My goodness, you look beautiful today...
OUR BLOG
One of my goals in moving in to my office was cutting expenses. In following through with this goal, I’ve been tracking the progress of my food budget since Day One. So I thought I’d provide a little mid-month report to let everyone know how I’m doing on that front.
I aimed to remain disciplined with my meal costs so I could both save money and learn more about just how much my new lifestyle would cost. I’d never tracked my meal expenditures before, but I determined that before moving out of my apartment I must have been spending roughly $175 per week on food–including dining out–which amounted to roughly $700 per month. This includes regular fresh home juicing and a diet consisting largely of organic, gluten- and dairy-free foods, as well as products low in or free of preservatives. Because I believe what I eat becomes integrated in who I am, I’m very careful about what I put into my body. But I’ll spare you that lecture for now!
Keeping myself on the same grocery plan would have been impossible. I have no kitchen in the office, no juicer, and no appliances except for a microwave. So I have limited methods for preparing food at my disposal. Space is also extremely limited. Although these facts would save time usually spent on preparing food, I feared that I would spend more by purchasing prepared meals. At least the kinds of prepared foods I was willing to eat.
Considering all of this, I decided to set a goal of staying under $20. per day on my food expenses. This would, I believed, put me at $100 less than my average monthly expenditures and still allow me to maintain my needs for convenience and my desires for well-being.
In order to track my progress, I developed an Excel spreadsheet to detail each meal expense and maintain a running tally for my daily and month-to-date totals. I also specified exactly what I was eating by placing a comment with each cell, explaining what the meal consisted of and where I purchased it. This tracking is done every few days, at my leisure, by reviewing saved receipts and inputting data when I had time available. So far, it’s been a very manageable process. I recommend it to anyone who’s as nerdy as I am.
Here’s a look at my calculations, recorded in Book Antiqua font:
After 15 days–roughly half of the month–I have achieved a daily average of $17.59 spent on eating. That’s pretty good.
How did I manage to stay under $20 per day?
All things considered, I’ve found it much easier than anticipated. First of all, buying pre-made juice in place of preparing my own from fresh fruit and vegetables on a daily basis made a huge cost difference. Also, taking advantage of free meals courtesy of Eric’s wedding and lunch events through my job allowed me to offset the otherwise expensive meal costs from socializing at the wedding and here in Los Angeles. Finally, I rediscovered the deliciousness of two affordable meals: oatmeal and the double-decker peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Both of these small meals cost under $1.00 each, and gave me more flexibility with my wallet when approaching evenings where I knew I’d be spending more on food.
Halfway into the month, I am finding my meal plan to be executable without problems. So I’ve set a new goal for myself: To maintain a $15. per day food expense limit. For the remainder of the month, I will try to cut my meal costs as significantly as possible without having it affect my social life or adversely affecting my health, weight or physical condition. Reaching the $15/day threshold would mean I’d be operating on 75% the forecasted budget for the month, which would put a smile on this dork’s face.
Just to get an idea of what saving $5. per day might add up to, consider that in an average 30-day month, a $5.00 per day contribution to a separate fund will net you $150. Over the course of one calendar (or fiscal!) year, this total will amount to $1,825. If one were to put this money toward a vacation fund, he could find himself comfortably covering air travel costs to, for example, Rio de Janeiro, which might cost a traveler $1,200 if booking at non-peak times on a few weeks’ notice. Hostel accommodations priced at a reasonable $30 per night for ten days would still leave said traveler with $325 of expendable income for a craftily-executed vacation. And that’s with zero impact on one’s existing budget.
For someone operating on a modest salary in a city with a relatively high cost of living, this savings held major appeal.
I now have renewed focus for myself coming into the end of the month. I am feeling very good about my place in the experiment, and am starting to wonder if I should extend my office stay beyond this first month.
– TOH
Dude.
The cleaners did not arrive today. Again. It’s midnight now. On a Monday.
I’m going to kill someone.*
– TOH
*I’m not going to kill anyone.
Every other weekend, a cleaning crew is scheduled to come in and tidy up the office.
Part of my leaving town for the weekend was to avoid them. The embarrassment and possible whistle-blowing of being caught in the act of sleeping behind my desk on a weekend wasn’t my idea of a relaxing time. Generally, the cleaners are scheduled to do their work on Friday evening. I’d even seen them on multiple occasions in the past, back when I used to stick around the office after hours, waiting to work my evening job. Killing time at my desk before my 8:00 start time, I would welcome them and let them know it was cool to work around me. They are nice people, working hard to make ends meet and smiling while they do it. But seeing them now posed a threat to my livelihood. Marta, the mother, also cleans my coworker Carla’s house. I bet they tell each other everything.
Maybe not, but you get the picture.
Ours is an easy gig. One main, carpeted room with desks, and a small portion of the back storage area, complete with microwave and bathroom. Having seen them work, I knew it took only a half-hour or so to get the job done.
My plan for evading the cleaners this weekend, I posited, was fail-safe. Friday evening was spent with Linda in El Segundo, with the rest of the weekend to be spent in the Angeles National Forest. I figured by the time I returned from camping, the office would be sparkling and dustless, and the matter of avoiding the cleaners would be, at least for the next two weeks, a distant concern.
When I dropped into the office on Sunday afternoon, I noticed that Marta’s paycheck was still on the lobby desk. The same spot that Carla left it on Friday afternoon.
