Why Judge Judy Hates my Toaster Oven

Last week, Matt and I were driving home from the store in my new city of Ann Arbor, Michigan. The backseat was full of all the new things we needed for our apartment, well, his apartment that had now— with the recent addition of all my clothing, kitchen items, and cat—become ours. We’d bought a carload of groceries, various grooming products, cat food and litter, and a brand new toaster oven. I was already feeling a little weepy about the toaster oven, not just because it was the first ever toaster oven I’d owned and toaster ovens are incredibly useful (did you know, according to the owner’s manual, you can bake a whole personal pizza in there?) but because it was our toaster oven. The first appliance we’ve ever bought together.

In the five years that we have dated, Matt and I have shared a lot of things, but we’ve always been careful to keep what was ours separate. The tabby cat is his, the calico cat is mine. His blue 2003 Volkswagon Passat, my black 2003 Volkswagon Passat. (This is purely a coincidence. We had identical cars before we met, but yes, it’s okay if you want to vomit a little.) Even when we lived together two years ago, we had two of everything like Karen from the Babysitter’s Club Little Sister books who owned duplicate items for each house of her divorced parents: two dressers, two woks, two separate bottles of laundry detergent (Mine was normal, his he made in the lab). But as we drove home I looked back at the big cardboard box that contained our new jointly owned toaster oven and couldn’t help but fall in love a little with the appliance all taped up in its blue box. I couldn’t wait to get it home, set it up, and make ourselves some symbolic toast. It was then that Judge Judy came on the radio and said these words: “Newly cohabitating couples should never, ever buy anything together.” Judy snapped me out of my toaster oven delirium. I’d been so happy thinking of all the things we were going to make in that toaster oven (Seriously, you can just put a raw chicken breast in there), but this seemed like a sign that couldn’t be ignored. After so many years of careful separation, were we making the wrong choice? Should I hand Matt over the 13 dollars for my half of the toaster oven? But then I thought about all the other typical “mistakes” Matt and I have made in the last few years. We’ve basically done every single thing they tell you not to do in a relationship. 

Don’t live together with roommates: we lived in a three bedroom, one bathroom house with two other roommates and three cats. Considering the cats’ litterbox was next to the toilet, that was seven living things sharing one bathroom. 

Don’t try making a long-distance relationship work: Matt committed to living in Michigan for five years before I was done with my MFA program in North Carolina. 

Don’t break up and get back together: From November to February of this last year, Matt and I were, for the first time in five years, not together. 

And let’s be honest, there’s a reason you’re not supposed to do these things in a relationship, because they are all awful. Living with roommates is awkward and stressful, even if you really like them, and there is no room for anybody to put things in the fridge. Long distance relationships are categorically the worst; it’s hard to feel the romance when you are staring into each others' eyes via a video chat that keeps freezing your face in weird positions. And breaking up was the worst of all. But we made all those mistakes, and yet, here we were, unloading our joint toaster oven from the car.

Matt is the only person I’ve dated for longer than a few months, so I’m not really a relationship expert, and also I’m only 25 so I will probably laugh heartily at all my silly, naive, beliefs about functional relationships when I remember this blog in my 50s, flying home in my personal hovercraft, but I think it’s not really the mistakes you make that doom or make a good relationship, it’s how you fix them. When Matt and I broke up, it would have been easy to get caught up in all the hundreds of mistakes we have made over the last 5 years, but instead we talked, we listened, we compromised, and we moved on. I mean, we also cried and yelled and occasionally angrily hung up on each other (or angrily signed off Facebook chat, which is a far less satisfying way to end an argument), but in general, we worked hard to make things better. I think it’s because we like each other. And we genuinely care that the other person is happy. And we want to be together. For me, those are the important things, not whether or not we bought a toaster oven together or a coffee table (Matt lived in this apartment for a year without a coffee table and didn't even mind, which I think should be a condition registered in the DSM). I know relationships are more complicated than that, I know we are only 25 and 26 and there are a million other things we will have to deal with that will make our relationship harder as time goes on, but right now here we are: one wok, one car, one bottle of normal laundry detergent. And I’m happy with that. So shut up, Judge Judy. I’m going to make some toast. Or maybe a chicken breast.  

In Honor of my 25th Birthday

When I was a kid, 25 was that age that I decided constituted being a real adult. When I thought about being 25, I thought I would have a job. I thought my job might be living among and studying  a pack of lions, inspired by my hero Jane Goodall. I thought I would have traveled the whole world. I thought I would at least have my own horse.  But I thought, in the very basic way that an eight year old can fully interpret their vision of the future, that this would be the age where I was done with the mystifying kid question: What will I be when I grow up? and know in which direction my life was headed, and it would be headed somewhere fantastic. Tomorrow, I will be twenty five. I do not have a real job. I do not own a horse.  The closest I have ever come to infiltrating and gaining the trust of a lion pride was last year when I lived with three housecats. I still have to call my dad to ask how to do things like make a dentist appointment or ask if my house has a pilot light. I am not the twenty five year old that eight year old Lucy imagined, and sometimes I wonder if somewhere she’s watching me, licking the purple Fun Dip stains off her fingers, and shaking her head in disappointment.

