Lebensraum

When I moved into my house last summer, I made a bold statement before I began the process of packing. "I will not label any boxes 'Miscellaneous.'" It was hubris; I know that now. Aside from a box labeled "Miscellaneous", there was another labeled "Miscellaneous Kitchen" and one labeled "Books and other Rectangles". The task of categorizing anything inevitably leave outliers; no amount of store-bought box labels and hours spent reading Wikipedia articles on set theory can avoid this precept.

But I kept trying. When I started unpacking, I foolishly declared a "no junk drawer" rule for the kitchen. Ironically, I don't have a silverware drawer, but the far left drawer is still filled with batteries, twist ties and half-empty blister packs of cold medicine.

Since my initial remodeling period bled more or less seamlessly into the holiday/overtime season, I've only recently had the time and inclination to revisit the arbitrary organizational decisions I made when I moved in. Chief among my decisions has been to steer into the skid of the Inevitable Junk Drawer.

Every room in the home of any well-adjusted includes a light dusting of "stuff that doesn't go anywhere." It can't be stopped. It's like the tide. So, I decided flood control strategies were in order. I gave up trying to stop the flow in favor of just redirecting it. In several places throughout the house, I have a low-profile plastic bin where "everything else" goes. That means when I'm looking for something, and it's not in any of the places it should be, I'll know it's in one of the designated holding ponds I set up to catch that kind of overflow.

Or, when I have some time to devote to it, I can just pick one of those boxes and dispose of (categorize or discard) the extraneous junk at my leisure.

I was complaining that I didn't have anything to write a blog about, and that this topic seemed really boring, but now that I've written it out, I realize that it's not so much boring as it is an obvious allegory for the Final Solution.

Home ownership is weird, you guys.

Theoxenia

My old Live Journal contains a lot of uses of the word Party. Capitalized. It's, I guess, most of what my Live Journal, and more to the point, my 20s were about. The constant, nightly search for something fun to do with one or more of the dozen or so people I like.

I was asked recently what my biggest accomplishment of the past few years has been, and I think, aside from (or probably as a parallel to) buying a house, it's going from being a good party guest to being a good host. That transition seems to fundamentally be the entire purpose of becoming a responsible adult. Jim used to wreck stuff sometimes, and now he apologizes for the small variety of cheeses on the cheese plate, because he wasn't expecting to have people over. This might seem like one of those moments where you imagine your younger self seeing you and you think they'd be disappointed, but I really can't imagine 23-year-old Jim (or me, for that matter) being anything but pleased with the idea of being the kind of guy who owns a lot of cheese.

There was a guy named... All right, I'm not going to pretend I remember his name at all... Anyway, he came to my Halloween party a couple years back and spent most of it bouncing from one party guest to another, morosely close-talking and mixing himself non-sensical cocktails. I definitely saw him pour Bacardi 151 and Grendine into a plastic cup with no ice. I don't remember his name, and I don't remember anything he said to me, but I remember that someone told me he left with the friends who brought him.

My dad used to say that the hard and fast rule of going out for the night was that everyone who goes out together comes back. You don't leave a guy passed out at the country bar. If one of your friends pulls a knife on a coke-dealer, you're obliged to do the same. These are the rules of a Fun Night. It follows that if the fun is happening at your house, all those people are your job, from the first pig-in-a-blanket until the last to-go vodka tonic the next morning. We live in a society. Hospitality is important.

Renae continues to be around. I'm waving off a certain brand of inquiry on that front by deferring to the reflexive property of equality. (I've used that joke before and I'll have you know it's just as funny this time.) She texted me before work a couple Fridays back, and launched a small inquisition about the degree to which I enjoy her company. History has taught me that when a lady* asks those kind of questions, you should start hoarding potable water and shotgun shells. As it turns out, she was just having a friend from out of town visit, and lacked a suitable venue in which to entertain the half dozen or so affable nerds and miscreants who wanted to see the prodigal BFF. I had met a couple of them previously, and I like gatherings (plus wiles may have been plied [by which I mean promises to clean my kitchen]), so I agreed cheerfully, but advised against anxiety-inducing lead-ups to obviously simple favors.

I'm never sure how fancy other people's friends are. I bought pizza rolls and Miller Lite. One was popular, the other is still sitting in a tepid puddle in the cooler in front of my dishwasher. It's strange to host even a small party for a group of almost exclusively all-but-strangers, but they seem to all be one or another of a few familiar brands of weirdo. Good people, just not our people.

The party broke up around 1:30 (not our people), but the feedback was good. People like the house. Couches are comfortable. Cocktails are delicious. The study, she is a porno.

New people invariably ask what I do for fun. I traditionally don't have an answer, but I've found that when I meet people at a party at my house, and they ask the question, it's nice to be able to gesture vaguely around me and say, "This. This is what I do."

Dan Johnson. Nice to meet you. My house is fun.



* Out of politeness, let's all pretend I don't almost exclusively mean Sarah.