If Marta hadn’t collected her payment, she hadn’t been by to clean the place. I felt the sudden urge to run.
It’s difficult to articulate the strange feeling one gets, running into his office on a Sunday afternoon, dreary-eyed in his basketball shorts, rustling around under his desk for personal belongings. One might feel like an outsider on such an occasion, an invader of space not his, working quickly to avoid detection by some authority that in reality isn’t likely to exist. He might knock over the trash bin in his frenetic wake, cursing wildly as the refuse of his weeks of scrambling scatter across the carpet, settling in a Pollock splash pattern in the hardest-to-reach crannies. The casual observer would derive great entertainment from watching this unfold. Any consequence is of our subject’s own doing.
Needless to say, I was in a pretty crappy mood.
Did they just waltz in and clean the place whenever they felt like it? Didn’t they know they were inconveniencing someone? I had an office to sleep in!
I’d rather not repeat the entirety of my verbally or physically reaction to this news, but one can imagine it was a fairly animated response, the kind of rant one has the luxury of displacing when in the solitary confines of his own home. After all, this had become my temporary home, and my territorial instincts had been quick to take over. Someone was interfering with my turf and I was pissed about it. I let those emotions freely escape me for the better part of five or ten minutes.
It was absurd, of course, me reacting that way. I had been sweating wildly for the better part of the past 24 hours. I was hungry. I had things to take care of today and the office was the only air-conditioned place I felt like I could achieve them. Knowing I couldn’t stay in the office meant more tramping in the untenable California heat. In summary, I was irrational.
But the truth is that the predicament I was in was my own design. Our office is rarely in use after hours, and there was no way for me to communicate with Marta or her son. My frustration was mired in expectation. I knew I didn’t necessarily belong in the office on the weekends, and I was more than happy to vacate the place when my absence was needed for others to be productive. What bothered me was that I’d gone to such great lengths to accommodate a timeline I assumed was verbally contracted. When people fail to follow through on their promises, it really gets my goat. The problem here, which after calming down for a moment I began to realize, was that no one had promised me anything. No one knew I was taking up residence in the corner of the main office, nor could they have concluded that anyone would be inconvenienced by a change of schedule. As far as Marta was concerned, we didn’t care when the office was cleaned. As long as it was done by Monday morning.
This grounded me a little bit. The reality now, however, was that the cleaning crew could arrive at any time between now and 9:00am on Monday. Any time spent in the office between now and then would be an exercise in risk vs. reward.
So I dropped off my backpack, washed my face, grabbed a water from the fridge, and headed for the cool coast of Santa Monica. At least I’d have some cooler air near the coast. My day had instantly transformed into a more legitimate homeless experience. I napped on the grass in a municipal park, urinated in a public bathroom, showered at a YMCA, ate a pbj sandwich for a meal, and cleaned my clothes at a local laundromat.
By the time all of that was complete, the day was nearing its end. When I returned to the office, it was just past 6pm.
Lo and behold, the paycheck was still there when I returned. No one had come to clean the office.
It had become a twisted game of cat and mouse, except the cat was hiding out somewhere coughing up fur balls, cleaning his hindquarters and taking his sweet ass time with participating in the game. There was no indication when Marta and her son would arrive. Could they drop in for an evening cleaning tonight? They were certainly willing to do so on Friday nights. Or would they choose an early morning cleaning on Monday, as they had done on at least one other known occasion? And, of course, there was the third possibility: That they didn’t show up at all.
In my annoyance, I became more brash. I decided to take ownership of the situation, clear off the surface of my desk, and fold my laundry. It was probably the most I’d ever enjoyed putting away my clothes; carefully partnering two matching socks had become an expression of rebellion. About halfway through spreading my clean boxer briefs and v-neck tees across my desk, it struck me that now would be a particularly inconvenient time for the cleaning crew to arrive. How was I to explain the perfectly strewn wardrobe and accompanying duffel bags, each clearly identified for a particular article of clothing, so dominating the landscape of my workspace?
I decided I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to allow some strangers to orchestrate the winkling of an entire week’s worth of khakis.
It turns out that no one interrupted my laundry. Or my modest dinner. Or my several phone conversations, or literary musings on the laptop. It was 10:30 when I went to bed that night, oddly at ease in the stale air of the back storage area, too tired to care if someone were to walk in on me that night.
– TOH
On Saturday morning I left Linda’s at a quarter past 9 and dropped by the office to pick up my backpack. The plan was to spend the rest of the weekend in the Angeles National Forest, where I could camp freely anywhere along the East Fork River, escape the possibility of anyone making a weekend stop into the office, and recharge from the past few weeks of chaos. I packed enough provisions to last me until Sunday night and headed off.
The beauty of the Angeles National Forest is that it’s so close to the city; one can reach its borders in an hour with minimal traffic. Of course, that’s a downfall as well, since its proximity attracts throngs of people on the weekends. The road to the trail was so littered with cars and tents, one could scarcely find a place to park. The river was lined with families of scantily-clad bathers, hopeful fishermen, and the occasional duo of wannabe miners panning for gold. The Angeles National Forest truly is the three-ring circus of the Southern California wilderness.
