Having a party means that you give yourself a deadline to clean up, too. When we had your second birthday party we had it at a house I had bought as an investment property in Malibu. Now, since this wasn’t where I was living day to day, the maintenance and home improvement would sometimes get away from me. I used your party as an excuse to kick my own ass into gear and finish it up. I still had people laying down sod during the party, literally. Guests were bumping into guys laying down turf and the paint was still drying. But we got the shit done.
You’re probably going to be tempted, especially when you spend all your money on the down payment and moving expenses, to skimp on the décor and just make a run to IKEA. Please don’t. IKEA is a human roach motel/ant farm. Once you’re in, you can never get out. It’s a giant maze that forces you to look at every single item. That’s where they should have the L.A. marathon, because I’ve easily covered 26.2 miles walking around that place looking for a lampshade. You think you’re going there for one thing and then you find yourself walking around for a full day holding a golf pencil.
I don’t understand how that place operates. The profit margin eludes me. You can get fifteen hand-blown wine goblets for under two dollars. I understand when cheap crap comes from China but IKEA is based in Sweden. Isn’t there some international law against using white people to make cheap shit?
And if you go there with your future husband or wife, be prepared to be going at each other with some forty-nine-cent steak knives before it’s all over. One of you will stop to look at something and the other will keep walking, someone will get lost or forget to write down the number so you can find the dresser that you furiously negotiated over in the warehouse section later. Then you push the weird low-boy shopping cart to the register, send the other person to aisle 162 to get the particleboard coffee table and by the time they drag it back to you, you’ve already checked out or are holding up the line because getting to aisle 162 required crossing two time zones.
Then you’ll send your spouse to get the car and back it into the loading zone. That’s always a disaster because there are never enough spots, and by the time you get home to bust out the Allen wrenches, you’re exhausted and on the verge of divorce.
I’ve done the IKEA run with your mother a couple of times. We have to do a whole war room thing before we head in. “I’m on Bravo team; you’re Charlie company. Synchronize watches, we move in at 0200 hours and attack the kitchen section from the left flank.” It never works. In the end I’m shopping for an entertainment unit and she’s shopping for a divorce attorney.
Plus, even if you just ate at the Chili’s across the parking lot before you walked in, you are still going to eat at IKEA. Two-point-seven hours of smelling Swedish meatballs will break down even Michelle Obama. Swedish meatballs are underrated. They’re savory. Savory’s only competition is horny, as far as what it can get you to do. You cannot be around that smell and those visuals and not get some. The meatballs are cheap, too, like the furniture. It’s like four bucks for a baker’s dozen of delicious little balls. Swedish meatballs are the ukulele of food. They’re the only thing that’s better when smaller. You can’t say that about tits.
No matter what project you’re taking on, make sure to just get it done and over with. With home improvements you have to go start-to-finish with one vision. If you start a bathroom remodel and stop partway through, you’ll never get to where you wanted to go. If you replace the sink one year, the mirror the next and the shower tile after that, nothing is going to match and your bathroom will look like a fucked-up patchwork mess.
If your home improvement projects get away from you, they will become part of your life. You’ll be halfway through redoing your living room and the carpet will be rolled up in the corner. If you get distracted, six months will go by with the carpet roll taking up that space and it will just become like wallpaper, you won’t even notice it anymore.
And on that note, let me close this letter with a wallpaper tale. I’ve always said that when picking wallpaper, just get three choices you feel good about, put them up on the wall, walk out of the room, walk back in, look at them for three seconds and pick one. You’ll be at your purest at that moment. Listen to your gut.
Many years ago, your grandmother, my mom, was redoing her house, including the bathroom. And that bathroom, for a long time, was just bare drywall. She was in a one-bed, one-bath. It wasn’t like this was the bath in the pool house or guest cottage. So one day I asked, “What’s going on with the bathroom?” She replied, “What do you mean?” I said, “It’s been like that for six months, when are you going to finish?” She said, “I’m picking out the wallpaper.” I pointed out that the same four swatches were pinned to the wall for the past four months. She said, “I feel like you’re judging me” and “I don’t like your tone.” I didn’t have a tone. It was said very matter-of-factly. It was starting to get tense. I said, “I’m just trying to help; you’ve been looking at bare drywall for six months. You just have to trust your instincts and pick a swatch and go with it.” Defensive, she said, “I don’t like where this is going.” So I shut up. And as I write this she’s moving out of that house and into year three of redoing the piece of shit my grandmother lived in. It’s a total lateral move from a one-bed, one-bath in the Valley to another. I haven’t visited and I don’t plan to. I’d definitely want to give home-improvement advice, something I’m literally an expert in. But I won’t bother. I can’t. It sends the wrong message. She got defensive for no reason and shut up the expert. This is like going to a doctor and telling him not to share his opinion. The scariest thing that can happen in a relationship is to have the other person not care. And that’s what happened. She got me to not care. So whether it’s home improvement, your career or how you dress, have an open mind and take people’s commentary into consideration. The day people stop critiquing is the day that they stop caring.
So take all of that first-house advice and make use of it. And if by a miracle I’m still alive when you have your first home, remember, I criticize because I care.
CHAPTER 9
Dear Sonny,
As my work schedule will have likely killed me by the time you sprout your first pube, I’m not going to be around to have a man-to-man with you about becoming a man. This carries on a rich Carolla tradition of never having “the talk.” It wasn’t that my parents were uncomfortable about sex, it was that having “the talk” required talking.
A quick note to your sister: I’m very sorry, Natalia, you’re just going to have to skip a few pages. I don’t have any puberty advice for you. Talk to your mom about becoming a woman. I find periods confusing. I could never track when my girlfriends or wife had their period. They always seemed irritable. Maybe that just means I’m an asshole. But periods shouldn’t even be called that, because they never seem to end. To me, periods seem like painting the Golden Gate Bridge. As soon as you’re done, it’s time to start over again.
I do have empathy for you. If I had a period once in my life I’d kill myself, never mind every month. I’d be the cuntiest of cunts if I had a period. I’m already constantly angry. If I had something coming out of me that I had to sop up with cotton, they’d have to lock me up like the Hulk or put me in chains like King Kong.
It’s also a damn good thing that my friends and I don’t have periods. Given the tea-bagging and other hazing that guys do to each other when they’re adolescents, the potential for disgusting disaster would have been way up had periods been involved. There’s no way that if my friend Ray had a bleeding vagina once a month, he wouldn’t have put it on my face when I was sleeping.