My Nest Isn't Empty, It Just Has More Closet Space: The Amazing Adventures of an Ordinary Woman (16 page)

I just went on a girls’ night out, or a GNO, and it got me thinking. How did that term, and even its acronym, enter the vernacular?

Why do we specify when it’s a girls’ night out, as opposed to a boys’ night out? And is it because a boys’ night out is the norm, so we need to specify when it’s a girls night out, which is, what, bizarre?

We all got dressed up for each other and even took pictures. Again, I doubt that guys dress up for a boys’ night out, and they leave the flip cameras at home. When girls go out, it’s not just dinner, it’s prom.

By way of background, eight of us went out to a restaurant in NYC, hosted by my great friend Robin, who has an apartment in the city. She brought two of her friends, one of whom is single and one who isn’t, and I joined them with Daughter Francesca and my assistant Laura, who’s married.

I specify because we spent the first hour of our girls’ night out talking about boys, and whether we have them or not. I’m betting that on a boys’ night out, they talk about playoffs.

The second hour of the night we spent talking about how we never go out, why we have so much fun when we go out, how we should go out more, why do we need an excuse to go out, and isn’t it crazy that it takes five weeks of planning for girls to go out? We couldn’t even have the experience without talking incessantly about it while we were having it.

Which is when I realized that the Heisenberg principle is completely wrong.

As you may know, the Heisenberg principle holds that an experience is necessarily altered by its being observed, but I disagree. Heisenberg never went on a GNO, and his principle doesn’t apply when the people having the experience are the ones observing it, and they’re still talking about it as they have it, all at the same time. For girls, the talk
is
the experience, especially when margaritas are present.

Mine was pineapple.

Which could have been a mistake.

I asked for a pineapple margarita as soon as I sat down, not because I’m a practiced drunk but because I’d been looking forward to it for two weeks, which gives you an idea of my social life. I wanted the pineapple margarita because I remembered that I’d had a terrific one once with Francesca. But the waiter looked at me funny and said they’d try to make me one, and she reminded me that it was a pineapple martini that I’d had that time and there might not be such a thing as a pineapple margarita.

Oh.

This mattered not at all by the third pineapple margarita, which tasted great because it was yellow.

And whether it was because of the alcohol or the estrogen, what happened then was that we girls’-night-outers got to laughing a little loud.

Or rather, one of us did.

Me.

Some men at the bar turned around at the noise, but my back was to them, so I didn’t see. I bet they were turning around to look at Robin, who is drop-dead gorgeous, but she’s so modest that she assumed it was because of our (read, my) loudness, and she said:

“Sorry, we’re celebrating.” Then Robin pointed at me. “She’s getting married.”

Wha?

Huh?

Me?

This sent all of us into new gales of laughter, and I thought it was so funny, but then I wondered:

Why do I need a reason to be loud?

Men don’t need a reason to be loud.

Girls should have an equal right to bad manners.

And I wasn’t loud anyway.

The pineapple margaritas were loud, not me.

They don’t get out enough.

They need an MNO, poor things.

I’ve always looked forward to decorating my own place. When my mother and stepfather parted ways, my mom conducted a massive home makeover. Gone was the compromised style of a marriage; here was the décor rebellion of a divorcée. She painted the all-white kitchen orange, reupholstered the red tartan sofa in a golden honeycomb, and covered the walls with rainbow Peter Max paintings. When she was finished, the house was sunny, feminine, and a little crazy—in other words, it was
her.

As much as I love her, I was excited to live in a place that was me.

However, decorating your first apartment is not as easy as I thought it would be.

First problem: my taste is better than my budget. I envisioned a plush couch with a funky mismatched ottoman. A shop down the street has the most adorable vintage glass chandeliers that’d be great over my table. And a giant, floor-length mirror would really open up the narrow entrance hall.

All good ideas, stylish even.

But my wallet is less Crate & Barrel, more Craigslist. And sadly, IKEA does not have much by way of vintage glass chandeliers.

No use crying over financial realities. I’ve found ways around pesky money problems. No, I am not advocating theft or credit-card debt. I turned to something arguably more dangerous: eBay.

I figured eBay could be the way to get unique decorative pieces on the cheap. What could go wrong?

First, there were the little piggy salt and pepper shakers. They looked so cute in the pictures, a little boy pig and a little girl one, hand-painted, and authentic! Authentic what, I wasn’t sure. But they were $3.99 and the auction was going to end in two minutes! So I leapt into action and—sold! For $3.99.

I was the only bidder.

Maybe because, as became clear when they arrived, each was less than an inch and a half long.

They were salt and pepper thimbles.

Shipping was three times the original price, so it wasn’t as cost-effective as I had hoped, and, considering that I had selected this particular set from a list of over five hundred, not particularly time-effective either.

Okay, so now I try to get my hands on something before I buy it.

But this hands-on approach took on an all-too-literal meaning when I realized that most of the furniture I could afford carried this ominous warning:

“Assembly required.”

Or its more treacherous cousin, “some assembly required.”

“Some assembly required” translates in English to: just as much assembly required, now with fewer directions.

Fine, no problem. I got out my tool-kit-for-chicks (pink-handled tools, a gift from Mom), put on a Talking Heads playlist (because I was raised right), pulled on my Converse sneaks, and tied a bandana around my head.

Manual labor is better when you accessorize.

Turns out, building furniture was fun!

