Despair and Home Improvement

Grumpiness abounds here at Knitcrit mission control; garden variety annoyances were recently transformed into a massive jungle of despair by the news that my academic arch rival got a major grant for which I also applied and which, needless to say, I did not get. The academic arch rival in question, I hasten to add, is probably unaware of her title; it was conferred upon her years ago when my spies heard her badmouthing me at a conference. Her genetic predisposition to seek and destroy competition combined with the fact that she has now effectively kicked my ass in grantwriting 101 has, I think, doomed me to being the lesser, other, and/or unconsulted academic opinion on our shared topic.

Whoever said that the best revenge is living well has, in recent years, become my personal hero (though I do have a true story about an ex-landlord, a washing machine, and some creative letter-writing that might contend for the title of best revenge, come to think of it. Another time). Unfortunately, working as a hedge fund manager is pretty much the only easy way to live well in Manhattan; for the rest of us, it's a high art.

My most recent triumph in this regard was switching our office and bedroom. Technically, we live in a two bedroom apartment. I say technically because in Manhattan, a room is, legally speaking, any space that has at least one window. Thus, the "room" that we used as a bedroom for nearly the first two years of our lease was a bedroom in the purest sense of the word - it was a room almost completely occupied by our bed, with the remaining floor space filled with two dressers. Going to bed meant opening the door to the room, taking two steps forward, and lying down. I couldn't open the bottom two drawers of my dresser because they were blocked by the bed. Making the bed involved standing in the middle of the bed. And so on.

This living situation was necessary because when we moved into the apartment neither of us had a job in the strictest sense of the word, and we therefore needed to use the larger second bedroom for our shared office. It's a wonder we managed to get married at all after sharing an office, actually.
















Knitcrit: Can I interrupt you for a minute?

Todd: What?

Knitcrit: Will you read this for typos? I have to send it out right away.

Todd: (grumbling) Yeah, yeah, sure (reads, approves, returns to desk, puts on headphones and begins listening to work-related music at high volume).

Knitcrit: Todd. Todd? TODD! (throws pencil/paper clip/crumpled piece of paper at him to get his attention because it's just too hard to get up and walk the three feet to his desk because that would entail the effort of trying to roll the desk chair over the necessary traction-producing Red Ringum).

Todd: (pulling off headphones) What?

Knitcrit: Will you turn the music down? I can't concentrate. Sorry.

Todd: (in a tone suggesting otherwise) It's okay.

Knitcrit: (in a tone suggesting lack of actual gratitude) Thanks.

Ah. The office. It was overflowing with books and bitterness.













































Note Red Ringum looming in the foreground.

When I got my actual job, I got an actual office, making it possible to move all of my books and files to work. Todd's actual job does not, alas, come with an actual office, and so the solution was to move his office to our old bedroom, repaint, and move the bedroom into the nice room with actual light and something resembling enough space for a bed, two dressers, two end tables, and a little desk for my laptop:






































My career may be ruined, but at least I can now make the bed while standing next to it rather than standing on it. What revenge.

The Fuzz

For most of the quite nearly 100 years of its existence, our building has been sliding slowly into what is called, with good reason, Manhattan Valley. This means that the floors in our apartment are so slanted that if, say, a vat of water were suddenly dumped in the living room, by the time the water got to kitchen it would have developed the momentum necessary for playing Poohsticks. While this might be a selling point for the under-5 set, for a cranky grown-up like myself the slant in the floor has been a source of great frustration since Todd and I moved in over two years ago: it's impossible to do yoga at home, for one thing, and for another, until very recently, our office was configured in such a way that it was necessary to place rugs under our desk chairs; without some form of traction, all we would have been able to accomplish at our desks was hanging onto the edge of them for dear life (a visiting friend once found the fun in this situation, pushing off from the desk while leaning left or right, causing the desk chair to circle in an amusement park ride-esque manner as it flew downhill. This is all fun and games until someone runs into the closet doorknob, but I digress).

For the first year or so in the apartment, the office chairs were anchored with the remains of a very, very old, very, very dirty, and very, very fake Persian carpet that Todd had purchased long before he had me around to save him from himself. In true economical graduate student fashion, we cut the carpet in two, placing one half under each of our office chairs. The dirt-encrusted pile of the carpets provided excellent traction.

If I had gotten hired at a New York City college with faculty housing, the story would have ended with tossing the rug and moving on to spacious and level living conditions, but as it turns out I got hired at the other type of New York City college, which meant I had both the means and the need to shop at Ikea. My deep hatred for Ikea really warrants its own post; for now, let's just say that after painstaking internet research and some phone calls, we drove out to a New Jersey-based Ikea to purchase Ringums. I chose a red Ringum for myself; Todd opted for a more masculine beige.
















So Red Ringum came home with us a little over a year ago. I was filled with such hope. Red Ringum was going to save us from the slant and look good doing it. And Red Ringum did in fact accomplish both of these objectives; the problem was that Red Ringum wanted to do so much more. Be so much more. Be so many more places.

Red ringum. red ringum. redringum. redringum redringum redrum redrum REDRUM.

Excuse me. Where was I?
















It turned out that Red Ringum shed. A lot. It was like living with Clifford. Red fuzz in every corner of the apartment. Red fuzz in the bed. Red fuzz stuck to my students' homework. Red fuzz in my mucus. Red fuzz in my lungs. Red fuzz in my knitting projects (hardcore readers - or readers in need of further procrastination fodder - should feel free to look back through my various knitwear pictures, clicking on them for big file versions, because at least one of the pictures clearly shows a red fuzz infestation).

Do you remember those almost certainly carcinogenic red tablets that the the dentist would give you to chew after brushing your teeth, or was that only my dentist? Any lingering tartar would be dyed red, and from this you were supposed to learn something about oral hygiene, and possibly also something about the futility of doing your best.
















The slightest hint of Red Ringum's fuzz had a similarly revealing effect on what would otherwise have been mostly unnoticeable standard issue dustbunnies.

Over the course of several heroic attempts to clean Red Ringum into submission, Todd succeeded in little more than severely damaging our vacuum cleaner. It became clear that the shedding would only stop when the supply was exhausted. Red Ringum was an evil, twisted version of The Giving Tree. I had, alas, thrown away the noble bisected Persian carpet in a fit of optimism/hubris, and so, in order to keep my desk chair from going into amusement park ride mode, I had no choice but to live with Red Ringum until such time as we were able to replace it. And that day, my friends, is today. Today Red Ringum is being put on the street with the following note:

Free carpet! No bedbugs, but shedding will drive you crazier than the bugs would.

I would be sad about Red Ringum leaving (I'm irrationally sentimental), but I know from long, bitter experience that he won't ever really be completely gone. Kind of like shingles. Or the New Delhi Police (motto: For You, With You, Always).