At the end of February Emily and I completed a journey begun just after we found out Erin was moving in: we finished the remodel of our house and moved in.

Now, some people might think three years is a long time to be remodeling a house that was perfectly livable to begin with. And those people are right. And they can stop talking now because they are not making me feel good about this at all.

There is a very long story behind the gap in time between our purchase of the house and finally moving in. The story is so long, in fact, that it resulted in our “temporary” apartment being the place I’ve lived the longest in my entire life.

But because the apartment was temporary (it was temporary from the day we moved in four and a half years ago) we had a strange sort of attitude toward it:

“Ah, no sense in hanging those pictures. We’ll be getting a house soon.”

“No, no sense in buying a mattress for that frame. We’ll be getting a house soon.”

“No, no sense in buying a crib for Erin. We’ll be moving into our house soon; we want to decorate her room first.”

“No, no sense in buying a crib for Adrian. We’ll be moving into our house soon; who wants to assemble then disassemble a crib that closely together?”

The apartment was always temporary, and we treated it as such. We had temporary solutions and workarounds to problems (tacking up a blanket on the window in the bedroom to make the room darker for the baby instead of installing a blackout shade) and we saw no point whatsoever in organizing our lives, especially after the kids were born: why organize what they are going to thrash and that you are going to be moving in a few months swear to God it’s only going to be a few months now please.

It was temporary, and impersonal, and weirdly home, and weirdly alien. We lived in that complex for four and a half years and it took two of those years to meet our downstairs neighbours. We never really met anyone else, either. Why bother, when you are only going to be there for another few months.

It was always just another few months.

But now, we’re in the house. We hadn’t even moved into the house and we already knew the people who would be living on one side of us; we met the other couple the day after we moved.

Pictures are being hung, postcards are being tacked to walls, mirrors are going up, books are being organized, rules are being instituted for the preservation of the order and maintenance of the house.

Being in the house is also saving the environment. While in the apartment, see, I’d separate out the recycling into a different trash can, but it’s not like we had a bunch of room for receptacles: it was trash, and recycling (vaguely), and that was it. I had some naive idea about sorting the recycling every week down at the dumpster where the paper/can/cardboard containers were. But it never happened. Since most of our recycling was in the form of plastic bottles and aluminum cans I used to just haul that load downstairs and toss it in the “cans/bottles” container and pat myself on the back for being such a good environmentalist.

Ha.

One day I received a passive-aggressive note on my door from the trash company (how they knew it was me still eludes me) telling me that I was recycling badly and to start doing it right or else. They thought they were helping the environment, I suppose. But they didn’t reckon with The Most Stubborn Man In The World.

See, The Most Stubborn Man In The World sees a note like that and says “Oh yeah? Well you and you’re damned environment can go to Hell, trash man.” And then instead of one can for trash and the other for recycling, all of a sudden The Most Stubborn Man In The World has two trash cans. Bonus.

At the house, though, I have my own recycling sorter, with one side for paper and the other for cans/bottles. It’s right outside my kitchen door. And the trash can is so small that I have to recycle or I’ll get charged extra for not being able to fit all my trash in the rollaway can.

See? And now The Most Stubborn Man In The World (who was also the Worst Member Of The Green Party In The World) has no excuse. World saved.

Thanks, house.

Erin has her own room now. Adrian has his own room now. The cat has his own room now. We have a garage and it’s surprisingly already full of crap we need to get rid of (and I have no idea how we fit it all into a two-bedroom apartment in the first place). I now understand garage sales.

I’ve been taking power tools to things, and getting propane for the grill (why bother refilling the propane tank when we’ll be in the house soon?) and finding out the dryer doesn’t work and figuring out that having laminate and tile floors throughout the place is much harder (and colder) on my toesy-woesies than carpet. I had to buy slippers to place by the front door.