There’s a wildness that we all have in childhood that we think we will never lose. We imagine ourselves as adults with this same wildness, because we can’t imagine that it will ever fade. We think that if only we weren’t bonded by bedtime, held hostage by our miniature stature and our limited allowance, that we would be doing better than the adults that we know. We wouldn’t be wasting our time raising families or having jobs or doing anything other than booking plane tickets to Africa to crouch in the grasses of the Serengeti and watch the lionesses lick clean their kill. The worse part about being in our twenties, when we finally get there, is that we remember this feeling with such sharpness. We haven’t forgotten how it feels to not know that this improbable. That we need to pay bills and we need to fill out job applications and the money in our bank accounts is barely enough for a ticket to visit our long distance boyfriends in Michigan, much less a transcontinental plane ride. We feel a constant disappointment that we got the gift of adulthood we always wanted, but we are using our freedom of bedtime to go to bed at ten to wake up for our job at nine. We are using our money to buy gym memberships to melt away the Halloween candy we now feel guilty about consuming. And this side of me, now at 25, the age at which I should be ready to be an adult, is not ready to let go of being wild.

 But there’s another side that eight year old Lucy could not have comprehended. Every day, I work. I work on my writing, my teaching, my lesson planning. I go to dinner with my friends. I tell my boyfriend that I love him and he tells me back. I make a pot of turkey chili. I keep my cat alive. These things are not wild. But as much as eight year old Lucy might roll her eyes, I think it’s actually okay. At 25, I can see the satisfaction adults get in working hard, no matter what it is that they are working towards. I can see why someone might want to get married and have a house and job instead of a pet lion. I don’t know how to change my oil, but I’m willing to learn.

I still hope that one day I’ll travel the world or see a lion somewhere outside of a zoo, or do a million things I couldn’t even imagine when I was eight. But I guess that’s the difference between being eight and thinking about being 25 and actually being 25, I can know that it’s not a milestone, just an age, the same way I turned nine, the same way I will turn 45. Nothing is beginning or ending, there are no requirements. Nobody is welcoming me into adulthood with a beer and a husband and a sudden understanding about why Doonesbury is a funny comic strip. I may not have done everything yet, but I have time. And for now, no matter what eight year old Lucy has to say about it, finishing an essay and taking a nap with a purring housecat is just as satisfying as tracking a lion.

The dog, the squirrels and the ghost

Last week I was visiting my parents at their bed and breakfast in Vermont. I came down one morning and smelled something cooking on the stove. It’s not unusual to come downstairs in the morning at the B and B and find something amazing being made for the guests, caramel banana French toast, apple cheddar quiche, cheese strata, but my mom told me “Oh, this is the dog’s breakfast” and then opened the refrigerator to show me the dogs meals for the week which she had prepared. Chicken, rice, ground beef, pulled beef, and what looked like a very expensive leg of lamb in a red wine reduction sauce. (Okay I made that one up). Then she looked at the dog and asked him which one he would prefer to have for breakfast. She waited a few seconds for the dog to respond (he didn’t.) and then my father declared he wanted the warm ground beef and she dumped it in his bowl, adding a little of the pulled beef on top and whispering, just so the dog could hear, “I added a little pulled beef for you just in case that’s what you wanted.” Meanwhile I sat at the table and ate cold cereal with soymilk and was denied a second cup of coffee. Two years ago, my parents got this West Highland Terrier that they named Sir Francis MacDuff, affectionately nicknamed Mac. It didn’t take long for Mac to be the center of attention around the inn. Despite my parents being home all day, Mac gets sent off every other day to doggie day care, just so he can play with his friends. Every time my dad goes to the store, he comes home with a new toy for Mac. My father recently ordered him a dog-sized kilt imported from Scotland, which he wears proudly to reflect his heritage.

But despite the lavish breakfasts and imported gifts, my mother has a complex relationship with the dog. He doesn’t love her the way he loves my dad, his pack leader. And while he lets her pick him up and cuddle with him, he doesn’t give a lot back in terms of affection. There’s no excitement when she walks into a room the way he lights up, wags his tail, bounces on his hind legs and collapses on the floor for belly rubs like when he sees my dad. The week I was home, my father bought a king sized bed. For thirty years my parents have slept in the same queen sized poster bed, but ever since the dog came around and started nuzzling his way in the middle and sleeping upside down with his little paws in the air, stretching his body as long as it could go, they felt a little cramped. So my father finally caved and bought a king sized bed to replace their thirty year old poster bed. My mother was not happy about this change, after all, it made more sense to her that instead of adjusting the bed, why not make the dog sleep on the floor like, well, a dog. And there are squirrels in the walls of the inn. At night, the squirrels run back and forth through my parents’ bedroom walls and the dog chases them on the outside of the wall, giving his little woof and padding back and forth around the room, keeping my parents up at night. Despite his months spent in obedience school, nothing seemed to stick, most of the time Mac does whatever he wants and at night what he wants to do is bark at the squirrels in the wall.