When I reached the trailhead, it was hot. Oppressively hot. Broiling, Thanksgiving-Day-turkey-in-the-oven hot. And in the distance, beyond the peaks of the lower San Gabriels comprising the foreground, brewed a nasty array of cumulonimbus storm clouds. This was nature’s way of relieving Earth’s inhabitants from the sweltering pseudo-desert. Looking at the storm, I welcomed it as exactly that, ignoring the inconveniences of a potential downpour.
I had spent much of the past few weeks among the masses of the metropolis. Getting out into nature again was therapeutic, a place I could go to purge the stresses of routine. A place where I could go to hear myself think. The outdoors has become for the modern urban dweller the ultimate in extreme exposure. In the city, our surroundings have been manufactured to conceal our weaknesses. We construct buildings to protect us from the shifts of the elements, devise climate control to sterilize our inside air to the exact degree of comfort, arrange decorations to conceal the homeliness of our labor. We hang paintings of landscape, plant plastic trees in mass-produced pottery, spray foul smells with harmful, fragrant chemicals. We build an artifice of beauty atop the beauty we destroyed to arrive at that point. We are the lone Earthly agents of this macabre recycling. Our cities are exhibits of this orbit in solutions, arriving us at the same problems we worked so hard to repair. It is an addicting narrative, one in which I am wholly guilty of indulging.
But here, in the mountains, our surroundings were conceived long before anything that could resemble a human blinked his eyes to enjoy it. The mountains are our walls. The stars our ceiling. I cannot help but be humbled by their grandeur, for their solutions are presented to us without granting us the slightest opportunity to conceal them. The only orbit apparent here is that of Mother Earth, revealing with unfailing consistency the scroll of the cosmos, one of the few lasting certainties of our existence. While my relationship to the city is that of a torrid affair with my siren mistress, the wilderness is my loving wife. She is loyal and comely and, in the moments when I slip up, proportionately harsh.
My return to the trees and mountains was therefore a tardy homecoming. The plan was to camp along the river bank, somewhere off-trail and shaded, with enough solitude where I could sleep, read, and possibly fish in peace. Bringing my trout pole and 40-pound bag of gear, I began to walk along the trail. After taking only a handful of steps, I heard thunder sound authoritatively from the horizon. I chuckled to myself, unwilling to be fazed by the overwhelming evidence that my luck for the weekend had been used up with Linda last night.
I walked on. A second clap of thunder reminded me of the dangers beyond discomfort. Namely, the potential for flash flood. A voluminous storm could raise water levels to elevated levels in a dangerous rush, with surrounding low-lying areas engulfed in the precipitous flash, the ground being unable to absorb the runoff. A lone hiker, camped in an otherwise innocuous flat, might find himself with mere seconds to save his belongings, let alone his own hide.
I had found myself in a similar predicament this past summer, canyoneering through the claustrophobic walls of Utah’s Virgin River. The Narrows, as the trail is called, makes up 16 miles of winding gorge, with walls rising over the river up to 2,000 feet. I later learned that I was among the last hikers offered a permit for the canyon that day. And as I reached the seventh mile, I learned why. It was there that the skies began to open up in spellbinding fashion, releasing a spectacular shower and Amtrack roar. I rushed to a nearby platform of land, elevated ten feet above the river, to wait out the storm. As I watched the water shade into a coffee hue and the “tide” inch up onto the sand, I considered myself lucky. Had I been a couple miles down the river, my best shot at higher ground would’ve been a foothold in the rock wall.
I took heed of this as I continued along the East Fork River, reassuring myself that this place was infinitely safer than a slick-walled slot canyon. By the time I came to my first river crossing, I had almost forgotten that I had already been soaking in ultraviolet and sweat for the past twenty minutes of my hike.
Flash flood country.
At this crossing I met a gentleman heading the other way–I seemed to be the only one making his way into the wilderness. He was a haggard traveler, more of the transient ilk than perhaps I appeared. He looked at me, looked at my backpack, and looked back up to meet my eyes.
“Heading in?”
“Don’t you know it!”
“Yeah,” he nodded, directing his gaze to the horizon. “Watch out for them flash floods. You seen what happened in Bagladesh a couple weeks back.”
I actually hadn’t. But I nodded and thanked him for his concern before moving on. His warning was equal parts endearing and eerie, so even though the clouds seemed to holding steady at the faraway ridge line and it was earlier than I had anticipated quitting the trail, I thought it best to start looking for a spot to set up for the night.
I found my camp without too much effort, a secluded spot under the shade of an oak tree, set back fifty feet or so from the river. Under the distant hum of thunder, I set up my tent and headed back towards the river for a swim. Even out of the sun, in the advanced hours of the day, the air was sweltering. Jumping into the water offered a brief respite.
Home.
I toweled off and returned to camp for a nap. An hour later, I woke up sweating through every pore, with a dry mouth and sour temperament.
It was 6pm.
I decided that if it wasn’t going to cool off by this time of day, I wouldn’t be able to enjoy myself enough to accomplish what I’d set out to accomplish for the time. So I decided to pack up and head back to the truck. I knew the corridor along the road leading into the canyon was shaded, and encouraged through it a gentler breeze, giving its inhabitants valuable degrees of temperature.
That night, I ended up sleeping on a breezy ridge on a blanket next to my car. Nestled under the modest glow of the urban-periphery sky, I began to finally relax again. It wasn’t the wilderness experience I’d been looking for. But even in the company of restless strangers and episodic human noise, there was beyond my conscious acquaintance an unmistakable calm that had settled over me, a skeletal comprehension that I was away from it all. The presence of others was irrelevant, and the noises their rustling around made had no bearing on my being. This was my home.
