Rambling post on the well-worn aesthetic

How many of you subscribe to Anthology? I had a subscription, didn't realize it lapsed, and recently renewed. My first issue back was the winter "Americana" issue, which I received last week sometime. I sat down with it, turned on My Little Pony so I could read it cover to cover, uninterrupted, ripped open the plastic sleeve, deeply inhaled the beautiful smell of fresh ink on paper, and started reading.

This issue, described by the editor as a "cross section of Americana", felt odd and alienating. I do a lot of over-thinking, so it wasn't surprising when I sat down to read it again, trying to pinpoint the lingering uneasiness**. Then it hit me: our quirky yard (and the experience of having it judged), the cracks in our house, the problems with living in an old structure; it's not all sunshine and perfect imperfection.

Peeling paint in an older home, to a home appraiser, means lead tests must follow. Cracks in original plaster mean the foundation must be checked. Peeling aged wallpaper and rusty old pipes means the resale value of the home goes down. How do I know? We've been trying to buy the house we're in, built in 1943, and it's not so easy for a first time home owner currently living in the structure .

From what I understand, banks these days aren't really on the side of  first time home buyers unless they have a sizable down payment or are purchasing a new-ish  home. They want the security of knowing upfront that if we stop paying they'll be able to get their money back. That makes sense.

But it also means a fixer-upper, an estate with the patina and visual interest of age, and drafty, energy inefficient windows are no longer affordable, available, and attainable, but the eye candy of the rich. Yes, that bothers me. Not because poor people should live in bad conditions, but because we're romanticizing what could otherwise be difficult living; hardening ourselves against housing inadequacies.


According to Bloomberg BusinessWeek and the Census Bureau, in 2011"the official poverty rate essentially held at 15 percent, meaning that 46.2 million people live below the poverty line."

Which leads us back to the content of the magazine: homes of executives filled with peeling paint, textures from residents' past, old, seemingly rickety windows, starkly contrasting shelves packed with valuable antiques and art bought on trips around the world. Look how simple we are! Look at the imperfection we embrace! We are charming and we are real! There's a common aesthetic throughout, which makes the magazine feel beautifully cohesive, implausibly homogeneous, and entirely dishonest.

While income figures were not part of the content, with 2 Anthropologie executives featured in a single issue. I know I pick on Anthro a lot, but as Forbes describes the Anthro market, I'm clearly not part of their market,

"Anthropologie’s ideal demographic is affluent, settled-down career women in their 30s and 40s, with an average family income of $200,000 a year. The brand sells its products at premium prices points, for example, $250 sundresses, $400 shoes, $700 end tables." 

As executives for a retail store aimed above my means, I'm pretty sure that translates to an income far greater than my own. One of the executives is featured because he owns a hobby train store in Ohio, while living in Pennsylvania. The other has made a quaint home near Philly filled with just peeling paint and old-house-character galore. Other homes include a vacation home for a Bay Area couple, and that of designer John Derian.

This annotated version "Americana" lightly brushes over disrepair and glorifies it as the "substance and style" of America today without recognizing 15% of America. Couldn't it be at least as interesting to see the apartment of a local barista who slings coffee daily to support her art-making? How about a college kid, neck deep in student loan who has styled his space to suit his tastes, despite the authentic and gritty decay of off-campus slum housing?

Is Americana a bland cross-section of a by-gone, nostalgic America? By the end of the issue, the second time around even, I realized exactly why I felt alienated: we're not rich enough to have peeling wallpaper in our home. 



** Before I get into things further, 2 of the articles seemed authentic and honest: the couple who buy pieces they love as they go, relied on a friend for a beautiful kitchen cabinet and sleep in a sparsely decorated room that is clearly loved; the man who lives in a rented cabin with little room for customization plainly explains his home is more about being close to nature than it is the "luxuries" of an interior.

Cooking with Mabel

While I don't think a bored child is necessarily a bad thing (it usually sparks the play times that I find most amusing to watch), there are times where boredom makes for a super-cranky kid. In our house, a super-cranky kid makes for an even crankier mama.

When C has a night out, M misses him. That missing makes time go even slower and boredom comes to the party earlier than usual. Those are the evenings I try to think of something creative and fun to do in the kitchen.  

I know I've mentioned a few times in the past that M and I do a bit of cooking together, and it's never some elaborate recipe. This most recent time was a flashback to my own childhood: pita pizzas! It doesn't take but about 10 minutes to actually make them, but M liked "painting" the sauce on, trying different toppings, and piling on the mozzarella. All in all, M and I hung out in the kitchen and cheesed it up for maybe 20 minutes, but for the next 2 days she told everyone about how she made her own dinner.

Another fun recipe we do together is Baked Oatmeal (from Super Natural Every Day by 101 Cookbooks' blogger Heidi Swanson as featured on Lottie and Doof).  M cuts the bananas (easy enough to do with a dull dinner knife) and stir and stir to her heart's content. The result is a moist, somewhat cakey, slightly sweet oatmeal concoction that I think is just as good straight out of the fridge as it is still warm from the oven.