For the first thirty minutes.

For the next several hours, I had only my feminist self-righteousness to keep me going. But keep me going it did, and I accepted this effort as a rite of passage for being young and on your own.

The MVP of any city dweller’s tool kit is, without a doubt, the measuring tape. All of these apartments are an amalgam of tiny, weird spaces—a skinny alley of a galley kitchen, or a sleeping “nook,” meaning “closet.”

Design gurus love to tell you to use dual-functioning furniture to save space, like it’s the easiest thing in the world. And initially, I was with them. My ottoman is essentially an upholstered box that can hold blankets, and if you flip the top to the hard surface side, it doubles as a small coffee table.

Yes, I felt very clever when I bought it.

But storing my decorative throw blanket wasn’t my main space problem. I still have a kitchen with no shelves. I still have a bedroom that can’t fit a dresser. And while I’m trying to be innovative, I’m starting to resent those dopey ideas for multi-purpose living.

No, I do not want my oven to double as a pantry. Nah, I don’t think my dog’s metal crate makes for an “industrial” end table. No, I don’t think a bookshelf becomes a “secretary” desk simply by putting a stool in front of it.

I’d rather have no room to walk than sit on a barstool with my feet on the paperbacks.

There are so many decisions that go into decorating your first place. Recently, I decided to buy bookshelves. I found the perfect ones, just narrow and shallow enough to fit in my bedroom and still leave room for me to get in and out of bed. They were just what I’d been looking for. There was only one thing left to decide:

What color?

The options were white or pink. But it’s not a soft pink. It’s a juicy, watermelon pink, a sunset-over-South-Beach pink—and lacquered, no less! A little much, perhaps. White, on the other hand, is classic. White shelves are versatile, at home in the kitchen or in the bedroom. White would match my bed frame. Nothing in my apartment is pink.

It’s kind of a no-brainer.

They’re delivering my flamingo pink bookshelves next week.

The joy of living on my own is I have only myself to please, and I like pink. It makes me happy.

Did you forget I was raised in an orange kitchen?

I’m trying to remember when food became medicine. Because everybody knows that food is love.

And comfort.

And a reward.

The idea that food is medicine might have started with all this talk about antioxidants, which evidently aren’t things that prevent rust, but things you have to eat every day, like a magic pill that wards off all manner of dreaded diseases. Then I started hearing about free radicals, which was another thing to be avoided, although to a person of a certain age, a free radical is Abbie Hoffman or Jerry Rubin.

Young people will have to look up these references. I suggest the
World Book Encyclopedia,
now housed under glass at the Smithsonian.

Bring a quill.

Anyway, I wanted to learn about antioxidants and free radicals, because I don’t want to die or get rusty, so I bought a book about superfoods, which explained that blueberries and beans were better for you than potato chips and popcorn.

Who knew?

I studied the book, which says that you should try to eat the superfoods every day, like more magic pills, and it listed the good things in each superfood.

Or maybe the super things.

For example, I learned that blueberries have magnesium, turkey has zinc, oats have manganese, wild salmon has selenium, walnuts have arginine, and tomatoes have chromium.

Wow!

I would have thought that only cars had chromium.

And batteries had selenium.

And magnesium is something in an Etch A Sketch.

And zinc is something you smear on your nose to prevent sunburn.

I’ve never even heard of arginine, which clearly belongs on the periodic table, under the chemical symbol TaStes TeRriBle.

So now when I plan a meal, I don’t think about what tastes good or what I feel like eating. I ignore all my cravings and all the dishes that make me feel happy. No food in a TV commercial tempts me, because it’s guaranteed that nothing in Kentucky Fried Chicken has chromium. Instead I select dosages of superfoods and rotate them around for a week of supermeals.

Super?

Which brings me to quinoa.

A friend of mine was raving to me recently about quinoa, saying how good it is for you and how much protein and fiber it has, so I went immediately to the store to get some. I couldn’t find any because I was looking for something spelled like “keen-wa,” and all they had was something clearly pronounced like “quinn-noah.” The salesperson told me that quinn-noah was really keen-wa, and who am I to complain, because try spelling Scottoline.

Plus I’m getting the idea that if you can’t pronounce it, it definitely has antioxidants, and none of its radicals will be free.

Free Angela.

Again, look it up.

So I take home the box of quinoa, boil it up, and dump it onto a plate, where it mounds like snow. And not white, new-fallen snow, but second-day snow, after the plow has gone by, shoving it up against your car.

Yummy.

It tastes like nothing, or maybe it tastes like antioxidants, or maybe just like rust. I dress it up with sautéed tomatoes, which ward off diseases. And garlic, which wards off a sex life.

So far, so good.

And I told myself that it didn’t matter if I didn’t like the quinoa, because I’m not allowed to like my food anymore anyway, and in time I got a cookbook all about quinoa, which taught me that it was some kind of grain, discovered by an American guy who went to Bolivia, because then it grew only in the Andes.

Which I thought was a mint, but back to the story.

And although the American guy brought quinoa seeds back to the United States to try to grow them in Colorado, he still imports the seeds from Bolivia because we had the correct altitude but not the correct latitude. Then I realized that I didn’t have the correct attitude.

I want to be open to new foods, even ones that double as medicine.

So I tried to change the way I think about antioxidants and free radicals.

And I sprayed a little lemon on the quinoa, and it wasn’t so bad.

For old snow.