Fine Art

I'm very concerned about my carbon footprint.

If I'm not around to do it, I remind Tiffany to crawl under our desk and behind our TV to turn off our surge strips when we're not using all the things that are plugged into them. When our sink had a drip in one of our previous apartments, I kept a pitcher underneath it at all times and drank only that water. Sometimes I turn out the lights on Tiffany when she's still in a room.

But. I enabled an enormous waste of paper the other night when our friends Bobby and Teresa came over with their children, Julia, Peter, and Baby Sandro.

We didn't have time to pick up taste-treats or toys like we usually do. They had been waiting for us so long they were about to be kicked out of the Natural History Museum.

So when Tiffany and I got home, we ran around sweeping our clutter underneath things, looking for anything kid-friendly. I eyed a set of Left, Right, Center dice but decided they were too close to swallowable-size.

"Where are the crayons we bought?" I shrieked. "And paper! Lots of paper!"

Tiffany surfaced from somewhere deep in the closet with a plastic baggy of crayons. The box apparently had been destroyed when Peter and Julia last visited.

They're such good kids they don't need to be entertained, really. But when Peter started throwing our stability ball around the apartment, King-Kong style, we pulled out the crayons and a stack of brand-new printer paper.

"Can I have another piece?" Peter asked after a few swipes of blue.

I handed him one.

"And me too, please," Julia called, sing-song style, as she taped an abstract-style rainbow to our bathroom door.

"Maybe they should use the back of the paper," Tiffany whispered to me as I went for more sheets.

I gave her a half-hearted nod.

But when I suggested as much to Julia, she pointed out that when we hang the pictures on our walls, only one side can be seen.

And since she was exactly right, I kept passing out paper, without a second-thought, until all of our doors were covered in crayon-drawings.

Next time I'll be prepared, though. I'll tell Julia I have a better idea:

Reversible art.

Guggen-heights

I'm not afraid of heights except when I'm somewhere that's up really high in the air. When I was little, I wasn't afraid of heights even then. I was afraid of elevators. I didn't trust them to stop themselves, and so I took the stairs--often dragging the rest of my family or at least one member with me--no matter how tall our destination.

My brother has always been afraid of heights and once stopped me from looking out at the top of a Look-Out we had summited together when we were small children.

"Get back, Rebecca!" he cried, throwing his arm to block me from approaching the safety railing. We went back down again without seeing anything.

I was reminded of this the other night at the Guggenheim. I'd never been there, and the spiraling, ascending design really was beautiful until I looked over the edge at the glittering gala-attendees below. After that it was terrifying. I saw myself plummeting the several stories to my death amid silver tray-laden servers passing chicken satay on sticks.

"Get back!" I cried, throwing my arm to block Tiffany and Rob from approaching the curved railing. I understood my brother's arm from so many years ago. If you love people, a fear of heights is like a blanket you can't help but throw over them to prevent them from seeing anything. It's why I'll never sky-dive. And why Tiffany never will either.

I wanted to laugh at myself, but I didn't see anything funny about our altitude. So I just took Tiffany's hand in my sweaty palm and we three walked on together.

The Notebook (lesbian-wedding edition)

The first time Tiffany and I had a moment to think about our wedding after we got engaged came high up in the air on a plane, somewhere between New York and Miami. Everything about the ring on her finger was still new. That day, we took pictures of her left hand holding a coffee cup at breakfast, a beer bottle at the bar, and a pencil while she studied. We tried to obscure the rubber band she had to wrap around the ring to make it fit (the ring I "borrowed" from Tiffany to use as a model was not one she wore on her ring finger. Apparently it was a thumb-ring for a giant).

Anyway, even though for years getting engaged felt like the Big Thing, now the Big Thing is the Wedding, and we have to plan one. We brought a notebook on our Christmas holiday to jot down our ideas, in case we had any.

"So should we talk about the wedding?" Tiffany asked shortly after take-off.

"Sure, I was thinking..."

"WAIT!"

I looked at her, startled.

"Maybe we should write this down in the notebook. Should we get the notebook? I think we should get the notebook. Can you get the notebook?"

I got the notebook.

Now that we're a little further down the line in our wedding planning (translation: we've planned NOTHING but have talked an awful lot about many things), I've come to appreciate the Notebook. As far as I can tell, it's mainly helpful in that it allows us to cross out what we've written down after we realize how incredibly affordable our ideas are for multimillionaires.

O-M-Double-G-D, It's a Cat

Did I tell you about our cat?

Tiffany and I live in an apartment where pets are not allowed. It is our greatest sadness, which is why I was so happy one day to open the curtain of our patio door to find a beautiful black and white cat staring in at me from outside.

"O-M-Double-G-D, it's a cat," I whispered to myself, using my great powers of deduction (O-M-Double-G-D is oh-my-good-god-damn for anyone who's interested).

I backed away slowly so as not to startle it and then sprinted the 20 feet between me and the bathroom where Tiffany was showering.

"Tiffany!" I yelled. "There's a cat on our balcony!"

Then I loved Tiffany a little more because her first response was not:

"What the hell are you talking about?"

It was:

"Oh my god! We have a cat! Get it some milk!"

I ran into the kitchen and filled a small bowl with milk. When I ran back to the patio, the cat peered at me, and then, when I opened the door, darted away, over the wall that divides our patio from our neighbor's and into an open sliding door.

My great powers of deduction only go so far. Because we've never seen our neighbor and he/she/they has/have nothing on his/her/their patio (not even twinkly lights!) I did not consider that he/she/they might own a cat. Invisible neighbors don't have pets.

