I am 32.658 years old

#14

Welcome to Bittersweet Pl. 🏚️

Back in August, I stepped onto an elevator at the Drake Hotel in downtown Chicago.

Two children were already riding with their mother—bored, staggeringly bored by their ornamental surroundings. Fidgeting, they were both younger than eight. Neither could have grasped they were staying in a hotel that famously hosted Princess Diana, where newlyweds Marilyn Monroe and Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio carved their initials into the bar like smitten teenagers.

Neither could have cared because just down the street is a LEGO® Store—Valhalla—yet here they were, stuck with their mom and some hungover mope on a golden elevator from prehistory.

Naturally, we struck up a conversation about life.

In the interest of time, I’m going to skip past all the small talk and apologies parents make re: their kids. In fact, I’m going to breeze by my interaction with the mother entirely. All that matters is the very end, where right before stepping off the elevator I playfully finger-wagged at the little ones:

“Stay a kid and don’t dare think of turning 31!”

Puzzled, the boy replied, “Why? Is it bad?”

As the doors began to close, all I could stammer out was…. “Uh…I don’t know.”

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Right now, you might be thinking: “Wow, Kyle is great with kids.”

And, really, I think I’m decent! I could have done much worse.

George Orwell once said, “Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.”

Maya Angelou believed: “Most people don’t grow up. It’s too damn difficult. What happens is most people get older. That’s the truth of it.”

In a way, I spared those children the weight of a real answer. They were fortunate to meet a Substackeur on his way to an architectural cruise. Had they run into a true literary giant, they’d have been crushed.

It’s all moot now because I turned 32 last fall.

32 is not a number that matters to anyone. It’s like turning 19 before it or 51 after it. In fact, it comes in a run of ages immediately after 30—31, 32, 33, 34—that I could take or leave.

These are adult homework years: the “we’d like them to be close in age” years, the finally going into practice years, the praying for lower interest rates years, and all others which feel impossibly intermediate.

I don’t get wistful for my 20s because I’m too tired; but back then, my worst nights were spent playing Cards Against Humanity with people I found excruciatingly common. At 32, I’m enjoying my first bout with an emerging technology that threatens my livelihood. Inevitably, progress comes for us all.

Mostly, things are fine. I swear I’m not having some sort of 1/3 life crisis. (Living to 96? Who do I think I am? A sitting American president?)

In fact, my only age-related problem is a good one: I have moved into an apartment I proudly call home.

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In 2007, my family visited my mom’s best friend in Chicago. At the time, she lived in a two-story rehab on the city’s west side, surrounded by restaurants and theaters and people I knew were voting for Obama, or at the very least, having sex.

I felt like a tick bouncing between cashmere scarves. There was so much to cling to but I understood nothing about most of it, which felt good to a suburban kid whose core trait was yearning. The world was as big as I had hoped, big enough for all my juvenile dreams of getting paid for my cleverness and falling in love under gas lanterns.

I would live here, one day, in a loft just like this one, with exposed brick and mounted TVs and a pool table near some liquor I wouldn’t even drink. “There’s a spiral staircase and it’s frickin tight,” I texted my eighth grade girlfriend. She’d be there too, a princess in a silk-spun parka, maybe three or four kids and a mutt named Poodle.

Chicago was the city for me, for romantics. In a decade or so, I’d return to start living, and you know what? That mostly came true. Situated in Pulaski Park—half a mile from that idyllic rehab—is my dream apartment, my apartment. There is a spiral staircase and it is frickin tight. Angie is not here, but we’re still good friends. In so many ways, I have found myself in the place I’d dreamt up.

The only problem has been furnishing it.

At no point in my adult life have I been settled. Chicago was pre-New York, New York became St. Louis, then I completed the loop. Unsurprisingly, perpetually planning moves has rendered me an incompetent interior designer.

My only specialty is angles, in the sense that my ultimate design hack is angling furniture diagonally. Beds, couches, TV stands, I will set anything diagonally. Perhaps it strikes me as unexpected, reflective of my nature. Regardless, if I had my way, corners would be cut all over my place—a double entendre, no doubt.

Masculine aesthetics are stunted in many regards but especially at home. As I began to plot out my place, I had the thought, “If I could buy a home’s worth of furnishings from a crime scene, I would.”

I’d have saved countless hours spent Googling “male apartment style” and “masculine design inspiration,” which ultimately presented me with two distinct avenues:

1. Tokyo Nights

2. Whiskey and Leather Pervert

I’ll stick with diagonals, thank you.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that masculine imagery remains a recreation of our fathers’ and grandfathers’ imagined prime—or membership in the Yakuza—though it’s certainly underwhelming. Men just started confirming their bisexuality. It might take a while to get framed jerseys down from the wall.

I’d argue the West Elm-ification of millennial homes is worse.

After years of evolution, from RNA molecules to tetrapods to Hailee Steinfeld, have we come this far just to champion beige? For the love of god, we are full of dark red blood. The sky is blue. Some jellyfish glow. Yet every sofa must be ivory?

I can’t sit still in these environments, not in implicitly padded rooms adorned with pictures of beach vacations. Not in the edgeless realm of beige!

Thus, I’ve been left with few turnkey alternatives. Probably a good thing for a guy like me.

As I look around my home, it’s borderline embarrassing how many questions it’s posed and how few answers I’ve had. Such a privilege to be humbled like this.

Unsurprisingly, my imagined 30s do not match me. My belief that a city or a job or a spouse would hand me the keys to my identity was a willful shortcut that has backfired all over my bedroom. Still I tell myself, sconce lighting can fix anything. There is hope for us yet.

Do I need a reading nook? How about curtains instead of blinds? Where to put the rocking chair I refuse to abandon?

I have found the place I dreamt of calling home, but a strange and unfamiliar man moved into it and will not stop asking me questions.

Puzzled, he badgers me: “Do sage green hand towels really reflect who we are?”

And as I drag the cursor towards the purchase button, all I can stammer out is….

“We’ll know by 33.”

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