunting terrifies me and makes me sad. It's a lot of risk to take on-- the amount of risk in any proposition, I believe, is directly proportional to the amount of times you have to sign your name, and thus far I've signed mine so many times that I'm starting to think it doesn't make good visual sense. The "k" in my last name trips up the line somehow, and each time I sign I try to iron that out. Risk, commitment, loss. It all gives me the creeps, and the shadows of all these awful stories seem soaked into the walls.

But all of this could be because it's a small town in the dead of winter we're looking at, desperately small, which always gave the creeps to begin with, having read too much Stephen King at an impressionable age. I have to wrap this up, and can't think of an elegant literary way to do it-- my baby has violent hiccups and Pants and I need to go over to the legal office to sign more things and dig ourselves deeper into this next stage of our lives.

Saturday, January 01, 2011

Handlebar

Our three-month-old son is asleep at long last and my husband has just walked into the kitchen to show me how he has shaven his holiday beard, we call it "Freedom Beard," into a handlebar mustache. To enhance the effect, he has donned a cowboy hat and refuses to smile, ducking the hat's broad brim to hide his face until he can again compose it into chiseled seriousness. He fails, I take pictures.

He's shaving Freedom Beard well before the end of Christmas leave because we're headed out to Nevada on Monday to look at houses in our next duty station. A seven-hour drive. I'm trying to imagine this from our baby boy's perspective and I'm failing to conjure scenarios that don't end in howls of protest. He's a stellar baby-- let me pause to rhapsodize:

Butter Bean, Little Pants, Buddy Bear, Otter Bot, Mr. Long Shanks. Our child is doomed to forever guess which appellation we'll saddle him with next. I try and fail every day to name all of his virtues-- his dark, playful gray-blue eyes, his perfectly shaped head, his ridiculously long legs, his impish smile. He is patient and clever and already realizes how a well-timed fart can change the direction of nearly any interaction. He is, I am convinced, the World's Best Baby.

I just don't really want to subject him to a week-long trip to a tiny desert town where he'll stay in some weird bachelor quarters room in some weird crib. I don't want to imagine those bedtimes, or the weird places I'll have to whip out a boob and feed him. Incidentally, I'm collecting awkward breast-feeding situations, and so far the one that takes the cake is the sales desk at the Subaru dealership in Bakersfield where I attempted to sign my name to a car loan with only a blue flannel blanket printed with tiny dogs standing between a very tired salesman and my right boob.

Actually that's a whole story in itself, one that deserves to be longer-- the Honda and I are about to part ways. I'll send it off sometime in the next two weeks to a man who's paying $700 over our original asking price to fend off all the other offers on Craigslist and buy it for his college-age son. This after the aforementioned Subaru dealer told me I couldn't sell it for parts. Ha!

This post is rambly and poor. If I were still Writing Every Day and calling it my primary job, I would ditch this as a warm-up and move on to better drafts, but for now I'm exhausted and want to take advantage of the World's Best Baby's peaceful slumber and pay some attention to this weirdo with the mustache...