I fell asleep staring up at the speckled handle of Ursa Major, likening its bowl to the vessel used by the gold-panners I’d seen earlier in the day, thinking that the yield of its kind glow held more value to me in that moment than any clump of flecks in any pan. My gold was the embrace of obscurity. My pan the open sky.
– TOH
Linda’s lack of commitment was starting to get on my nerves. After rescheduling two dates and being late to all of them, we had agreed to meet tonight. After messaging her earlier in the day and hearing nothing, I was ready to throw in the towel. I have always valued punctuality and loyalty to promise as a matter of integrity. Simple ethics. If you take the initiative to say you’re going to do something, follow through with it. If you can’t, recognize that and own up to it.
What’s strange is that Linda seemed genuinely interested in me. We shared thoroughly enjoyable phone conversations and she always seemed reluctant to get off the phone. I didn’t understand it. Linda was just liberated from the constraints of time and task.
I recognized the resulting trend and decided, despite her seemingly genuine interest, not to take any commitment of hers too seriously. Not to take anything at all of hers too seriously. In the same vein, Linda was undeniably raw, unadulterated good times. So when she called an hour later and invited me to her friends’ home in El Segundo, I accepted and took my time getting there.
Linda’s friends’ had offered her carte blanche on the conditions of her stay at their home. Tara and Landon, the home’s happily married owners, were as laid back as anyone could imagine. Landon spoke in a humble monotone and always seemed to have a Sierra Nevada IPA in his left hand. Tara was perpetually curled up on one love seat or another, clouded in a haze of marijuana smoke. It was undergraduate off-campus housing with a splash of the bourgeoisie.
It hardly felt like a date. Linda had prepared for us a plate of freshly cooked salmon and baked potato. We shared our meal in the company of Landon and Tara, with Linda’s dog, The Office Hobo, occupying the space between us. The other three were engaged in a rousing conversation about the television show Off Their Rockers, a kind of elderly Candid Camera comedy series hosted by Betty White. Not having heard of the show–and in fact not having watched much television at all over the past decade–I found myself drifting away in thought, daydreaming about spending the coming Saturday and Sunday in the San Gabriel Mountains free from phone service and conversations about modern television.
I want you to feign interest in my show.
Linda and I weren’t drinking but once the final episode of Betty was over, the night seemed to devolve into silliness in short order. Linda and I started kicking a soccer ball around in the backyard. A former U.S. Women’s National Team candidate, Linda was a baller. I’ve got plenty of experience myself, having played the sport consistently since I was 5. Going at her one-on-one, she blocked my first advance. Then she ousted a second chance, defending me cleanly after a few step-overs. Recognizing her talent, I tried the slickest trick in the book. The rabona. A misdirection move, taking the opposite leg behind the back for a forward kick.
The rabona, executed almost as well as my pre-inebriation version.
It worked. Linda was a talented athlete, but I was infinitely more stubborn. It was like two elementary students on the field at P.E. trying to one-up each other. It was an unusual method of courtship and it seemed to be working wonderfully.
After moving our soccer scrimmage to the front yard, we stripped to our bathing suits and dove into Tara and Donovan’s pool before scurrying inside to take a warm shower. Squeezing our shivering bodies into an extremely humble, submarine-like stand-up shower, we began to soap the chlorine off our bodies and start making out. It was hardly a scene out of Chocolat, one of us letting out a periodic yelp when her back would touch the frigid shower wall or barking a cease-and-desist order when the other would direct the hot water into the eyes of the other at point blank range. But it was significantly more appealing than showering with the Rotary Club crowd at the Y.
Making it work…
This time when Linda invited me to stay the night, I accepted.
Moving our evening into the bedroom did not make the night any more romantic. Linda was not a seductress in the least, and I couldn’t take myself seriously enough around her to muster any kind of suave myself. So we opted for the evil step-sister of seduction: mischief. She would poke around for a ticklish spot on my side and I would try to convince her that I was born with 9 fingers. The mood became so playful that I thought we’d fall asleep without exchanging more than a couple of dirty jokes.
Linda soon turned off the ceiling light and struck a restful, prostrate pose on the bed, announcing that she “was out of energy” from the day–she could’ve fooled me, the woman was like a Mexican jumping bean, even when she was tired. When moved on her side, closed her eyes, and was silent for 30 seconds, I figured the night was through. The mischief had failed me.
A series of thoughts ran through my head in those moments. Disappointment. Regret. Inevitability. Confusion. A man is conditioned to act in a way that encourages members of the opposite sex throw caution to the wind and seek relations with them. I have never considered myself a philanderer, but when I end up making out in the shower with a woman whom I am courting, I am made to believe that being led to the woman’s bed will result in more excitement than supervising her REM cycle. This is an ideal time for one to consider his own faults (“Should I not have implemented the rabona during our one-on-one drills?”) or the very foundation of the connection in the first place (“Maybe her squirting me in the face with hot bathwater during make-out does mean we’re just friends.”). I wondered if our night was less fun than it was foolish. Or if in pandering to her more whimsical nature, I’d lost my own sex appeal.
Just as I had lost myself in thought over how the evening had ended so abruptly, Linda spoke up.
