9 house guest in 900 square feet

Hunter came to stay with us the first of June and left this past weekend. The last ten days he was here he had his three best friends from Denver come out to visit. Logan, Wesley and Chris are like family, so I didn't hestitate when Hunter told us about their plans to visit. The four boys (including Hunter) have piggybacked on our hotel rooms in Durango for years when we visited Jordan in college so I have certainly been in tight quarters with them.

The wrench in the works was when Hunter asked if the Colorado Parkour team could stay three nights at our house which just happened to coinicide with the days that his best friends were already booked as our guests. Let me add that the two groups of boys are all friends in Colorado, so it's not that strange of an idea that they would all "crash" together. If any of my readers are familiar with the show "Ninja Warriors" you have probably seen a number of the Colorado Parkour team on the television show. I still think of Hunter and his friends as "boys", but in fact the youngest was 19 and the oldest was 25, so in fact my house was full of men. They are men who jump on rooftops (roof gaps) and scale brick walls by their finger tips. The testosterone level was palpable in the apartment during their visit. The lucky part was that Jordan moved to Austin the day after the boys arrived and Jeff was in Detroit on business for the week, leaving Hunter, Cameron and I to host. So there were eleven of us in the apartment. Eleven people in 900 square feet. I am actually the control freak in our family, so giving up control of the apartment was hard for me. But to agree to them staying, I had no choice but to let them come in and spread their stuff out. I gave them my bedroom as the dumping ground for their bags allowing the livingroom/kitchen to stay pretty tidy except for the computers and phone chargers that were stretched across the room. I slept with Cam in her room, so she and I did have our little sanctuary. When I agreed to the Parkour team staying at our apartment, Hunter said that they would only be sleeping at the apartment and would be spending the rest of their time out seeing the city and getting footage for the team video they were working on on their cross country tour. It made perfect sense and who would ever imagine that 20 something year old young men would opt to stay in my tiny apartment staring at computer screens instead of exploring New York City just beyond the stoop of my building. I heard one of the young men say "It was really nice of our host in Boston to want to show us the ciy, but they really didn't understand that we need to conserve our energy and all that walking really took it out of me". I wanted to ask what he was conserving his energy for, but I refrained. But that was the foreshadowing for them not leaving he apartment for four days. That is not to say that they never left, but they did spend a hell of a lot more time inside than I had expected. At one point I was at work, the boys were out filming, and Cam was home alone. She cleaned the house, went shopping, made Toll House chocolate chip cookies, and made dinner for me. But by the time I got home the clean house was over taken by large bodies, the cookies were gobbled up, and my dinner was tucked away in the frig to keep it away from hungry onlookers. But I appreciated Cameron's hard work even though it was hard to see it underneath all of our guests sprawled across the living room. And they showered all the time. I felt like a hotel maid taking large piles of white towels and washing them daily only to find them back in a wet pile the next day waiting for housekeeping to replenish them. Honestly, it wasn't that bad. And a day or so after they left Cameron said that she acutally missed the enegy of having so many boys in the apartment. I didnt' miss the laundry or the stepping over backpacks and sleeping bags, but it was rather fun having Ninja Warriors visiting for a few days.

Swimming in Central Park

After work today the girls and I went to Lasker Swimming Pool. It is a free pool in Central Park, but you must bring a lock for a locker. It was probably 95 degrees today so the pool was extremely refreshing albeit crowded. There were probably about 300 hundred people at the pool and we were three of maybe ten white people there. It is near 110th Street which is, technically, Harlem so it was not unexpected but rather interesting non the less. The pool is a large round pool about four and a half feet deep through out. At one point we were walking across the pool and a Polish man said not to us, but audibly about us, "Ah, we need more beautiful woman here." I wanted to laugh, he looked like a character out of the old cartoon "Hey, Arnold". The collection of lifeguards was very interesting. There was one anorexic girl who was wearing long pants, a long sleeved shirt and a scarf around her neck - we didn't think that she would have enough strength to save us. Another lifeguard we called Fabio - no further description needed. Then there was a Michael Jackson circa 2000 look alike. And finally, one cute life guard seemed fine and fit until he proceeded to put his hand down his pants for several minutes. We couldn't look away because we were transfixed by the fact that he was so interested in himeslf and so uninterested in watching the pool.