I’ve also been a little stunned at how quickly dirt shows up on hard floor surfaces like laminate and tile. And then I realized that it’s not that they get dirty any faster than carpet, but that carpet just hides it all deep down to jump out at you when you are rolling around on it. And then…ew. Hard floors forever, mommy-huggers. I like to see my enemy.

The house is warm, because it’s insulated and doesn’t have a big gap under the front door to let all the hot air out (or the hot air in, if it’s summer), and why would we go to the trouble of sealing windows and doors in the apartment when we won’t be here for another winter/summer, right?

There’s an apricot tree in my backyard. And my neighbour has lemons dropping into my yard for me to steal. There’s a shed out back that’s full of spiders and an old washing machine. Do you want an old washing machine? I also have a gas dryer that may or may not work (and an electric one that definitely doesn’t).

My lawn is gone to Hell. The weeds took over long ago. Three years ago we said “Why do landscaping when they’re just going to be tearing the house up and ruining the yard anyway during the remodel? We’ll be done in a few months, so it can wait.” And then, every spring since we’ve had to do some serious weeding at a house we didn’t live in because the city would leave a little note saying “You aren’t allowed to grow your own rainforest in your front yard. Especially one that only has dandelion trees. Get on it.”

There are many projects left in this “finished” house, because it’s not so much “finished” as it is “as done as it needs to be for us to sleep there”. We’ll be working on it until we move again. We’ll never get out of it, financially, what we’ll have put in. There are a lot of reasons for that, in the long story, and only part of it is because of the housing market crash.

But Erin and Adrian finally have a neighbourhood, one that we envisioned three years ago.

It will take a while for this new place to feel like home, especially with all of the strange feelings I have about it. During the past three years I’ve hated that house. I’ve fantasized about burning it, about accidents making it unlivable, about natural disasters and acts of God. It’s been the most draining experience. The house is the cause of “if only” thoughts and wishes to go back in time and stop ourselves from buying in the first place. Sometimes it felt like standing at the edge of a cliff with a badly made parachute on your back being given the option to jump to my possible death, or to have the parachute taken away and be pushed to my certain death.

As I hang things on walls that sat in storage for three or four years in our “temporary” apartment I can forget about those old, dark thoughts for a while. The house starts to feel like home.

Soon it will feel more like home than even the place I barely lived, though for four and a half years.

I need to get my lawn in order. Anybody know a guy?

(Not pictured, above, House.)

I wrote a post nearly two years ago about raising a daughter and my worries about it. I re-post it now because it’s still worth worrying about. And I like that I used to try really hard to be good at blogging.

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Sophie

My great fear as a parent is that I will fail. No, that’s too trite. My great fear is that despite an intellectual commitment to raising my children in as thoughtful, respectful, joyous and diligent a manner as possible, I will instead harm them with those thoughts and beliefs that remain hidden from the world, and even from myself; the submerged opinions formed in my own childhood that have long since been consciously rejected, but which perhaps persist, infecting my healthy parenting with a malady of anachronism.

This is Sophie:

My wife and I call her "Sophie the twenty dollar giraffe", because even though she is a fairly inexpensive rubber toy in her native France, once imported her price skyrockets.

One cannot be a good (read: slightly snobby and keeping up with the Joneses) parent on the San Francisco Peninsula unless one has purchased Sophie. She is an excellent teething toy, and babies love her. Erin loved chewing on Sophie so much that when she lost her at dinner we immediately purchased another.

That’s Sophie, the forty dollar giraffe.