“Are you sleeping?”
“Yes, I’m dreaming about kicking your ass in soccer.”
“Yes, that’s definitely a dream then,” she said, turning towards me.
We bantered for a moment about the evening and different reasons why we were better than the other person at any given task.
“It sounds like you really think you’re better than me,” I said.
“I do,” she quipped. “Except someone is living in a dreamland about being hot shit.”
“Oh you think so?”
“I do. I do think so”
“What are you gonna do about it?”
“I don’t know, maybe I’m gonna make out with you.”
“I’d like to see you try.”
And so it was. It started as a slobbering kiss, performed in jest to punctuate a mock adolescent argument. Only this time, there was no cold shower wall or hot rush of water in the eyes to stop us. We were like the coils of a slinky crashing down a stairway, as unlikely as it is certain, speeding hastily but smoothly past each step with no regard for the surroundings. Rare and beautiful. And beyond anything I could have ever anticipated.
It was the tenth day of my journey and I was beginning to wonder if I was just treating this period as one big party.
– TOH
There comes a time in every man’s week when he needs to shower.
I stepped into the local Family YMCA, a little musty and heavy of breath, having finished my Thursday with a 12 mile bike ride to my old apartment and back. (I’m still receiving mail there, so I try to go back once or twice a week to collect the good postal news.) Upon walking into the Y, I was greeted by a friendly desk clerk in a red polo shirt. I presented my trial pass and slid through the entrance turnstile. The clerk hadn’t offered me a tour–she looked properly engaged in conversation with a male coworker–so I made my way through the maze-like hallway towards what I believed to be the locker room.
This particular YMCA is situated in a painfully outdated facility. Having worked at a Y when I was younger, I was well-aware of the budgetary constraints of an international non-profit centrally operated by folks with little contact with their satellite centers. This branch was an example of a crew trying to make the best out of a less-than-ideal space. The weight room was in a converted executive office. Elliptical machines were squeezed diagonally into a hallway overlooking the racquetball courts. And the locker room was a collection of nooks and crannies, patrons walking through the hot tub area into the showers. Like most family Y’s, the median age hovered somewhere in the Rogaine range. Nearly everyone was stark naked, and loving it.
Here is an excerpt of a conversation I overheard between two naked older men convening at the entrance to one shower room:
Naked Guy 1: Someone’s looking tan today!
Naked Guy 2: Yeah, I just got back from vacation. Lots of sun out there, Ed.
Ed: (still naked) Oh, Hawaii right? Yeah you were gone for a while. We missed ya here, Georgie.
Georgie: (sans pants) Don’t I know it. If you haven’t had a Pineapple Iced Tea in Maui, you haven’t lived.
Ed: Oh, I’ve lived Georgie!
(both erupt in laughter)
I’m confident that this went on for minutes. Fascinating as it was, though, I wanted to get moving. I locked up my belongings and headed for the awkward cardio hallway. There’s nothing quite so refreshing as getting the blood flowing on a stationary machine in between two retirees, with a bird’s eye view of three Asian men in sweatbands smacking a rubber ball against a wall and the concurrent opportunity at inhaling the distinct scent of every passerby. It’s all part of the Y’s Core Values: Respect, Honesty, and Unadulterated Geriatric Awkwardness. You have to embrace it.
When it came time to shower, I realized I had left my toiletries at the office. No soap, no shampoo, no little loofah to scrub my body in non-existent lather.* So here I was, caked in sweat, malodorous as a stray dog, surrounded by bare elderly buttocks, and without a solution for how to come out of it safely. I took a deep breath, grabbed my towel, and headed for the showers, hoping the solution would present itself on the way.
Much like the rest of the facility, the showers at this Y were scattered throughout the locker room and difficult to locate. I would enter one area of open, cattle-call showers, thinking I had found the last of them, only to turn a corner into another room. At least, I thought, there were soap dispensers conveniently located on each tiled wall. There were three of these larger shower rooms in all, and upon reaching the third I resigned myself to standing naked in a large room with other naked men, all my senior, all comfortably swabbing themselves with loofahs they had not forgotten in their homes (or offices).
I’ve never been big on communal bathing. Unlike my friend Hitchcock (affectionately nicknamed “The Cock” by our high school football teammates), who seemed to revel in the neighborly atmosphere of the locker room shower, I preferred the closed stall. Cleansing, for me, is a highly personal ritual, a time when I can drift away in almost meditative thought, purging the mind of negative ruminations, allowing the worst of my spirits to cascade down my skin and away into the drain with the grime and sweat of the day. I solve problems in the shower. Recover energy. Conceive ideas. The notion of office living, believe it or not, was first debated under the steady drizzle of a chrome-plated Kohler K-10282 Classic. If my skin didn’t wrinkle so quickly, I’d give Thomas Edison a run for his money.
So naturally I was disappointed when I found I’d be losing that privacy for the coming week. Instead of cultivating new ideas, I’d be parading my bare balls around with the VFW club in the big room. As I looked around for the most private corner I could find, I noticed an almost hidden hallway I must have missed on my initial reconnaissance. And in the hallway, which led directly into the sauna area and back to the locker room, were two narrow shower cubby-holes, separated from each other by a thin slab of plexiglass.
Three-sided privacy. It was glorious.
