Archive for February, 2019

On the Move

Phone Museum in my Closet

As a card-carrying resident of my own personal comfort zone, I’ve found that there’s an awful lot that can rattle me. The upstairs neighbors renovating their flat for five months. A wonky lock on the front door. Friends or relatives staying at the flat.

But there’s not much worse for this Comfort Zone Guy than moving flats. If you’re an adherent to a comfort zone, then you understand.  

Moving is terrible. No matter who you are or what your philosophy is towards being settled, you probably have a bad memory of being surrounded by hundreds of boxes, bags, crates, and furniture that you had to bring somewhere else. Moving means you have to move everything in your house. Everything. Soap. Each shoe. Every notebook, pen, and bottle of hot sauce. And so, everything is disrupted.

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On Paperfeet the Cat and Hoarding Books

Paperfeet the Cat Stands Proudly Among his Depleted Shelves

After twelve years in one flat, I am preparing to move in two weeks. Everyone knows that moving sucks. Though I am not an extravagant person, It’s the only time in my life that I wish I was loaded. I’d hand a few guys a wad of cash, give them instructions and two addresses, go on holiday, and just come back to a new flat all ready for me to live in.

Moving makes you realize just how much shit you have accumulated in your little hovel. This, of course, is because you are now forced to look through the backs of those cabinets, closets, mudrooms that you have gleefully avoided for so long. And so you dig out books, DVDs, mugs, clothes, old calendars, and cat figurines that you got from someone else who was moving and didn’t want to deal with it, and so now I’m standing in a room holding the cat and making a dubious look, all purse-lipped and furrow-browed, like the bad guy who realizes he’s been duped at the end of a movie in which he thought he had won. But you can’t get rid of him now; you’ve named him Paperfeet.

And if you are in your late twenties and lived on your own more than once, then you totally know what I’m saying.

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The Life and Times of Fausto Carro

Ah, Fausto Carro

Last week, after doing some work for an online magazine, I was asked to send along the details of my online payment account. I won’t say the name of that payment company, but Scooby Doo would probably call it RayRal.

I didn’t have an account there, so I began to set one up. And that of course is when I found out I had an account there.

Memberships to websites, online magazines, and services are as forgettable to me now as the magazine subscriptions I signed up for in college in our quad. I’d use a false name – Larry D’Urberville – with my sights set on a free T shirt. Free T shirts were gold when the alternative was washing your other 75 T shirts. Ah, the carefree and extremely dirty days of yore.

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Keep Calm and Stay Home

So you’re in your 40s? 28 Things I Learned in my 40s. Why I became So Much Happier in my 30s. If My 40 Year Old Self Could Tell My 20 Year Old Self a Few Things at a Bar, the first would be to stop drinking. 

We’ve all seen the advice, the philosophical, logical and sensible points that people in the 40s have pocketfuls of. Close your eyes (uh, but not if you’re driving) and just call to mind some of the uber-enlightened, sagacious advice and commentary. Own your flaws, they make you who you are. Laugh lines are worth the laughs. So laugh! In your 40s you have let go of the toxic people and you much happier.

OK, are there some truth nuggets in there? Absolutely. But it still comes off as theoretical and frou-frou. I feel as though I am listening to the wispy mantra of a holy guy in a Nepalese cave.

There are so many benefits and occasional downsides to being in your 40s that you just can’t list them all. Mostly this is because you have forgotten them moments after you are gifted the epiphany of them. Irony.

But let’s get real. If you’re in your 40s you know that there are more concrete ways of defining that age decade than the little insights and theoretical developments. There are real, day to day applications that you notice. Here are a few everyday realities about life in my 40s.

I plan hangovers, not nights out. A friend who is a great pool player once told me. “If you want to be a good pool player, don’t think about the shot you’re making, think about the one after that.” And man does that make sense in the world of being 40. I can still bring down a number of drinks with little problem. But it’s the reality of the next day that rules whether or not I will go out.

I weigh the headache, the arsenal of medicine that my body will require to simply go through the motions without ending up in a hospital, and the lack of productivity up against what I need to do that next day and the evening as well. Depending on the findings of those measurements, that’s how I decide to go out. Can I be a mess tomorrow morning? Do I want to be? This is why younger people think we fortysomethings are boring. We can still drink. But we don’t know if you are worth the payoff. Also we don’t mind what you think. PS: It should be mentioned that I still suck at pool. Bigtime.

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