"Oh," I said to myself. "It's someone else's cat."

And then I drank my saucer of milk and went back to report the sad news.

In the Closet

This is the story of how Tiffany and I nearly paid $300 for a pair of shelves in our closet. Here's what happened:

We live in a very small apartment. Surprisingly, we have a lot of storage space, but most of it is accessible only with a nine-foot ladder that the tenants of the building share. The thought of having to climb to the top of aforementioned ladder every time I wanted a pair of jeans or a sweater was not appealing. So after weeks of living out of boxes...

(Okay, fine, we're still living out of some boxes)

...we decided we simply had to have shelves in our closet to accompany the bar for our hanging clothes. Tiffany dreamed of Perfect Shelves. In fact, I think she dreamed of a Custom-Built Closet because each day she came home with some more elaborate shelf system that required a set of tracks, lots of screws, and a Stud Finder, which at first I thought was an electric shaver.

After several failed attempts and returns of products, we asked a handyman to appraise our project. He quoted us a hundred bucks for labor. We nodded our heads. We had $100 worth of spackling to do to cover up the holes we'd already made, so this seemed reasonable. When he quoted us $200 for material, I continued to nod, but inside I was shaking my head vigorously from left to right.

"I don't feel good about this," I whispered to Tiffany after we had closed the door on our handyman with a tentative agreement.

"Me neither."

If we were still living in San Francisco, away from the wise counsel of our family, we may have paid that absurd amount of money. But when our New York uncles came over, Rob began to shake his head as soon as we said "handyman."

He told us what we needed, and it pretty much boiled down to:

1) A long piece of wood
2) A handful of nails

Our shelves cost us about $50 bucks. Labor was free, obviously, although it took its toll.

One of our shelves was slightly longer than the other (It's possible the scary-looking man at the hardware store who cut our wood hated us because we looked like we were enjoying life) and our walls are crooked. Before we figured that out, I blamed Tiffany for measuring wrong.

Also, we didn't take our hanging clothes out of the closet to build our shelves, so we were highly irritated with each other, sweating and smushed in among my work suits and Tiffany's going-out dresses, holding nine-foot pieces of wood above our head in a terrible home-improvement version of Twister.

When it finally dawned on us to consider how funny we looked, we started laughing, which made holding the nine foot pieces of wood all the more difficult.

"You should have seen us," I told Rob the next week as we bragged about our work over dinner. "We looked like..."

I paused. Everyone stared at me expectantly.

"Well, you know, we really looked exactly like two lesbians in a tiny closet!"

Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep... Carefully

Tiffany and I lucked out with our new apartment. It's in a great neighborhood; it's got lots of great light. Oh yeah, and it's two stories.

Technically, the second story is our bed, but, because we have a set of stairs (attached to a ladder though they may be), I think that counts.

Back when we were looking for places, we got so competitive with our competition--other potential tenants--that we started carrying around blank checks and entire credit reports in order to be prepared if we wanted to put in an application.

When we saw this apartment, a middle-aged woman was seeing it at the same time. I was ready to hip-check her out the door while we applied, but she took one look at the ladder in the bedroom and spun on her heel.

"Oh no," she said, throwing up her hands. "I'm too old for this. It's all yours, girls."

(It's a good thing Tiffany and I don't look as old as we are.)

We could have put our bed underneath the loft space like the old tenants did, but having it upstairs means we get to have a second bedroom/office underneath. And when I say second bedroom/office, I mean a space big enough for our dresser, a desk, and a twin air mattress for whoever doesn't fit on our couch in the living room. But this is way more space than we've had in the past. So be it if we sleep floating in the air on a piece of plywood.

Anyway, so far it's working out. I've only hit my head once, sitting up too far, too fast. And the loft reminds us how much we love each other. Or maybe it's how much we'd rather not have to go to the emergency room.

Every time one of us gets out of bed in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, the other whispers:

"Be careful."

These Boots Were Made for...Not Me

I'm not ashamed to admit I'm not a good shopper. But even I'm embarrassed at how many pairs of rain/snow boots I've bought and returned in the last few months.

"Just get the tall rubber boots everyone else has," my friend Teresa keeps telling me.

But I can't bring myself to do that. I actually had a pair of the tall rubber boots everyone else has--10 years ago. They were as yellow as a bathtub duck, and I wore them exactly twice. Just long enough to figure out I don't like the suction cup-y feel of tall rubber boots.

I haven't needed rain/snow boots in a long time. It never rained in Los Angeles where Tiffany and I first moved together as a couple. And it rarely rained in San Francisco. But since we've been back in New York, already I'm fed up of stepping in puddles, sitting at my desk with soggy pant legs and stuffing my running shoes with newspaper when I get home at the end of the day. In fact, I was fed up with it the first time it happened, the day we pulled our U-Haul into Teresa and Bobby's driveway in August.

I bought a pair of boots right away. When I tried them on for Teresa and Tiffany later, they covered their mouths in horror at the puffy monstrosities on my feet.

"Peter loved them," I said defensively.

"Peter is two," Tiffany pointed out. "And a boy."

My dilemma is this: I can't bear the thought of buying one pair of boots for the rain and one pair of boots for the snow, but in trying to find something that works for both, I keep coming home with shoewear certified for the Olympic ski team.

I put my latest pair on recently with a pair of running tights and Tiffany refused to let me out of the house--to do laundry!

"I guess they are a little ridiculous," I said, rummaging around in my wallet for the receipt, which I had not dared throw away. "Maybe if we lived in Alaska..."