The feeling of hot water against my skin was transcendent. I immediately slipped into my subconscious, floating from one gracious thought to the next, delighting in my good fortune and relishing the triumph of a stubborn will. I turned my back to the surging spray and exhaled a sigh of relief. Everything was A-Okay.
The thing about slipping into meditative thought is that you surrender an awareness of your surroundings. Static environment blends into the background of thought, eyelids lazied into lower relief, the pupils’ focus morphing into the abstract, all of this blending into tranquil unconsciousness. It’s when something breaks that static background that problems arise. Something like a moving body. A moving, naked male body.
It was a cross between a full-body twitch and a catapult that my nervous system instinctively triggered when the man came into view, a 50-something Nordic-American male with a bottle of Suave in his hand. I barely had time to yelp in terror before he passed, wholly apathetic to my being. I’m sure I could not have gotten the man to look at me if I was bathing in $50 bills, shrieking about my penis being a danver carrot. He could not possibly have cared less. But that wasn’t the point. I was vulnerable, naked and unguarded, and here was this strange man invading my personal space. It was unsettling.
I toweled off and went to my locker to change, feeling fortunate to get out of the place alive.
If this was what the next month was set to look like, I was going to be in for a rough ride.
*I had to look up “loofah”. They’re super popular in Asia. Whatever.
I had to get an air mattress.
Waking up on a carpeted slab of concrete is an incredible method for understanding the delicate nature of the human skeleton. The evolution of man must have been most advanced not by the fashioning of instruments and fire, but figuring out how to skin fluffy things to make bedding. How did these early humanoids survive, sleeping on the bare ground like that?
Day eight was to be one of grumpiness and joint discomfort. Knowing this, I managed my work day accordingly, leaving the office early for a quick meeting in the South Bay, then stopping in Target for an air mattress. I made quick work of it. The best $29 I’d ever spent–provided the thing didn’t pop. I couldn’t wait to use the thing.
I returned to the office at 5:30, making sure my coworkers had left for the day. They had. Earlier in the day, I had begun to research trial gym memberships in the area, locating first a local YMCA that I thought would be perfect for a temporary cleaning spot. But now, lazy and hazy, having returned to my resting spot for the evening, I couldn’t imagine starting my gym journeys now. Showering would have to wait another day.
It hardly mattered. The emphasis our culture places on daily showers is far from universal. Studies show that American water consumption per capita–surprise!–greatly outweighs that of other countries. Save for Canada, in many respects our 51st state*, according to the World Commission for Water in the 21st Century, Americans use 35% more water per person than the next highest consumer of water–Italy. Lotsa hands-washing from tossing pizza dough.**
Here’s a chart for you chart lovers out there (Note: not graphophiles, as that term denotes a love of writing, not graphs…):
What does this all mean?
The answer is simple. I can now excuse my laziness on an effort to save our Earth’s most valuable, dwindling resource: water.
With that settled, I found myself needing to unwind. I cleaned up my necessary parts in the bathroom sink, and searched through my bags for a comfortable set of clothes for the night. I still had no idea where anything was. There were literally five bags under my desk, each stacked carefully on top of the other to conserve as much space as possible. Moving each bag was a labor of patience, as too hearty a pull could unbalance the desk, knocking off key office supplies into unreachable positions, or tipping the wastepaper basket onto the floor. Any given bag was intended to be packed with a different set of garments, but instead ended up being wadded with a mash of clothing stowed away out of convenience. I almost preferred to wear the same clothes over and over again, just to avoid the hassle.
Later that evening, on a blanket in the back hallway, surrounded by a stale lack of life, executing yoga stretches in my underwear, it occurred to me that something terribly unusual had happened with my life. I wasn’t sure if it was awful or amazing yet, but it was remarkable. And completely unexpected.
It was during this minor depth of thought when Vera messaged me. And soon after, Linda called. Both just wanting to chat. I wondered if they knew I hadn’t showered in three days, soon to go on four.
I guess it didn’t matter. They both knew my situation. And neither appeared to mind. It seemed as if this whole experiment was helping me find the right kind of women after all.
As the old saying goes, just because a man is on the run does not mean he cannot be pursued.
– TOH
*Cue hate mail!
**Hey, some of my best friends are Italian. I can say whatever I want about the land of World Cup trophies and lasagna, capisce?
I’m including two entries for Day Six because it was such an epic day.
Monday night was another karaoke night with Linda, and it marked the longest consecutive string binge-drinking nights in my life. Even my college days couldn’t compare. I was in rough form, the acid burning through my esophagus, compounding the snare drum headache that reverberated throughout my skull. My body couldn’t have possibly survived this. But here I was. Standing uprig–oh, nevermind, my knee just gave out.
Linda and I had left the karaoke bar early the evening before, making our way to a burrito stand for a late-night snack. I was in my best threads and feeling dapper despite my extreme fatigue, many thanks to my ingenuous sink-showering technique earlier that evening, courtesy of my office bathroom. I’d found a way to cleanse all of the essential parts without making a mess. It required a bit of acrobatics, but that only made the deed that much more pleasing an accomplishment. Anyway, I was looking all right for a man who’s insides were rapidly deteriorating.
When I got the bill for the burrito, it read $16.
I don’t even have the heart to discuss this further. Having implemented my daily meal expense Excel spreadsheet since Day One, it hurt knowing that a less-than-necessary meal could skew my average so. I had set out to spend under $20 a day. That couldn’t be achieved by such frivolous meal behavior. Linda didn’t even end up eating. This was 100% my doing.