In the middle of the pool was a large group of teenaged boys and girls. As we floated and walked through the water we never felt threatened by them in any way. They were dunking each other and flirting. No big deal, but I guess dunking is not allowed. There was a lot of whistling from the lifegards telling them not to dunk each other, but no adult or authority figure ever got into the water and talked to the large group directly. After we had been there for about an hour and a half we could see a police car had pulled up near the gate and the lifeguards were now telling everyone to get out of the pool an hour before the swimming session was supposed to end at 6:00 pm. The teenagers splashed their hands in the water in unison causing quite a splash, but then they proceeded to get out in an orderly manner. What I thought, to myself, was how strange the whole scene was to me and yet how normal it seemed to the other swimmers. I have never been in a public setting where the police came in and basically said, "Ok, the fun is over. Break it up and head home." There were a few grumbles from the crowd about how a few were ruining the fun for the masses, but as a whole, everyone followed the rules without question. I wondered if it was an urban thing where people just know that the masses must follow the rule for the greater good or if it was a race thing where an oppressed group has learned to go with the flow or suffer the consequences. The girls and I plan to return again tomorrow afternoon to beat the heat and work on our tans. People watching and urban dynamics don't get any better than the Lasker Swimming Pool in the heart of Central Park.

Boundires and Adult Children

This is not so much about living in New York, but more about young adult children living with you. Of course this is compounded by the New York City sized apartment and the cost of living in the city. Last year after Jordan got back from her summer in Tokyo completing her BA at Temple University Tokyo, she moved in with us to decide what her next move would be in her foray into adulthood. Ten months and one unpaid internship at an animation studio later she has decided that she is heading to Austin, TX to get a job at Blizzard Studios (parent company of World of Warcraft for those in the know). First of all, Jordan is probably the least offensive house guest that you could ever have. And second of all I think having her here has made Cameron's to New York much easier. But... she has been sleeping on the fold-out couch for ten months. She is tired of pulling it out and folding it up each morning and I am tired of my livingroom being a bedroom. She has split her clothes between a small wicker dresser in Cameron's room and a rolling rack in my bedroom (I think the shoes are strewn between the two spaces). Jordan moved to Durango her freshman year and lived on her own for four years, so I know moving back home as been a struggle for her as well. She has a job at a boutique in Soho. One night she had to stay late to take inventory. It is a tiny boutique so we expected her home around 10:30 p.m. By midnight we were worried and she was not answering her cell phone. If she tells us that she is going out after work with friends we do not wait up because we have a general idea where she is heading in case she doesn't return home by midmorning. But in this case we thought we would hear from her to let us know she was on the subway headed home. We called the store at 12:30 a.m. and her manager said that they had just finished inventory and Jordan had left 10 mintues earlier. When Jordan got home we told her that her manager had told us she had finished around midnight. Jordan was livid (hmmm...I'm not sure Jordan and livid can be used in the same sentence but I am taking poetic license). But it's a perfect example of a parent not being able to go to sleep not knowing where there child is and how an adult child who is at work does not even consider the need to call their parents to tell them that their work is running late. Hunter on the other hand is more in the gray zone. He spent a year between working in Zion National Park and working his way through Europe. Ane he has been living on his own this past year in Denver going to college. Becasue of his indpendence I was surprised when he landed back in our apartment this June ready to lay on the couch for a lazy summer. I don't think he reads my blog or he would have realized that not working is not an option when I am working two jobs. At our urging he did quickly land a job at Argo Tea as a barista, although he grouses about tomorrow's shift endlessly the evening before. I'm not sure how he thought taking a good chunk of the summer off and having spending money in New York City would reconcile itself but some heated arguements transpired before he starting applying for work. From my own experience working at "un-named retailer", having a job in the city allows for a unique vantage point seeing New Yorkers as coworkers and customers, always making for an entertaining story at the end of the day. He will go back to Denver with a much richer view of the city as a participant in the flow of the commerce and much richer in his bank account that would have surely been quickly depleted if he had not joined in the work-a-day world. Cameron, at fourteen, still has a free pass, although if anyone reading this is looking for a babysitter she is available! And at what point do you stop paying for your young adult's entertainment and eating out? We don't eat out every day, but in NYC it is much more common to eat out than probably anywhere else in the country, so should I foot the bill for their slice of pizza or take-out Chinese? When we go the beach should I pay for their $35 train ticket and lunch on the boardwalk? When everyone is headed out to work should I offer my metro card at $2.25 per ride? and when we are making a late night run to Insomniac Cookies do I offer my debit card to cover cookies for all? Although we live in a vacation destination we are not on vacation. And no one that I know has a vacation budget 365 days of the year. At what point do you tell your adult children that just because they are living at home they are no longer a dependant child? In three a week when Jordan moves to Austin and Hunter is back to his life in Denver, all of this will be a moot point, but until then the bank account is still hemorraging.