In which I use the word "cool" entirely too much.

It seems that we purchased a house today. Unfortunately I’ve changed my mind. I would like to stay in Brooklyn, please. Do you think the buyer of our apartment will let us stay? Maybe we can talk her into taking the New Jersey place.

My last-minute panic is based on nothing reasonable, except that where we live is cool, and where we will live, while probably cool in infinite ways, is not as cool. Period. We will never be this cool again. And we weren’t all that cool to begin with. You may think, reading this, that I have long placed my coolness in high esteem, but in fact I have never bothered much with the coolness. I didn’t have to, because I live here. Not that I even got much pleasure out of the cool things here. I can’t afford them, and even if I could, I’m too old. And I spend my time with a preschooler whose idea of fun is playing air accordion while blasting Led Zeppelin. Actually I don’t disagree with him. Even if I had never had a child I would probably be doing that. In my underwear, probably. And not the hot kind of underwear, oh no. I’m talking Jockey For Her Hipsters with sagging elastic because I still own panties that my mother purchased for me in 1985.

Oh my god, what am I talking about? Do you see what this has done to me? I am weak with panic. What the hell was I thinking? I’m going to have to drive places. And my god, I’ve just made my holiday shopping a million times more complicated. In Brooklyn we are steps away from so many damn clever shops that are so crammed with hip whimsy that it can give you a migraine if you take it all in at once. In New Jersey we will be steps away from a KFC, a Dunkin’ Donuts, and a CVS. And I don’t think my mom wants a six pack of Crispy Nuggets for her birthday. I could be wrong about this.

But a person cannot live in a neighborhood just because of the cute shops, right? Right? They can’t, right? Oh god, what have I done?

It’s not just the coolness and the cute shops and the friends who will never move to Jersey and I see them every week and what was I THINKING. Crap, it’s everything. I can’t believe we can’t afford to live here anymore. I’ve lived here for fifteen years. Almost every day, I walk out of our house and I run into someone I know and love. Or someone I know and don’t like very much. Either way. I can’t believe I’m moving to the suburbs. I think I might throw up. I know I need to get over myself. I do. And I’m sure I will. Maybe in a year or two.

Why gyms are no good. No good at all.

I quit my gym a while back, on account of I never went. Apparently I hated money enough to give it to a place that was offering me nothing in the way of goods or services. Anyway, eventually I came to my senses, and realized I could spend my money on something better, like cookies.

The gym quit was perfectly timed: shortly after that we made our decision to leave Brooklyn and find a house in New Jersey, and my weekly bouts of ennui became hourly fits of plus-sized panic. I ran back to my psychiatrist, who told me that the best thing I could do for myself was get some regular exercise.

For a while I fooled myself into thinking I could exercise plenty without some stupid gym. The gym and I were through. Who needs a gym, when you have a park and good sneakers? I’ll jog! Okay, ha ha, maybe walk! Fast!

Whoever said walking was a good workout was lying. To me, a good workout means you sweat, and maybe I’m in better shape than I thought, because I couldn’t break a sweat, unless I wore two sweaters. Also, I kept tripping on the sidewalk. And I inevitably took my dog, because I would be lacing up my sneakers and there he’d be, watching me--and you try to get a workout when Charlie is tagging along. He has to pee on every tree, every hydrant, every garbage bag. He doles out his pee like it’s his gift to all of Brooklyn, to be evenly distributed to its residents. Behold his golden puddles! It’s Christmas, but not!

Lately my anxiety level has been ramping up day by day, as we near our closing and our departure from Brooklyn (I actually just screamed a little). So today I sucked it up, and called a local gym. This gym is not my ex-gym; it’s a gym that happens to be in the same building as Henry’s school, so I really have no excuse. I can drop him off and go. Mind you, during that 5-second elevator trip up those three flights, my brain will be screaming NO NO GO HOME AND EAT DING-DONGS. Nonetheless, the chances are not bad that I might actually get myself some exercise, sometimes.

So! “Is it possible to get a six-week membership?” I asked the nice salesperson. “No,” she said, “We don’t do short-term memberships.” Apparently this place hates money as much as I do! We were meant to be!

“Really?” I said.

“The shortest membership we could do is two months,” she said.

“I’ll pay for two months,” I said, and she said, “Well, this month would be prorated to start today.” So six weeks, in other words. Who was I to point this out?

