Month: April 2006

Even though I know I’m a bit nomadic, from time to time I still entertain the fantasy of owning a home of my own someday. Of course, my vision of owning a home is a fusion of various thoughts I have about mobility, thriftiness, craftsmanship, ecological worries, and an aversion to suburbia. Pretty much, that leaves me salivating over fantasies of tiny, prefab, loft-like houses that can be dropped in unusual places. This page of teeny houses, for instance, makes me tremble with delight.

I consistently forget to jot down these various house kits that catch my fancy, so I finally went on a hunt this evening to find links to various projects that have caught my eye over the years. (Most of what I found came from Treehugger and Max at lotsofco.org.) My favorites:

• The Wee House is definitely a favorite — teeny, sleek, and flexible

• The miniHome is not just sexy, but it also seems to consider the cost and land-use issues for a li’l prefab house, as this Treehugger post notes

• The various schemes from BlueSky Mod are also magically delicious, but sadly they don’t show as much of them on the web site as I would like

• These groovy Floating Homes from Germany

  rock me

• The Micro Compact Home is lovely and tiny, especially in this idea for a tree village made of of the little cubes attached to vertical supports

• The Zenkaya would be delightful for a little warm-weather getaway somewhere

• I love the Boase concept from Studio Force4, which I first read about in Metropolis a while back — a cluster of sort-of-treehouses built into groves that actually decontaminate polluted soil

• The Flatpak House is a great idea for beautiful little modular houses, but the website is a bit of a flash-intensive horror

• The Loftcube is sexy and futuristic, but a bit too posh all in all

• A few different models from the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company, especially the XT house, seem really darling

Where does the time go? Another one of those anxious e-mails from Mom reminded me that my posting has slacked off once again, and the question of whether or not I’m still alive has once more come up. Yes, I live. Life is a seemingly endless cycle of work, dentist appointments, and errands, but I live nevertheless.

As much as I adore Teen Dentist and hate the idea that I’ll be passed onto another DDS-in-training when he graduates in a couple of weeks, I am sick to fucking death of going to the dentist once or twice a week after work. The clinic at NYU only doles out appointments in two-hour blocks, so something complicated like root canal can’t be done in one marathon sitting. That means that not only do I get drilled and filled over and over again, but then I also lose a couple of days afterward feeling crummy from all the lingering discomfort. Zero fun. (Plus, I’m pretty sure I won’t be passed on to the other super-cute dental student so I won’t even have that small bright spot to cheer me up.)

Work is work, of course. Work is also any and all of my assorted part-time jobs and freelance obligations, so I lose giant chunks of time just hauling ass from one end of the city to another when I’d rather sit in one place and concentrate for an effective amount of time on each of my projects.

Not everything sucks, though. Special Agent Josh continues to keep me from descending into full-on workaholic hermit mode, and that’s good for both my overall morale and the relative cleanliness of my apartment, which would surely become a full-on pit of filth if I didn’t have someone over to keep me company and shame me into tidying up once or twice a week. (He doesn’t nag, I just can’t bear the thought of having him see how truly sloppy I can be when no one is around.)

The last couple of weekends I’ve also had the pleasure of spending time with my old pal Dave and his girlfriend, who have recently returned from an ill-conceived year in L.A. that made them realize how much they love living in Boston after all. I was able to offer them last-minute accomodations one week, and then they were able to repay the favor this past weekend, which means that I got to see more of Dave in the last two weeks than I have in about the last five or six years. Seeing as he’s my bestest pal, that’s a really good thing.

I wish I could say the rest of my far-flung social network was in such good shape. It used to be a mild technique for avoiding stress and finding time to work, but my tendency to fall out of touch with people I care about has blossomed into a full-on shame spiral that I can’t quite fix, and that makes me feel shittier and shittier all the time. A mild aversion to spending time on the phone has become an almost pathological avoidance of telecommunication. I stopped socializing much as a concession to the Rooster’s aversion to crowds and bars, but it eventually became my own bad habit of never getting out that much and then never wanting to talk about how unhappy I was becoming. My irregular, hectic work schedule has sucked up most of my time, leaving me clinging to the restful solitude of the occasional hours I get to myself, and pretty much totally unable to make plans for any actual leisure time.

As a result of all this (and varying amounts of guilt, embarrassmant, exhaustion, self-consciousness, etc.), I am surrounded by the rotting corpses of many a dear friendship. People I love and long to see assume I hate them and have stopped keeping after me. My neglect has become so shameful that I can’t really blame them, and I don’t know how to repair all the damage without a whiney fistful of excuses and explanations that sound lame even to me. Feeling lonely has become a bit of a guil-inducing crutch. It’s a sucky feeling to carry around, but at least it’s safe, familiar territory by now. After all, why should anyone bother when I’m such a wet noodle so much of the time? The truth is, though, I’m better company when I hate myself less, and I hate myself less when I have good company. I just wish I’d done a better job of remembering that during the last few years.

Bleah. Sorry for all the crabbiness, but it’s the mood of the day.