Home Alone
what the French call les incompetents
Hi cutiepie! How’s it going?
I’ll tell ya how it’s going over here: It’s SILENT. I haven’t left the house or spoken aloud to a human being in several days, unless you count sending endless voicenote missives to friends while I absentmindedly dust my windowsills in a caftan.
It’s silent at my house because Davin is gone—he’s doing his annual “Learn a Bonkers New Butch Skill in the Far North” week at the North House School of Folk in Grand Marais, Minnesota. He looks forward to this week of the year with a rabid, frothing intensity. Every winter, when the school’s new catalogue of summer classes comes out, Davin snatches it from the mail pile and hurries it away upstairs, where he will then pore over several physical and digital calendars, comparing dates with the upcoming course options he’s circled in the catalogue, agonizing over the choices and feverishly reading the bios of the instructors.
Two years ago, Davin spent a week learning how to build an entire small cabin from the ground up. Last year, he learned how to dye canvas strips with natural plant dyes, weave the strips into traditional geometric patterns, and stretch the woven strips onto a wooden frame he spent days hand-carving, which resulted in an extraordinarily strong-yet-light stool/chair that looks like it would cost $1,400 from the “artisan collection” at Restoration Hardware. This year, Davin is learning to use large lathes, which means he’s working with scarily dangerous machines that spin really fast to turn blocks of wood into round things like table legs and bowls. Great for him!
But even greater for me, honestly.
… because I love—LOVE—being home alone. God I love it. It has nothing to do with how Dav is as a person to live with (he’s wonderful to live with) and everything to do with how much fun it is to be a feral unperceived monster in your own home.
Wearing the same onesie for five days in a row? even though it’s covered in stains???
Fine. Nobody’s there to see you do it.
Not remembering to brush your teeth until it’s time for bed? So what!!!
I live to stand in front of my kitchen counter and stare off into space while mindlessly open-mouth chewing strip after strip of fruit leather as I listen to Rashida Jones explain the rules of her pajamas-only birthday parties to Amy Poehler on the Good Hang podcast, which is blaring from my phone at top volume.
And why not? Who am I bothering??? NO ONE, that’s who!!!
This is Secret Single Behavior (SSB). They talk about SSB on Sex & the City, and while the ladies on that show are complaining that their SSB is stuff they would never do in front of men they’re sleeping with, I don’t think that’s quite right. SSB is more like the stuff you wouldn’t do in front of anyone, because it’s stuff you only do when you’re alone. Not because it’s inherently gross, or because you’re whew! taking off the mask you wear when you’re with another person, but because your SSB is probably the same stuff you liked to mindlessly and unconsciously do when you were a kid, or a teenager, alone in your room.
Secret Single Behavior as an adult is more like your core essence + your favorite rebellions against the common established norms of your household, all intensified into a few days of knowing there’s no need to make sure you’re not bothering anyone else.
For instance, while Davin is gone, I like to:
Fill the house with incense.
Davin is a fine person with fine qualities, but he doesn’t???? like incense???? and so when he’s around, I’ve got two choices:
I can wearily say, “It’s incense,” for the 9,000th time when Davin asks me in a frantic voice if I smell something burning, or
I can… not burn incense.
Look, when I signed up to be a lesbian, I just kind of thought it was a given that I would always live in an old house that smells faintly of incense, and to discover that my own partner has a strong prejudice against nag champa was a blow my gay heart may never recover from!!!
Try on all my items of clothing I never wear (but want to wear but don’t wear because I can’t figure out how to make them look good) in different combinations to create new outfits in front of our biggest mirror, all while pretending I’m a bitchy fashion director judging someone else’s outfits.
And talking out loud the whole time, like: “Lose the belt, honey, and can we get some earrings in here? Big gold ones!! WHERE ARE THE DOORKNOCKERS, THE CHUNKY GOLD SHOULDER-DUSTERS?? Let’s MOVE MOVE MOVE, people!!!” and I’m snapping my fingers at myself over my jewelry case, digging for gold earrings the size of a baby’s fist, and jesus christ, now that i’m reading this back it sounds insane, just kidding, I never do this!!
Eat no real meals.
This one is important Secret Single Behavior. If I’m alone, I simply do not eat Regular Meals. All meals are Weird Meals, or just snacks, but lots of them, like “two large fistfuls of granola, cold leftover lemony broccoli, and three small spicy meat sticks” or “an apple eaten the way a pirate would eat it, with a knife cutting sections toward myself, which is risky and I know better, because i’ve cut myself doing this exact thing before, and a spoon that I dip in and out of the co-op peanut butter container.”
You know what I’m talking about. This is “half a too-hot rotisserie chicken eaten with your bare hands over the kitchen sink” territory, or “a fried egg and a piece of toast with apricot jam, and then you put your plate in the dishwasher, and then you get the plate out of the dishwasher and you make another fried egg and another piece of toast because that was so goddamn good” domain.
I don’t know why it’s like this, but it is. If I’m alone, all semblance of normalcy re: meals is dispensed with about as quickly as I can tear this bag of Terra root vegetable chips open with my teeth.
Continue with my classic film education
I’m on a decades-long mission to watch as many old va-va-voom bombshell movies as I can. Movies like The Seven Year Itch. And God Created Woman. Rear Window, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Roman Holiday… I’ve seen them all, and there are so many more out there that I will surely die before I finish this quest. (Possibly of boredom, because have you ever fucking tried to watch Cleopatra in one sitting???)
I almost never watch bombshell movies when anyone else is around. Mostly because most people won’t stand for even a few minutes of them. I understand this, because I will start one and immediately get annoyed, like for the love of god, why is there a five-minute orchestral arrangement at the beginning of this??? and can we get a friggin’ move on the plot, here???
but the bombshells in these movies are so beautiful, so breathy with their laughter, so casually mean to men and no-jobbed and eyebrow-arched and well-accessorized and wiggle-walked that I am helplessly drawn to watch them, over and over again.
Drown myself in perfume that ~offends~
Sometimes a girl just needs to study the drydown of a popular-with-certain-gay-men, cult-status perfume designed to smell like blood, sweat, and semen (yes this exists and yes I have a sample and yes it is appalling, you would barf, I almost did.)
For science!! It’s so interesting! How can noses be so different; how can smell be so subjective???
And sometimes she just wants to smell simple and delicious, like she’s made of caramelized sticky nuts, even if the marketed-to-teenagers body spray that makes her smell like this causes her partner to literally beg her to never wear that scent again!
You know???
When I’m home alone, BELIEVE that I smell fucking weird.
All of these things are normal SSB, I’m pretty sure.
Why? Do you do something different?
I have a friend who refers to this as "goblin time". But are you watching And Just Like That...?
I both want to go to this school and felt and sauna hat AND be a snack eating goblin while home alone