She told me to come down to the gym, so I went to the gym, and when I got there she told me, and I quote, “The accountant doesn’t want to give you that membership because it’s too much paperwork for just two months.” Wow! They loathe money!

”Really?” I said.

“Let me see what I can do,” she said. I was getting good at this! “Why don’t you go home and I’ll call you.”

So I went home, and no joke, there was a message from her saying to come back, the membership was approved. I took my gym stuff with me! I was going to work out! Mental (and, I suppose, physical) health for me!

“The accountant said to give you a temporary six-week membership,” she said when I got there.

OH MY GOD WHAT OTHER KIND WERE WE TALKING ABOUT, I wanted to shout, but didn’t.

Then I exercised today for the first time in a long time. That in itself is not worth the effort it takes to type the words. I flailed around on an elliptical machine. I tried not to hurt myself stretching. I considered the weight machines but concluded that I had done enough for My First Workout in 2006. The End.

But here’s what I forgot: when you’re a nervous wreck, having had a workout is an excellent idea, but being in a gym is the worst thing you can do to yourself. First of all, you're surrounded by muscled, supple forms, and you're not one of them. You have to get naked in a locker room, which would not be a terrible thing unto itself, but inevitably, in this cavernous, mostly unpopulated space, a woman will stroll over and take the locker right next to yours . You will try not to look but oh god peripheral vision. You have to squeeze yourself into your five-year-old, pilly Lycra-infused pants and witness the horror of the visible panty lines. You suffer a glimpse of yourself in a full-length mirror, an object you have very wisely banned from your home.

Then you go to the Cardio Station (do they perform open-heart surgeries there? It would be a welcome distraction) and you put on your iPod and commence to feeling the burn and so forth. You imagine the elliptical trainer is the damn gym accountant and you step on his head again and again. Your freak-outedness begins to dissipate.

But then! A beefy personal trainer (is there any other kind?) keeps entering the room and peering directly at you, the sole enjoyer of Cardio. You try not to worry, but that’s what your brain is good at these days. There he is, back again. Oh god, is he going to come over and tell me I’m doing something wrong? Is he going to—oh please no—correct my form? Or did I commit some terrible breach of gym etiquette? Oh please let me be done before he comes back. And then you realize: you don’t have a towel with you. And you’re sweating all over the handlebars. You are gross. You are what you always loathed at the gym. The sweat-leaving person. You jerk.

Now he’s back with another trainer, and they’re standing in the corner, pretending not to be talking about you. One of them has a towel wrapped around his neck. It’s an obvious message.

You finish five minutes early because you can’t stand it anymore, rush past the trainers, get a wad of paper towels from the bathroom, and purposefully wipe down the handles, as the responsible gym-goer you are. Anyway, with your iPod off you can hear what they’re talking about and it’s something about their hours or their quads, or both, but anyway it’s not about you.

At least your conscience (and the elliptical machine) is clean.

So after you’re done with your comic approximation of stretching, you return to the locker room, where Next Door Locker Lady is just emerging from the steam room and she says hello. Oh god do you have to talk with her now? Sweet Moses, do you have to make small talk when you’re both naked?

After a quick retreat to the showers and subsequent drying, dressing, etc, you head to the elevator. Standing at the elevator is a cadre of seven-foot-tall, confident athletic types, all dressed in revealing workout costumes. Undoubtedly they Take It to the Max on a daily basis, right after they Push It to the Extreme. And you have to stand among them, with your workout clothes in a plastic shopping bag. The group includes the "your money is not worth the effort" salesperson and the trainer who had been staring at you over at The Cardiac Center. No.

You duck into the stairwell and head down the stairs.

And you set off the alarms.

While racing back up the stairs, you see the sign, cleverly angled so that you can’t read it as you head down the stairs: DO NOT GO DOWN THE STAIRS ALARM WILL SOUND. You get back to the elevator, and there they all are, looking at you. “Ha ha!” you say. “That sure woke me up!” No one says anything.

Anxiety: returned!

A house! A house for us!

I haven’t told you about our new house! And it’s all God’s fault.