We spent the money in part because it helped when Erin was teething, but we also spent the money because Erin liked Sophie. I want to give Erin the things that she likes. But sometimes giving her the things she likes makes me feel guilty. For instance, she loves to push her own stroller around. And this is wonderful, and adorable, and also not always a possibility. But in those instances when I’ve taken her stroller from her, for whatever reason, she has grown very upset with me, and she shows me this face:

Which breaks my heart. And so occasionally I’ll give in, and let her push it anyway. This always makes me feel guilty. As though I am spoiling her by letting her have the things that she wants so desperately. And then I wonder about this feeling of guilt, and whether it’s legitimate or not. And I trace it, correctly or not, to a chapter of Rousseau’s Emile that I remember reading in the 9th grade. It’s an Enlightenment treatise on education that devotes only one chapter to educating girls (an oversight Mary Wollestonecraft was very quick to criticize). In this chapter Rousseau introduces Sophie, and discusses the proper way to educate a girl who is destined to be Emile’s companion, wife, and servant. And one of the key elements to raising this girl, doomed by her sex to the life Rousseau imagines for her, is to create her as a passive companion:

"It is necessary that the one [Emile] have the power and the will; it is enough that the other [Sophie] should offer little resistance."

My deep fear is that my guilty feelings about possibly spoiling my daughter are influenced by some archaic notion that what Rousseau is saying is true: that women need to be raised differently than men, because they have some nature that differentiates them in a relevant way. This passage from Rousseau has stuck with me for 16 years, peering down from my shoulder like my own devil; stalking me like a mad killer of dreams:

"Girls should be vigilant and hardworking, but this is not enough by itself; they should be accustomed to annoyances early on. This misfortune, if such it be, is inherent in their sex, and they will never escape from it, unless to endure much more cruel sufferings. For their entire life they will have to submit to the most continual and most severe annoyances, those of proper decorum. They must be trained to bear constraint from the first, so that it costs them nothing, to master their own fantasies in order to submit to the will of others."

And every time I think about taking Erin’s stroller away I wonder if I am just buying into Rousseau’s line: that I need to raise my daughter to be accustomed to disappointment; that I need to make her docile in the face of my authority, even when I exercise that authority whimsically and arbitrarily. And yet, even knowing that this might be the reason for my guilt, I cannot help but think I might spoil her. And that is the real, damning, myopic legacy that I cannot shake.

So, I fear that at the end of the day I am not the man I claim to be, that I am not the father I intend to be, and that I am not the parent I ought to be. Because I only have a one child, and that child is a daughter, I have the fear that I would raise my son differently. I fear that if, in the end, I have a son that I am going to make a choice, a horrible, terrible, and frightful choice. One that will save one child and doom another, because I am entirely within the power of some other entity.

While William Styron’s Sophie has to face this choice because of a sadistic Nazi doctor, my fear is that I will be forced to make my own choice because of some lingering, traitorous, and anachronistic ideas about differences between men and women. What I hope is that as much guilt as I feel about indulging her I will likewise feel about indulging him, giving the lie to this entire fear I’ve now spent ages and pages articulating. But until I have a son this can never be put to the test. And if I never have a son I don’t think I will know for sure that I am anything better than the misguided, bigoted figure that I fear I will turn out to be.

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It’s still too early to tell.

Guess what? No one is too fat to fly. But airlines don’t care. They have asked a badly designed question that presumes, in its premise, that the business model they follow of maximizing souls on planes is the one that will keep them in the black. Maybe they’re correct. That doesn’t mean they’re right.

When I say “no one is too fat to fly” I don’t mean that every person of any size can travel by any plane and sit in any seat. But the phrasing of the question “How fat is too fat to fly?” implies that the only thing of importance is the size of the person…not the size of the seat.

Bigger seats are possible. I have one. I have a big comfy chair in my living room. I have a couch in my living room. I’ve seen many places to sit that are bigger than modern airline seats. So the issue surely isn’t that the people are of the wrong type or kind to be able to travel by air. The issue is rather that the seats are the wrong type or kind to transport anyone outside of a certain body type.

But blaming the seats also isn’t fair. I mean, the seats didn’t do anything. They were just sitting there, waiting to accommodate a nice, slim ass. Why are they the only seats on the plane? I think they’re lonely. I think they want to be around seats of all stripes, creeds, and colours. They tire of homogeneity.