By the time I had paid my bill, I was nearly falling asleep. My eyelids hung like curtains over my pupils, shading the light and threatening my consciousness with sweet, sweet darkness. Linda took me outside, and I accompanied her to her rental car. Linda refused to buy a new car. She said she didn’t want to be tied down by purchasing any car or home for fear it would tie her to the area long term. It was an extremely poor financial decision, but one that made absolutely clear that she was not your average girl. Well, average woman. Linda was 32.
We debated for a while the merits of not paying exorbitant rental car fees in favor of, I don’t know, buying a car. But soon Linda’s attention turned on me. It was at the bar when she asked me straight.
“So, where are you living right now?”
I guess my vague answer about house-sitting hadn’t been enough for her. I imagine she thought I might be harboring some more sinful secret; perhaps I was estranged from my wife or sleeping with a patron of the arts sugar momma or seeking asylum from an enemy sect of Djibouti drug-running sodomites hell-bent on retribution for my role in the massacre of their underlord’s chief general and the undermining of their secret campaign in the capital’s textile factories to implant underpants cameras for widespread use in their elderly population. Whatever her thoughts, she never guessed I was living out of my office. But I took a deep breath and told her everything.
“You’re living out of your office?” she said, exasperated. “I think that’s awesome. I love it.”
The idea actually seemed to turn her on. I was incredulous. I was certain this would be the end of Linda. Instead, it seemed to only stoke her the flame. By the end of the night, she was insistent that I come home with her.
But I turned her down. On principle. The night had gone well, but not so well that, had she believed I was sleeping in my own bed, she’d have still invited me. I could tell she wasn’t ready for that. And I knew that she was only inviting me over to spare me from sleeping at my work. I had to decline.
When I returned back to the office, I immediately crawled behind my desk and passed out on the floor. I didn’t even change into more comfortable clothes. I had turned down a sleeping with a pretty lady for this. I wasn’t sure if I was stupid or committed.
Before I knew it I was asleep. It was the first time I’d slept in my office overnight.
– TOH
It was one of those days.
Yari and Jürgen called first thing in the morning to say they’d be late. Because of their timing, and since I needed to arrive early to work to unload and properly hide my belongings into the office before my coworkers arrived, this meant that we could not do home orientation. I had this notion of preparing them for every potential issue in person, demonstrating how to keep the legs on the decorative bookcase I’d made from buckling or how to position the car without parking (or causing someone else to park) over the lines. Type A things. Things I now had to let go of having control over.
Breathe out.
We decide to meet at my office. This seemed like a good idea until Jürgen got lost driving there, because he’s Austrian and driving in Los Angeles for the first time, so who knows where the hell he ended up. So I keep on nervously walking into and out of the office, driving my coworkers batty. Upon arrival, Jürgen doesn’t have the full amount of money he owes me. He must attempt to withdraw the rest from a bank. But he can’t withdraw it from the bank, for he has already withdrawn too much money in the past 24 hours. So he pays me in cash, a couple hundred dollars short of our agreement. I take it in stride. After all, I know where he lives.
The work day is a stressful one, with me trying to coordinate last-minute meetings with schools. I end up making two appointments in South LA that afternoon, my attention focused on the reality of needing to deposit my rent cash and figure out how I was getting to the airport in the morning.
Any time I left town, I usually parked in my work’s lot and took the quick, $1.00 bus to LAX. I’d become comfortable with public transportation during my time in Chicago, so this was an appealing option. Plus, I was never comfortable burdening anyone with giving me a ride, unless I am dating someone because there’s nothing quite so romantic as the curbside Casablanca kiss.
The problem is the morning’s flight is at 7:00, so I need to arrive at the airport before the bus was operating. I’d have to either take a cab, park at the airport, or leave on a late bus and sleep in LAX overnight. Hardly a cut-and-dry debate. I’d have to think it over.
My other issue is the bank deposit. Quirk Alert: I still bank with my original Florida credit union. Over the years, I’ve taken advantage of direct deposit and, occasionally, send a check home for my parents to deposit. I’ve never thought much of it as an inconvenience. Until now. I had nearly $1,000 in cash and no way to deposit it safely.
Anticipating this problem, I had done a little research and found that through a network of credit unions, there was one accessible ATM in Los Angeles that would accept my deposit and divert the funds to my bank. So at the end of the work day, I leave work to the ATM. Having not used an ATM since 2010 or so, I forget my pin number. The first three attempts at remembering lead me nowhere. Finally, it occurs to me that the pin number is, of course, the four-digit code I used to use at the grocery store to get cash back.
At this point, however, my account had been locked, meaning I can’t deposit using that ATM for the next 24 hours. The Jürgen ATM special, the curse of the day. I’m honored to be a sweepstakes winner.
So I have a decision to make: Take the money, nearly $1,000 in legal American tender, with me to Chicago and use cash for every possible transaction. Or, as I have been familiar doing since I was an 11 year-old hiding my baseball cards in the family washing machine during vacations, I can ignore the .01% risk of theft/fire/abrupt commercial eviction and hide the cash in my office.
Paranoia is a funny thing. It can morph a seemingly logical idea into a wooden whorehouse of mistrust, turning every screw of doubt deeper into the floor of the subconscious, cracking its precarious foundation until every sinful thought soaks into the shag from a muddy, mired underworld of despair.[1] It totally sucks.