Meanwhile, I was having trouble sleeping of my own on the other side of the house. My room is haunted. The inn is a 150 year old Victorian mansion and for some reason my room is the one the 150 year old Victorian ghost has decided to frequent. I’m not a huge believer in the spirit world or anything, but I can say with at least 90 percent certainty that there is some type of paranormal activity going on in that region of the house. The cat refuses to go in there for more than two minutes, I once woke up in the middle of the night to find that I was completely unable to see anything, despite the bright moon outside that illuminated the rest of the rooms in the house, and plus, my neighbor told me that an unidentified translucent man with a walker once chased her down the stairs from my room. It’s just something I feel pretty sure about. So while my mother and father were in their room trying to get Mac to stop chasing the squirrels in the walls, I was in my room trying to fall asleep with Netflix on to drown out any clanging of ghostly chains or at least to think about the Lions next victory on Friday Night Lights instead of the angry old man spirit fingers slowly opening the closet door on the opposite side of my room.

“I am the one who feeds him ground beef every morning, and he doesn’t even like me,” my mom complained one day. “Even the dog is a Huber,” she says, using our surname like an adjective. She doesn’t have to explain what she means by this. To her, the word “Huber” represents the qualities all three of her kids and her husband have that she doesn’t share, what she refers to as our “German heritage”: our lack of need for very much physical affection (The Hubers are not huggers), our interiority and tendency not to communicate feelings, our independence and refusal to accept help unless we really, really, really need it. All three of the kids have it and she’s right, somehow my father picked out a dog just like us. My mother always tells me she had no idea any of us would turn out the way we did. “I had this idea of what my kids would be like,” she told me, “but it was nothing like the way you turned out. Sometimes I don’t feel like you’re even my kids, I look at you and think 'who are these people?'” Because of the Huber in me, I don’t take this too personally, but I do wonder what it would be like to give birth to children who turned out nothing like you. I imagine my own life in the future if I gave birth to a bunch of kids who wanted to play a lot of organized sports and loved math. I would feel pretty left out when they broke out the soccer ball or the quadratic equations. And I guess that’s how my mom feels, she kept hoping we’d all turn out differently, that I’d one day want to wear all the Lily Pulitzer-type dresses she kept buying me as a kid, or that the dog would look up and realize she was the one providing him with the freshly cooked ground beef and lather her face with kisses. It just never happened that way.

But my mom isn’t totally right. While I’m there, we go to the fabric store and spend hours looking at prints and talking about sewing projects. We go to the Shelbourne Museum and pore over all the antique medicine bottles in the recreated old fashioned apothecary. We get Vietnamese food twice in one week and both ask for no noodles in our dish, we want to cut back on carbs, but when the waitress bring out dishes with noodles, we shrug, cover them in Sriacha and eat them all anyway. And we share one major thing in common: I’m kind of fed up with the dog, too. He’s more of a Huber than I am, and I’d like to get a little lick on the cheek every once and awhile.

Around three am one night, my dad cracked my door open and I saw him usher Mac into my room. He closed the door behind him and Mac jumped up on the bed with me and curled into a little ball against my leg, unconcerned with spirits, and apparently happy to be banished from the room with the squirrels, relived of his nighttime duties as squirrel watcher. And finally with him there, I switched off the computer, felt his hot breath against my leg, and fell asleep. Everyone was finally at peace, even the ghost, it seemed. Maybe we all need a little more help than we let on.