I have, in the past couple of weeks, found myself newly fearful of the Lord’s wrath. My God, it seems, is a vengeful God, replacing the God who compelled my parents to purchase the Barbie Dream Boat or the God who made sure my ex-boyfriend didn’t get a date to the prom. This God will take away our pretty house if he hears me bragging about it too much. He will send armies of termites into our pretty house’s support beams, and not even joists of steel will keep our (pretty) shelter from tumbling down upon the earth, and the ancient but lovely windows will shatter upon the ground, and mine enemies will rejoice, yea verily.

That said, I couldn’t wait until we had closed on the place to share our news, so I decided that God does not bother himself with blogs.

But enough about my petty God. We have a house! Here's how it went: we saw the listing, fell instantly and completely in love, decided it was too pretty for us to deserve, visited and were depressed because it was so pretty and it would undoubtedly go to someone nicer and better-looking, worried that the neighborhood is too sketchy, fell into an even deeper depression, were put in touch with a couple of residents of said neighborhood (thanks to my blog readers! My nice blog readers!), were reassured that the area is not at all sketchy, worried about the school, found out that the school is great, found out there were nine other bidders, freaked out, made the best offer we could, and here we are. A house! Us! We have a house! It’s a four-bedroom (FOUR!) and it has two sunrooms (TWO!) and an enclosed porch (AN!) and my god, but we love it.

We were fairly certain that someone (God) would take our house away from us because it’s so nice and so pretty pretty, but so far even the inspector couldn’t scare us away. We were certain he would take one look and say, “But these walls—they’re made of taffy! And the windows are just cling-wrap stapled into some lincoln logs!” and then we would cry and move into our nearby friend’s garage. It’s a two-car garage. Maybe we would like it.

Which is not to say that there aren’t issues with the house. It’s been relatively well maintained, but it’s over 90 years old. Also it’s probably teeming with ghosts. I was hoping the inspector would also check for ghosts, but he didn’t respond to my hints. I asked him, “Does it feel, you know, crowded in here?” and he said yes, why don’t you step outside.

Beyond the families of ghosts, there’s a tiny bit of water damage, a smidgen of termite damage, the chimney needs some work, there’s some creative wiring, and also the backyard is a swamp. On the other hand, we paid about $40K less than we thought we would.

Home ownership, I have learned, means you have to know stuff. Two weeks ago, if you had used words like “soffit” and “fascia” and “downspouts” and “garage,” I would have said, “I’ve heard of this ‘garage’, but about those other things, whuuuuh?” And now I’m tossing these terms around like I know what I’m talking about, because soon I’m pretty sure I will know! By gum, I’m learning!

In closing, let me say that if you have to call a contractor whose last name is Schwalbenberg, it’s probably a good idea if immediately beforehand you and your spouse don’t periodically cry out SCHWALBENBERRRG at each other or ask each other “If I asked you to hold my Schwalbenberg, would you still love me?” Because then? You’ll call Schwalbenberg, and while you’re leaving a message you’ll snort helplessly with laughter as you try to say his name and then you’ll have to hang up and call back and leave a message with a slightly different voice.

SCHWALBENBERG!

I'm back! But now I'm leaving.

I know! I’m all, “I love you, baby,” and then I go and disappear. For a week! No, eight days!

It’s not that I don’t love you, it’s just—it’s me.

My mind is not working right these days. I seem to be afflicted with the particular brand of insanity that occurs when you spend your weekends trudging through crappy house after crappy house and then finding the one house you like and then bidding on it and then not getting it and also you’re preparing to leave the country for six days. Wait, where are you going? Denmark? Finland? Close enough.

I’m trying to juggle way more things than a person can reasonably be expected to juggle, and I’m not a good juggler. Really. I have serious coordination issues. Meanwhile I have this little boy here with me whose idea of hilarity is to sing, over and over, “Dinah won’t you blow/Dinah won’t you blow/Dinah won’t you blow your BUTT BUTT BUTT.”

Which actually is pretty funny.

Henry has really had it up to here with me. So what else can you do when you have a crazy mother but insist that you go RIGHT NOW to see the crazy dancers?

And after you’re done admiring the craziness of the crazy dancers, you go to the Egyptian Wing, where you tell your mother all about how the mummies are wrapped-up people who have been wrapped up by other mummies. Or mommies? Unclear.

And then you make a ruckus in the “echo room,” which is actually a room full of Rodins, most of which don’t appear to be enjoying the ruckus one bit.

My next post will be from Amsterdam. Six days without Henry and Scott and Charlie the Dog.

Can I handle it? Will I never want to return? We shall see.