Thursday, March 9, 2006
I realized something this morning which startled me. We were watching Lady and the Tramp last night, and in the film a man and woman have a large (I think) Victorian house with a large front and back yard. I realized this morning that whenever I saw that house in the film I thought to myself, "I'll never ever own a home with that much space!" or "By San Francisco standards, and fixed up the right way, that house could easily be home to at least 20 people!" and this latter thought is really the wrong thing to think anyhow. In this film, this is how people lived—and were supposed to live—in Victorian homes. In our Victorian flat apartment on Capp Street, our bed was next to what was supposed to have been the living room fireplace. The living room was probably what used to be the sitting parlor. The upstairs and downstairs were split into separate apartments. The kitchen, bathroom, pantry, and closets were cruel (oh so cruel) afterthoughts squeezed into the remaining space. I have a strange vision of someday leaving San Francisco, buying a home somewhere, and then becoming so paralyzed at the thought of having so much more space that I fall into a coma for years until they figure out how to freeze people and I get frozen and I sleep for decades or possibly centuries before they thaw me and pull me out of the coma and as I get up from the table I see hundreds of other people around me doing the exact same thing—getting up from a table—and I eventually learn that they all left San Francisco around when I did and they all bought houses with 900 square feet of space—or even 1,000 square feet!—and they all were paralyzed just like me. And here the vision splits—I can't decide which way it will turn out, but it's either—together we build a single, giant, multi-billion-square-foot Victorian house and we all live in it—or—we build a vast city of rows and rows and rows of giant Victorian houses—each one is at least 5,000 square feet and has several miles of surrounding gardens—and a single person or couple lives in each one. Either way, it's a beautiful ending. Breakfast: yogurt, cereal, orange juice. Helped Lucia install an imaging unit into a laser printer, tweaked backups, poster work for Cindy, link checking, updated photo credits for Update from the Dean for Susie and Steve, printed a floor plan for Chris, handed off the first final for Cindy's poster project to FedExKinkos. Spent a lot of time trying to get the tabloid color inkjet printer to print correctly. We don't use this printer often, so as inkjets do, the inks don't come out reliably if you let it sit for long periods with no printing. Lunch: double cheddar cheeseburger and fries at desk. Patrick did a great job today cleaning up the "garage" so that I could install some shelving on one wall. He also hung some art in the living room and bathroom. Dinner at home by myself: turkey burgers. Worked on Corinna's website.