determined to not put it back together the same way. Several months ago, on a day when the debt anxiety had flared up even more than usual, I arrived at the idea of moving to Lincoln, Nebraska. I’d been to Lincoln on a magazine assignment twice before, met some nice people, and found myself liking it enough to entertain the notion of moving there. But both times I’d discarded the idea of moving there the minute the wheels hit the tarmac at LaGuardia. Surely I’d never be able to live without twenty-four-hour take-out food and glitzy Russian martini bars. On this latest round of panic, however, I chewed on the idea for a while, decided that it was a good plan, and have pretty much continued to feel that way ever since. I can rent an apartment there for $300 a month. I can rent an entire house, if I want one, for $700. Full coverage health insurance will cost me $66 a month. Apparently, people in Nebraska also listen to NPR, and there are even places to live in Lincoln that have oak floors. Had I known that before, I might have skipped out on this New York thing altogether and spared myself the financial and psychological ordeal. But I’m kind of glad I didn’t know because I’m someone who has had a very, very good time here. I’m just leaving the party before the cops break it up.
C ARPET I S M UNGERS
Once, when I was desperately searching for an affordable apartment in New York City, I looked at a place that was gigantic by local standards. It had two bedrooms, a kitchen nook, a dishwasher, and a sweeping view of the East River. The building was staffed by twenty-four-hour doormen and had a running track and a garden on the roof. It rented for $400 a month. This was in a rental market where studio apartments rarely went for less than $1,100 a month, and it was unheard of to have sunlight let alone things like dishwashers and running tracks. I was in dire need of a place to live. I had precisely ten days to find something before I’d be forced to put my stuff in storage and sleep on a friend’s couch. But I did not rent the apartment. I did not for one minute entertain the possibility of living there. I did not even look in the closets, of which there were many. The reason is that the apartment had wall-to-wall carpet.
Carpet makes me want to kill myself. Wall-to-wall carpet anywhere other than offices, airplanes, and Holiday Inn lobbies sends me careening toward a kind of despair that can only be described as the feeling that might be experienced by a person who has made some monumental and irreversible life decision and realized, almost immediately after the fact, that it was an error of epic proportions. Carpet makes me feel the way the woman who married the multimillionaire stranger on national television must have felt when she was on the plane to the honeymoon in Maui, the $35,000 rock on her finger, and her possibly sociopathic husband next to her in first class. Carpet makes me feel the way I felt when I was twelve and “went out” with Stephen Mungers, a boy from homeroom who I barely knew, for a week. In seventh grade, “going out” signified nothing more than a mutual agreement that the term would be applied to the parties involved; no physical contact or verbal exchange other than “You wanna go out?” and “Okay” was required. And even though the situation was entirely reversible, I remember that week as an unprecedented and traumatic psychological jaunt into a self that was not my own. I had, in the context of seventh grade and the various ideas I’d developed about who I was, become “other” to my own self. I felt somehow that I had betrayed a basic premise of my existence. And although I was unsure exactly what that premise was, I specifically recall spending that week practicing the oboe with such concentration and nervous energy that I finally mastered a particularly arduous exercise and decided, with more certainty than has since accompanied more serious matters, that as long as I
C ARPET I S M UNGERS
Once, when I was desperately searching for an affordable apartment in New York City, I looked at a place that was gigantic by local standards. It had two bedrooms, a kitchen nook, a dishwasher, and a sweeping view of the East River. The building was staffed by twenty-four-hour doormen and had a running track and a garden on the roof. It rented for $400 a month. This was in a rental market where studio apartments rarely went for less than $1,100 a month, and it was unheard of to have sunlight let alone things like dishwashers and running tracks. I was in dire need of a place to live. I had precisely ten days to find something before I’d be forced to put my stuff in storage and sleep on a friend’s couch. But I did not rent the apartment. I did not for one minute entertain the possibility of living there. I did not even look in the closets, of which there were many. The reason is that the apartment had wall-to-wall carpet.
Carpet makes me want to kill myself. Wall-to-wall carpet anywhere other than offices, airplanes, and Holiday Inn lobbies sends me careening toward a kind of despair that can only be described as the feeling that might be experienced by a person who has made some monumental and irreversible life decision and realized, almost immediately after the fact, that it was an error of epic proportions. Carpet makes me feel the way the woman who married the multimillionaire stranger on national television must have felt when she was on the plane to the honeymoon in Maui, the $35,000 rock on her finger, and her possibly sociopathic husband next to her in first class. Carpet makes me feel the way I felt when I was twelve and “went out” with Stephen Mungers, a boy from homeroom who I barely knew, for a week. In seventh grade, “going out” signified nothing more than a mutual agreement that the term would be applied to the parties involved; no physical contact or verbal exchange other than “You wanna go out?” and “Okay” was required. And even though the situation was entirely reversible, I remember that week as an unprecedented and traumatic psychological jaunt into a self that was not my own. I had, in the context of seventh grade and the various ideas I’d developed about who I was, become “other” to my own self. I felt somehow that I had betrayed a basic premise of my existence. And although I was unsure exactly what that premise was, I specifically recall spending that week practicing the oboe with such concentration and nervous energy that I finally mastered a particularly arduous exercise and decided, with more certainty than has since accompanied more serious matters, that as long as I
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