The Tiny House Thing

I had the pleasure of lying around most of the afternoon, yesterday, watching exactly the kind of television I would watch all the time if I were allowed to lie around watching TV, and that is stuff about houses, mostly where people go around looking for new houses to buy with their piles of money. I love this kind of TV because it's basically consequence free judgement. You can lie back in total comfort and judge other people without them ever having to know about it. You can say things like, “well, they clearly picked the wrong house to buy with their pile of money” without ever having to meet and know them. I mean, I could never say that to someone for real. “You totally bought the wrong house.” What a terrible thing to say. But to be allowed to think it for like four hours, really a pleasant way to spend the day.

So anyway, the new thing is Tiny Houses. I guess I knew this because I've been really wanting a tiny house and I do have a penchant for accidentally really really wanting whatever is percolating in the cultural air. So I ended up naming my two oldest children the most popular names those years even though I had carefully avoided looking at lists of popular names just as so as to Not Do that which I actually did. So of course I've been really wanting a tiny house. Everyone, it seems, wants a tiny house.

But the desire of a Tiny House, because this is the American landscape of 2015, can no longer just be that you want to go out and get a house and move your stuff in and start ordering takeout, because, one of the trade offs, for being relieved of so much burdensome space, is to not have a stove. No, because of who we are as a society, you can't just buy a house. Your house needs to reflect something about you. Your house needs to be a statement of your personal identity, as well as being the means of the corporate joining of yourself into a community, in this case, The Tiny House Community. The number of times I heard the words Tiny House Community, well, I wish someone had handed me a pile of money every time I heard it. Once you buy or build “tiny” (see, I'm all about the lingo) you become a member of the Tiny House Community and you are welcomed, rather formally, by the TV personality, with a big smile and a hug. It's really appropriate for you to cry at this moment, and be overcome with the emotional weight of this rite of passage. From thence on you can talk about “what its like to go tiny” and all the joys and delights of “living tiny”.

I was really surprised by all the unbridled joy– broad, completely happy smiles, the tears of wonder and amazement, the statements of complete approbation, the yawning lack of anything negative to say about living in 300 square feet. As far as I can make out, there isn't anything bad about “going tiny” at all, ever. It probably says something wonderful about my own character, that I've been wishing I could rush out and buy a tiny house myself. I am probably on my way to ascending up to a morally superior plane than the rest of the population who can never and will never “go tiny”.

Except that who are we kidding. I probably won't ever be able to “go tiny”. I, in my heart, don't really believe that owning stuff is that evil. I don't have a minimalist bone in my short stubby finger. While I am probably physically suited to “go tiny” my soul chafes at the idea of participating in a fad. Now that it's an actual thing, I guess I'll go back to my other dream of owning a huge Victorian house, green, with brown seventies carpet, and seven or eight rooms so full to the brim of stuff that you can't open some of the doors, and a big dining room table where I can write dubiously mediocre poetry, and some sort of smallish oriental maple tree in the front. That's the other kind of house I'm willing to consider owning.

In the meantime, I will continue to drag my peonies around to wherever I am, and work on forming and shaping my identity into whatever suits me right now. Today I will be six feet tall and win a marathon, and I think I will be, hmmmm, what is a suitable ethnicity that won't get me hated on Twitter?