Someone has decided that airplanes shouldn’t carry seats that are large enough to accommodate passengers above an arbitrary size limit. Someone made that choice. They may not have been thinking “Screw you, fatties!” when they did it, and in fact they probably just thought “More customers!!” But we are allowed to ask if the airlines are doing the right thing in addition to asking if they are doing the profitable thing.

The airlines might feel that so long as the chosen path is the profitable one there is nothing left to discuss: if some people are not, therefore, customers then so what? Who said a business has a responsibility to make it possible for every single person to patronize their business? Is it a problem if a business says “We do not offer a service that suits your needs?” Bars don’t cater to babies, but we don’t cry “foul” over that. The grocery store generally doesn’t sell cars. How ridiculous is it to imagine that the grocery store is saying, venomously and contemptuously,“If you are looking for a car, take your business elsewhere, driver.” Why is there outrage over the business decision to not install larger seats on airplanes? It’s capitalism: be an innovator and start a business that caters to larger people; make your millions! See, the airlines have no responsibility here.

But…many people kinda, sorta, somewhat feel like the airlines do have a responsibility to accommodate larger passengers. Why? Isn’t the argument-from-capitalism enough to show these Apologists for Obesity that they haven’t a chubby leg to stand on?

Well….look. Bars don’t cater to babies because there’s an overwhelming public interest involved in keeping babies sober. They have no off-switch, and if you let them drink in public places they’ll definitely be the ones hitting on your girlfriend and throwing up in the peanut bowl. So, although in a way bars have to say that babies are somehow “less than”, we choke back our moral outrage for the sake of the public weal. We do not, except in very extreme and douchey cases, think that the airlines are doing some kind of public service by not installing bigger seats: we don’t think that by kicking Kevin Smith off the plane Southwest has contributed positively, importantly, and most of all intentionally to a conversation about public health.  (Note that this is different from the view that the airline is doing a public service by not permitting passengers of a certain size from sitting in the seats that are already installed. That can arguably be considered a safety concern. But the decision not to install larger seats, have wider aisles, etc… is not a safety concern. It is a profit concern.)

In the case of the grocery store, the businesses aren’t actually saying to people who want to buy cars “You are a different kind of human being, and it wouldn’t be profitable to cater to your needs, driver.” They are instead saying “Cars are a different product than the ones we’d like to sell.” Do you see? In the airline case it really isn’t the product that varies, and has determined the attitude of the airlines toward a group of people, it is the people, something about them as persons, that has determined the attitude of the airlines: customers are people of a certain size, because catering only to those people maximizes souls on the plane. But we can, should, and have said to businesses in the past that they need to consider people the same as far as their money goes: a Black woman’s money is as good at the lunch counter as a white man’s, we say, and we don’t care what accepting her money along with his does to your bottom line (if, for instance, the rest of the customers stop coming because, *gasp*, the place is integrated.) We have familiarity at least with a principle that permits us to vote with more than our wallets when it comes to discriminatory policies that, we think, unfairly select a portion of the population as non-customers. We can, have, and should compel businesses to place dignity before profit.

The real question (the one that needs to be asked of the airlines) is “What is it about your profit-policy that makes it different enough from the lunch-counter case (or other cases of unacceptable discrimination-for-profit) that you can consider dollars ahead of dignity and exclude the overweight segment of the population from your customer base by not equipping airliners with some bigger seats?”

This question puts the responsibility for justifying discrimination squarely where it belongs: with the airlines. The other question, “How fat is too fat to fly?” places the responsibility for excepting oneself from a policy on the shoulders of the larger-sized consuming public.

Maybe the answer to the question won’t be one that most people will like. Maybe there is more than an arbitrary or feckless reason to not install larger seats on airliners or design the seating layout so that aisles are wide enough to safely accommodate larger passengers. But at least we’ll be asking the right question, and one that respects the dignity of all, even if we don’t like the answer.

Asking “How fat is too fat to fly?” is the wrong question. We need to be better than that, and we need to demand that the businesses that serve our practical needs are doing so in a way that also reflects our considered, genuine, ethical standards.