 I'd call them both major successes: bonding time, relatively easy to make, not terrible for us, and total boredom busters. What else could you ask for in a recipe?

Tales of a bored lady and a paint brush

I'd like to blame Charlie, if at all possible, for leaving me home and bored.  Our upstairs bathroom, since redoing it 4 1/2 years ago, had some issues that needed addressing: towel hooks falling out of the wall, the flat paint was a bad choice and the humidity caused some superficial cracking...
Yesterday C took the little one out to play for several hours at one of those kid-ertainment places, and I grabbed the gray purple paint from the downstairs bathroom and headed upstairs.

I removed the hooks and a small wall-mount shelf, plastered over the holes and painted around all the edges. At that point my hips were so mad at me, I decided a little break was in order. Said break resulted in a trip to the hardware store for a new shower head.

If a nap doesn't knock me over first, I'll finish the painting today and snap a picture. I'm already bracing myself for critique. There are a few things I already know:

As is the case with any of our re-do projects, one new thing makes all the older choices look dingy. The purple looks decent enough, but the change from the beige made me realize the shower grout looks dirty. The new paint doesn't quite match the gray tiles in the shower, which bothers me, but not C.  It does, however, look pretty decent with the shower curtain, we'll just pretend I didn't buy a new, solid white, waffle weave shower curtain for this bathroom several weeks ago.

Cleansing Breath, Relief

After many years of art school, the process of making and critiquing, I came out tired of the process. I have yet to find my way back into it, but intend to. In the meantime, my "art" has been creating in a different way, out in our yard.

It's a process, it's making, watching, revising, and all in all satisfying. It's not the most beautiful art I've ever made, not the most poignant, not the most revolutionary, but it feels like the most important thing I can be doing (aside from being a mother, wife, etc.) right now. It inspires me to make other, more traditional, art and it keeps me yearning to learn and use my brain, something I don't get to do on a daily basis.

At the same time, as I approach our yard as an ever-evolving studio, we have people around us who don't like what they see. The feeling of being judged is one I thought I'd mostly escaped since high school, but living in a suburban town, I'm learning that not everyone grows out of being judgmental, and those are the people who will never be happy with the way we, Charlie, Mabel, and I, live.

One particular neighbor is an elderly lady who speaks no English.  She has children who come over and check on her, they either do her communicating for her or for themselves. Either way, that communicating consists of requests for yard work: cut down a bush, remove an old but healthy oak tree, remove another area of shrubs that produce berries and, therefore, create a mess on her laundry. They also asked to remove several large pine trees, offered to pay for the removal, then decided they weren't going to pay for the removal once the job was done, but further suggested we have the roots and stump removed. Beyond those requests, they rake leaves into our yard and throw sticks and branches over the property line because they fall from a tree that is on our property. Then they complain about the unkempt nature of our yard. They are, in short, unsatisfied, and after years of trying to keep the peace, we let them know we were done doing favors for them.

Since getting pregnant, we've been trying to buy the house we currently live in, which has been bad timing on our part. My first trimester left me super grumpy and nauseous all the time. The second trimester has brought a new form of exhaustion, and more recently sore hips and back. Somewhere in between, we had an appraiser visit the house and make a lengthy list of repairs that must be made before the bank will finance. Several of those repairs were in our back yard, so the yard has, to be frank, been a mess.

Then the holidays came...

Since then we've been resting and opting for indoor projects rather than outdoor ones. Why? Well, it's cold out there most days, and neither of us actually wants to face or deal with those neighbors. We don't make eye contact, don't give friendly waves, we don't acknowledge them, but their bullying presence and disapproving judgement can be felt across the property boundary.

I've all but abandoned that "studio space" simply to avoid the neighboring family. So yes, it has been ugly and in disarray. Then last week we received a letter from the Town, a letter that has left me feeling like the teacher wrote my name on the blackboard and is going to call my parents because of my bad behavior.

This letter that calls my sacred space a Public Nuisance. It would be naive to think the Town sought our yard out on their own and decided it was nuisance-worthy, so I immediately wrote the officer to get the issue resolved. He was the most polite, sincerely helpful man, far more than I expected. He pointed out a few things that we could do to tidy up the place, but the creative aspects he had nothing particular to critique and simply said everyone has a different idea of art.

For that, I'm incredibly grateful. Maybe, once again, I'll get a full night's sleep. For those with similar neighbor issues, I feel for you, I really do.

The horse before the cart

Mabel is curious about telling time these days (shhh, don't tell her she needs to know her numbers first) so I've been looking around at clocks that function, look clean and modern, and would aid in the process of teaching her how to read a clock. Two solutions that suit our style include the Newgate Brixton clock with 3 different colored hands ($125, 15.75" diameter) and the very basic, graphically strong Braun clock ($65, 7.9" diameter).

I'm also thinking she needs better access to her toys, which are mostly stored in a vintage dresser with wooden drawers just heavy enough she can't open and close them on her own. That, of course, is a whole new project for a different day.