Flying off the handle

As the boyfriend and I have been decorating and painting and upgrading some of the crappy-ass materials the developer used when our condo was rehabbed a couple years ago, I’ve discovered something weird: I have opinions about stuff I had barely even realized existed.

For instance, our condo is filled with totally cheap door hardware, probably procured at bulk discount because nobody else would buy it and the manufacturer needed the tax writeoff. It’s gold, which I’ve never been a fan of anyway, and it looks like it’s laminated to delay the gold finish’s inevitable tarnishing or flaking, because we can put a man on the moon but we still haven’t found an effective way to keep our fake gold from tarnishing or flaking back here on earth.

Where was I? Oh yes: I wonder why Newt Gingrich’s marriages keep failing. Is it because he’s morally and physically repulsive, or do you think once the sedatives wear off, his wives realize to their horror that they’ve been sleeping with Newt Gingrich and the evenings in the old Gingrich household become as awkward as the playgrounds where Ann Coulter keeps screaming “faggot” at the other 6-year-olds?

Oh, dear. I seem to have wandered again. Give me a second so I can backtrack: faggot, harpy, playground, divorce junkie, flake, tacky, cheap, knobs, stupid opinions … oh, yes! Door handles!

So the boyfriend and I have been discussing what we can do to upgrade our condo, and we’re both in agreement on replacing the door hardware. And we both like silvery finishes like burnished stainless steel. But I like simple round knobs and he likes those door handles that look like toilet flushers. Now, I’ve seen those toilet-flusher door handles in stores and in other people’s houses and I guess I’ve always just subconsciously preferred regular handles. I’ve never said to myself—on any level—Holy crap! Those door handles look like toilet flushers! Who would ever put such a silly thing on their doors? But when the boyfriend suggested we replace our door handles with toilet-flusher handles, my immediate thought was I’m not living in a house where you have to flush every door you open … unless we could somehow make the handle trigger flushing sounds every time you flushed it because that would be cool. It would also be Water Music, but that’s a joke for a different blog post.

In the real world, it doesn’t make a bit of difference what kind of handles we have on our doors. And once the handles are in place I bet I’d never notice them again. (Unless I tried to hang a coat on one and it kept falling to the floor amid mysterious flushing sounds.) I don’t think I can describe the door handles in any of the houses I’ve lived in … except now that I think about it, I believe the handles in my childhood home were glass-knobbed, and the plates behind the handles in my first home had a funky-cool Art Deco motif, but that could just be the paint fumes talking because I spent the weekend finishing our first bedroom (dark green trim) and starting our second bedroom (gray-purple walls) and I’m still a little woozy.