Ultimately, I choose the office.
Except when I arrived to the office to stash the cash, my key refused to open the door. That’s funny, I think, I use this key every day of my working life and it’s never done this. Confusion gave way to curse words, and after ten minutes of berating every inanimate object involved, I hear a vague mental whisper of advice from my father.
“Graphite, son.”
Exactly! Graphite, the locksmith’s trick for sticky unlocking foil. Keyhole lube. Lubricant which I have conveniently located… in my apartment. Aside from being a forty minute round-trip drive away, it is also now occupied by the Europeans. What other instrument does man use when he needs a bit of lubricant, but has no obvious instrument of wetness handy? That’s right: spit.
It works right away. This is both relieving and completely infuriating. To think, there is a whole industry based on selling graphite to access fickle keyholes. And the answer was, quite literally, right on the tip of our tongues. I have to bitch to someone. I call by best buddy, Kevin, for support.
Kevin and I have known each other since second grade. He’s a voyeur of the umpteenth degree, raising it to the level of vicarious living in every aspect, elevating to an artistic plane the skill of narrative appreciation. The man could get joy out of hearing your story about saving a quarter on a bag of oranges. As long as somewhere in the story is a remotely attractive cashier, or even just a descriptive mention of the hanging of round citrus in a mesh sack. You know, like a pair of balls.
Kevin’s last name is Hitchcock, and very early on in pubescence he earned the nickname, “cock”, so my audience must forgive me when rarely refer to him as Kevin. Cock, then, listens intently to the goings on about my day, agreeably polite about my ATM maladies despite the fact that my frustrations are 100% my fault. And he manages to fish out a detailed illustration of Yari, with whom he determines unequivocally I should copulate. Rarely is the determination elsewise. Such is the way of the Cock.
Hanging up with The Cock, I feel immediately renewed. I take my $1,000 in cash and find it a proper hiding place. Half in a desk drawer tucked inside a pair of socks and another half in a copy of Alfred Lansing’s Endurance. Subtly apropos to my adventure.
The evening proceeds with my usual packing routine. Identify one item for packing, try to remember which bag or box said item was stored in, furrow brows, locate item on third attempt and pack it. By 9:30, I had completed my task and decided to catch the 1:45 bus to LAX. My first home-free night would be spent sleeping at the airport. (Note: I hadn’t at this point decided to commit 100% to office sleeping; I’d wanted to try my car, too. Will add that.) I’d even located a complimentary transit card to get me there. Score.
When I board the bus, the complimentary card doesn’t work. The driver tells me, tersely, that this card is only for the train system, which I guess is a separate entity. Fair enough. I’ve grown accustomed to being wrong today.
Because I don’t have exact change, I overpay for my fare and take a seat. When I do, I get a call from Jürgen. Someone’s car is in his parking spot. I walk him through the steps of how to tow away the culprit. The day is ruthless. I’m actually looking forward to getting to the airport so I can close my eyes and end it.
Just before midnight, I arrive at my final resting place. It is in the baggage claim area, on a low ledge usually reserved for unclaimed luggage. I have a ledge all to myself. Luxurious:
Bed.
I blow up my inflatable camping sleeping pad, insert my earplugs, and cover my head with a cotton hoodie. I sleep soundly in each twenty minute segment between PA announcements for delayed flights and baggage arrivals. The day couldn’t have ended any other way.
Tonight will be my last night in the apartment. It has been a scramble getting everything packed and accounted for. Despite my attempts at proper planning and organization, the packing process is always painful for me. I always make a list, but it doesn’t seem to matter. Complete. Shitshow.
Earlier this year, my girlfriend at the time, Shani, was watching me pack my belongings for a flight home. On a couple of occasions, I would fancy myself done, head over to the bed to relax with her, and realize I’d forgotten something before I could sit down, explaining that I always had this problem with packing. The third time that happened, Shani stopped me and asked me to sit down.
“You know what your problem is?”
“Awesomeness, with a side of obsession?”
“Um, no… It’s anxiety.”
Shani was right. What I’d always recognized as a family trait–overemphasis on preparedness and paranoia that the next forgotten object would be our last–was actually just nerves. Watching my parents struggle to leave the house on time after days (weeks, sometimes) of careful packing and preparation and tensely adhered-to wake-up calls early on the morning of said departure, I used to wonder, “Oh crap. Am I forgetting something?” If they had prepared so well and were still frantic, I, having packed with significantly less forethought, must be entirely ill-prepared.
The paranoia only built from there. We used to ready ourselves for all kinds of contingencies. I remember once hiding my most prized binder of baseball cards in our dryer “just in case” our house got broken into. Mind you, we lived on the most bland of neighborhood streets. No one would have ever been interested in our belongings. Certainly not my Fleer Ultra Todd Van Poppel rookie card.
So it goes without saying that I’ve been reared for transitional anxiety, second-guessing every detail, concerning myself with the analysis of the most remote possibility for failure. It’s a stressful empire over which to preside. But, on the bright side, I’m always the one you can count on for a piece of gum or extra batteries for your flashlight. For an event like this, I had my work cut out for me.
Here are some notables from the move out:
After a long night of getting my stuff together, I finally reached my absurdly high standard for preparation. Tomorrow, I’ll turn over the keys.
– TOH