A Better Flush

I'm by no means a handyman. I'm kind of the opposite actually. For a while though, I've felt as if I needed to be a little more "guyish." You know, go camping, fix things around the house, act more emotionally distant with the people in my life, the basic sort of things you can expect from a guy, stereotypes welcome. I mean, you take me from college and I was just this Metrosexual dude who really got into the style of the early 2000s, complete with unnecessarily tight shirts, gelled hair with a little touch of Sun-In, and yes, even H&M capri shorts "for men," which, in my defense, were totally acceptable as a European transplant for a good 3 months in the Summer of 2000. In any case, I've been working on getting a little rougher around the edges. You understand what I'm trying to say.

I don't approach this with any particular direction or even with any particular intent. Rather it's just sort of a feeling I've gotten, that I want to do more of these guy things that, for whatever reason, I wasn't really exposed to growing up. Like with the camping, honestly, I'd never slept outside before my Birthright trip in the Winter of 2004-2005, and even then it was a faux-Bedouin campsite with a relatively clean and functional outdoor facility. Then came a couple more Bedoiun camp experiences on other trips, followed by my first "real" camping experience with my own campsite and my own (rented) tent in October of last year. And of course you know about my latest camping trip which was the first time I "roughed" it for two consecutive nights and had the awesome fortune of sleeping outside in the middle of a crazy thunderstorm.

I have to be honest - I loved it, and I had no idea what I was missing.

Now comes the other part of this thing - being able to fix stuff around the house. A couple of months back, for the first time ever (laugh if you want), I changed the light switch in my kitchen. Maybe to the average do-it-yourself raised-on-Bob-Vila sort of guy, this is a joke, but for me it was kind of a big deal. We're talking turning the power off, hands shaking as I removed the light switch box, wondering if there was some latent current that was going to ignite my hair. Somehow I did everything right and, lo and behold, the freaking light in my kitchen works again, and all without needing to call the super and waiting a few weeks.

Fine, so when I had to have my massive 10,000 BTU AC installed, I did call the super, but that was only because the thing weighed like 80 lbs. and the last thing I needed was to have my nice new AC fall out the window. If I had some help, I might have even handled that on my own, but we can move past thing.

But the thing I'm most proud of now is this weekend's toilet adventure. You see, a couple of weeks back, trusty old toilet tank decided to keep the water running indefinitely. And sure, I can just close my bathroom door and I won't hear it (just like I do to ignore the dripping from my shower), but this time I said to myself, "hell no. We're going to take care of this problem." That's right people, I took action into my own hands. Off to Home Depot I went to buy the "Total Toilet Kit" which has everything you need to make your toilet tank better. That kit stood in my bathroom for over a week before a chance delay this weekend - "sorry dude, I have to take care of some chores and can't run until later. Can you give me an extra hour?" - let me break open the box and get some fixing going.

Here I was thinking that I could take care of everything within that hour I had, but oh shit, I was wrong. The freaking toilet tank in this place probably hadn't been touched since the last Iranian Revolution. Inside was all rust and oldness and I made the mistake of deciding I didn't need to wear any gloves. By some miracle, I also happened to have all the tools I needed, save for an emergency trek back to Home Depot for a handsaw because sometimes things don't want to come apart the way they're supposed to. That's right, I now own a handsaw and that little period of time when I had it in my backpack on the way back from Home Depot I admit to contemplating what it could do to someone if they tried to attack me in midtown Manhattan in broad daylight. I had the fire in the eyes. I sat there on the F train, looking down at my greasy nails and feeling the numbness in fingertips and wondered if the people around understood what was going on with me - I was busy, I was fixing something.

Back at my place, after the two hours of work that preceded the trip to Home Depot for the handsaw, I thought that maybe the remainder would fly by. But instead I was met with more resistance from the tank, now detached and sliding around in my bathtub where, I decided, it would be less messy since I could just wash all the excess rust and dirt down the drain. More ripped skin on my hands, a nearly-crushed finger, sweat, tears, yells of frustration that I apologize to my neighbors for, and then, a total of four hours after the saga began, it came to an end. Holding my breath, I pressed down on the newly-installed plastic chrome lever and was met with the sound of flushing water followed by a filling tank and topped off with my triumph - the sweet silence of no leakage. I know that sounds weird, but you get it.

That night I went out and drank myself silly. I was on some crazy high from the whole experience. So I wondered - what about it made me feel so good despite the torture of the whole ordeal? More than anything- and this is going to sound cheesy but it's totally true - it was empowering. I maybe have a little bit of a problem with relying on people, with allowing myself to be helped. I guess that can be a bad thing sometimes, like when people really want to help you, where helping you allows them to show you that they care about you, and your rejection of that help is interpreted - wrongly - as a sign that you don't value them as much. But when it comes to stuff like this, it's kind of nice to know that I'm not totally useless with a wrench and a screwdriver.

There are already a couple of new items piling up on agenda: 1) fix the shower radio :-( and 2) hang those damn shelves that have been sitting on my dresser for 5 months.