Don't get me wrong, I love my house. I am especially proud of all the things that I have been able to fix, create, paint and repair in the eight and a half years that we have lived here. It seems that I acquire some new power tool with each passing year as the situation or project demands. I'm a very hands-on homeowner.
Still, I find myself periodically pining for a new apartment. I know that this means the horror of moving. Boxing my life up at this point would include all the clothes, toys, books, technology and photo albums that three people and a dog can possibly latch onto over the course of a decade. It is certainly enough to give me pause. But then I move past that to the memories of standing in a bare room, imagining my stuff in various arrangements and permutations. Would that make a good office, or a guest room? Apartments require you to think about the limits of your life and your stuff. Living in a house has made us lazy. We don't have to edit our stuff. We just box up the extra stuff and shove it in the basement, garage, or attic. There are whole lives in storage. There is no need to limit ourselves to just one bobble-head. We can have a dozen on display at any time.
When I was in college, I bounced back and forth from living by myself and living with room mates. I liked the freedom of living alone - no one to criticize my taste in TV dinners and no lengthy discussions about which David Cronenberg poster goes in the hallway. That same freedom was periodically outweighed by the need for some kind of feedback. I was pretty lucky with room mates. I only had one that I just couldn't stand. Four of us shared a rambling townhouse near campus, and three of us were just fine eating corn beef hash with our beer. The fourth was a little too conscientious for us to take. He wanted us to join the food co-op and get all our vegetables once a month in these great huge cardboard boxes. He also had a habit of sitting naked on his bed at odd hours of the day, strumming his guitar - with the door standing wide open. The three of us agreed that we could absorb the extra rent if we didn't have to have naked soybean boy strumming in one of the bedrooms, so we gave him the heave (long before Puck was tossed from "The Real World.")
Most of the rest of the time, I was living with my pal Joe. Joe and I shared the same aesthetics: beer in the refrigerator, and you should be able to see the television from any point on the living room floor. Joe and I shared three different apartments. Each one was just a little bit nicer than the last. Whenever we moved in, we paid our damage deposit with the understanding that we fully intended to spend that money on the damage we would inflict over the course of the lease. When we walked into a new apartment, our first question was: How hard is it going to be to get the Battlezone game in here?
My wife rescued me from all of that. Once I moved out to California, we lived in only two apartments before we made the big leap to home ownership. We moved out of the first one because we needed room for her stuff and my stuff. We bought a house because we understood that becoming parents would mean a geometric progression in the amount of stuff that would fall into our domain. Now we periodically end up storing things for other single folks who just don't have enough room in their one bedroom apartments. Life can be so ironical, sometimes.
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