space

am i up in tahoe for the last fully open weekend of the season?

no, i am here thinking about space.

not the final frontier. not the mars rovers. not the aborted dart mission. and certainly not seti. (although oddly enough, one of the bars in vail was named “bart and yeti’s”)

i’m thinking about space around us. j & s downstairs have bought a place in bernal and are moving out. which makes me the top dog in the apartment (or is that longest sucker?), the tenant with the most senority. now i’ll get all of the dancing girls and the fresh bread that comes with positions of such high stature. at least that’s what they tell me on tv, right? it’s the american dream!

actually, what’s interesting is the possibility of moving into their apartment downstairs. why would i want to move down a floor and no longer be on the top floor apartment giving up my sunny sunny views of bernal hill?

space.

they’ve got the only two bedroom apartment in the building. we visited and got a good look at the place today, and man, is it bigger. not only an extra bedroom bigger, but a bigger kitchen bigger. and a huge ass closet bigger. as if my closet office extended through and connected up with the hall closet. because that’s exactly what theirs does. wow.

suddenly instead of being cramped from too much stuff in too little space, we’d have an honest kitchen with a large nook, a bedroom that could just be a bedroom, a living room for living, and a whole other room that could be an office. or hold that glacier-sized drafting table. or the five thousand books we have in our house. and the vinyl. and the cd’s. and the buffalo head. and the giant squid.

wow.

so why not? i don’t know. i went down there, and i wasn’t BANG! excited about moving down there. it’s a little darker from being one floor down, but also, it’s just not quite as pretty as our place. we’ve got french doors between two of the rooms, whereas they’ve got big ugly solid doors there. they have twice as many kitchen cabinets, but ours have glass doors on them. their bathroom hutch is more functional but made of 70’s fugly-wood. they don’t have the beautiful wedgewood stove like i have.

malcolm gladwell would tell me, blink-style, to trust my gut and not move in. on the other hand he also talks about where your gut reaction might be wrong and you need to work around it.

but the space! i have to remember that now hmc’s finally convinced me that we have too much stuff and that we really do need to rent a storage space, that the extra bedroom is extra space for living and not for keeping more crap. (yes, i know that we shouldn’t need that. with all that storage in the garage, who needs an extra storage space as well? oh yeah, you try stuffing two apartments’ worth of crap from two different cities back into one apartment and see how you like it. and don’t burp. because that’d be rude.)

inevitably you think of creature comforts, and the lion who says, “we need space to live! we need space to feel that we are part of the world and not a kind of piece of object in a box!”

but what if it’s a really pretty sunny box?

Posted at April 17, 2005 12:45 AM