A Fake Review of The Five Year Engagement That is Really Just About My Life

Last night Matt and I went to see The Five Year Engagement, the new movie written by and starring Jason Segel. This was a pretty important movie for us to see, not only because we’ve seen every single thing Jason Segel has starred in since the tragically short series Freaks and Geeks (We still sometimes have a moment of silence for Undeclared, one of the best shows of all time despite the fact that it only made it halfway through its first season before being cancelled), but because as we’ve long suspected, Jason Segel is apparently following our lives just as closely as we are following his. Here’s what I mean: The Five Year Engagement is about a couple living in San Francisco, Segel’s character (Tom) is a successful chef and his girlfriend Violet (Emily Blunt) is a psychology student, applying for post docs. Segel proposes in the first scene and they begin to plan their wedding, but not long after that Violet receives the news that she’s been accepted to a post doc program…in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Obviously this doesn’t mirror our life exactly, but it comes pretty close. Next year Matt will be moving to Ann Arbor to pursue a doctoral degree in Chemistry and after I finish my creative writing graduate degree in Wilmington, I’ll be following him. I’m not a super successful chef (or a super successful anything), and we aren’t engaged, but the sentiment of the movie hit pretty close to home. The fear of living the Midwest, a place where you have to actually own cold weather clothing, where there are no beaches (everyone I tell this fear to keeps assuring me that there are beaches at Lake Michigan and I keep dramatically rolling my eyes), and where people use the word “pop” instead of “soda”, and the even greater fear of following someone you love somewhere you aren’t sure you want to be with absolutely no plans on what you might be doing once you get there.

And it’s not just us. In our age group, the mid twenty somethings, serious relationships are really hard to maintain. Our lives are essentially just beginning, or at least the parts of our lives where we get to make real decisions about our future. Decisions like what we are going to do, or where we are going to live. The time in our lives when we finally start feeling guilty about spending significant portions of our day watching Love it or List in on HGTV and eating burritos in bed because it’s not really that helpful to our future. But our futures are taking us in all different directions. Matt wants to go to Michigan to be a chemist, and I want to…well, be a writer preferably somewhere that isn’t Michigan. But who is to say whose dream is more important when you’re part of a couple? We come from the nurturing you-can-be-anything encouragement of our parents and the age of both sexes being told to work towards their dreams, no matter the cost. We are brought up our whole lives to think we can be anyone, do anything, and there should be nothing that can slow us down and that’s great. I’m glad that I am the kind of woman who thinks about my career and aspirations before I think about being a wife and a mother, but where does that leave us when it comes time to really decide what we want to do with our lives? What happens when you’re in love with your partner as much as your aspirations, but the two aren’t necessarily in the same place? Which one are you supposed to choose and can you have both?

In the movie, Tom moves with Violet to Michigan and gives up his lucrative and impressive career as a chef in the Bay Area and unable to find work in the Ann Arbor restaurant scene, he ends up putting sandwiches together at the famous Zingerman’s deli. (Side note: The shots of the sandwiches in Zingerman’s were enough to convince me that moving with Matt is probably the right decision). But he doesn’t find the job fulfilling and after a few years, as Violet becomes more successful and his career stays stagnant, he starts to fall apart. The movie is, of course, slightly dramatic. I highly doubt that if I move with Matt to Michigan I will take up hunting and grow a pair of unruly mutton chops, but the sentiment is there. At one point in the movie, when Tom is eating a box of stale donuts and wearing a bunny suit instead of getting dressed, Matt grabbed my hand and didn’t let go. I know we both were thinking the same thing, Dear God don’t let this be what happens to us.

And maybe it will be. When Matt decided to go to Michigan for five years, he made a conscious decision to choose his career over our relationship. Matt never consulted me on whether or not I’d be happy living in Michigan for four years because he already knew this was a dream of his he had to pursue, and that it was up to me to make the decision of whether or not I wanted to come with him. If it came down to it and it was between Matt’s career and our relationship, I have no doubt that he would choose the former.  But I don’t think that is necessarily bad. The truth is, if Matt was the kind of man who waited around for me while I graduated and didn’t have his own agenda in life, I don’t think I’d like him. I like his drive, his ambition. And if I was the kind of woman who followed him blindly into the wind blown frozen tundra of the Midwest without any doubts, I don’t think he’d like me very much either. But that doesn’t mean I don’t still think we are the best couple in the world, the way we dance silently to my roommate’s alarm clock every morning, how we meticulously plan the ingredients to our Sunday morning frittatas together, or the way he holds my hand over the gear shift when he drives.

When Violet tells Tom she has been accepted to Michigan and wants to go, but she’s scared he will resent her for making him move there, he says “Well if I made us stay here, you’d resent me. And I’d rather be resentful than resented.” But I don’t want to be either. I want Matt to be happy in what he does and I want me to be happy in what I do more than I want to be in our relationship. Because despite what I have been taught by romantic comedies my entire life, happiness in your own success has to come before love. This is, at its heart, the message we get from The Five Year Engagement. It’s just unfortunate that Matt and I happened to fall in love before either of us had the chance to really be successful, but it’s not necessarily a catastrophe. We don’t know how our lives will turn out. In the movie, after breaking up for a year, Tom and Violet eventually get do get married after Tom has started his own food truck, which can easily drive to and run in Michigan. It’s not that easy for the rest of us, but we make compromises. We create our own metaphorical food trucks and suck it up, live in metaphorical (or actual) Michigan and find a way to bring ourselves and our aspirations with us. At least, I hope. In the meantime, I can’t wait to eat at Zingerman’s.