Megan Stielstra's Blog

My twenty-year-old self had a dream. It went something like this: “I’m gonna like buy some old warehouse and fix it up and have a printing press on one floor and a theater on another and a studio/loft on another where like all kinds of artists splatter paint all over the place and then I’ll live on the top floor and have an organic garden on the roof so, like, we won’t have to buy FOOD and it’ll be really urban and gritty and arty and totally cheap and most importantly there’ll be floor-to-ceiling bookshelves with a sliding ladder.”

My twenty-year-old self didn’t know anything about property taxes or zoning laws or the cost of historical restoration or even how much plants cost (Dear Gethsemene: I love you. This past weekend, I showed that love with cash) and just REALISM in general. My twenty-year-old self ate Ramen and drank Purple Passion (re: Everclear and Koolaid) and thought she was an ARTIST (Capital ARRR!) and, like, Bukowski’s life was like totally poetic. In fact, I think one time my twenty-year-old self went on a date with a twenty-nine-year old Indie Rock Boy (Capital ROCK!) at the Mutiny—which, if you haven’t had the pleasure, is a one-room dive bar on Western where I once got hit on as follows:

Note: after each of my responses, SUPER-DRUNK GUY spends a minute or two trying to formulate his next sentence before he actually speaks.

SUPER-DRUNK GUY: You want a PBR?
ME: No, thank you.
SDG: What’re you doing later?
ME: Homework.
SDG: What kind of homework?
ME: Writing.
SDG: What kind?
ME: Fiction.
SDG: Fiction is for pussies.
ME: ???????
SDG: Nonfiction has balls. If you can’t handle the truth, then you’re a pussy.

Note: while writing this, my thirty-year-old self wants my twenty-year-old self to deliver some genius soliloquy about truth in fiction but, frankly, my twenty-year-old self didn’t get it yet. She’d get it at twenty-three when someone first gave her a copy of The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien and she made all sorts of connections between her life and her work and it was super-exciting, but when she was twenty she just looked up at SUPER-DRUNK GUY and said—

ME: Are you seriously picking me up and insulting me at the same time?

—which my thirty-year-old self thinks is a pretty good comeback. My thirty-year-old self high-fives my twenty-year-old self while SUPER-DRUNK GUY sways and stumbles and tries to come up with a response, which ends up being—

SDG: So what’re you doing later?

Needless to say, The Mutiny wasn’t my twenty-year-old self’s favorite place in the Universe but she really wanted to get in that Indie ROCK Boy’s pants (hi, Dad!) so she went with him to see some Shit-Band from Milwaukee, four thirty-something guys on the elevated piece of plywood called “The Stage” playing to an audience of like four people and here—HERE—is the kicker: Indie ROCK Boy pointed at the lead singer and said, “That guy is like my hero. He’s got a wife and kids at home, but he believed so much in his music that he went on Welfare so he could tour. Like, anybody else might’ve like stayed with his kids or got a job or something but this guy—” he paused in reverence— “This guy knows what it’s all ABOUT.”

And you know what my twenty-year-old self did?

SHE NODDED.

I want to reach back in time and smack her upside the head.

But, of course, she just didn’t get it yet: that you don’t HAVE to give up everything for your art. You CAN make good art and also be financially independent and own your home and have a savings account and eat, like, FOOD and, frankly, my thirty-year-old self is RELEIVED that we don’t live in some abandoned warehouse with shitty plumbing and rodents and no heat. My thirty-year-old self LIKES running water and furnaces and Makers Mark and Marc Jacobs and, while I appreciate my old youthful exuberance, I’m happy the whole I’m Going to Live in a Warehouse has morphed into this: “My husband and I are going to buy a thousand-square-foot place in an historic building in Uptown and it’ll be a really beautiful, comfortable home where we have lots of dinner parties for our friends and I run writing workshops for 2nd Story and we’ll be a block away from the train so we can spend less time driving and the mortgage is comfortable enough so we can still enjoy our lives and also WE OWN IT but most importantly THERE’LL BE FLOOR-TO-CEILING BOOKSHELVES WITH A SLIDING LADDER!”

Cue symphony.

I’ve always wanted floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. ALWAYS. I dreamed about it when I was a kid, you know, with lots of old dusty books and women in pencil skirts and glasses on a chain around their necks up on the ladder, or old Tolstoy-looking guys with long white beards doing research all the damn time, and the thought that I could have that IN MY HOUSE was just insanity, people, INSANITY. An ENTIRE WALL OF BOOKS IN THE HOUSE!

When Christopher and I were talking about buying a place, he said, “blah blah mortgage financing neighborhoods property tax,” and I said, “FLOOR-TO- CEILING BOOKSHELVES,” and he said, “You are a very strange,” and I said, “YOU KNEW WHAT YOU WERE GETTING INTO,” and he said, “hahahahaha BEER,” and we haven’t really talked about it since we moved in because A. built-ins are expensive and B. we’re both too stinkin’ busy to follow through with anything right now but FINALLY, last month we decided to FULLFILL MY LIFELONG DREAM and get the bookshelves built, which maybe had something to do with the fact that my books have been in boxes since December and every time I need one—like if I have to teach the How-to form in class and I think, “I should read them that Junot Diaz story, that’s a really great example”—I have to UNPACK fourteen boxes to find the damn Diaz collection and I’m getting all SORTS of testy about that and, furthermore, all those boxes have been stacked in Christopher’s office and it’s getting to be oppressive (re: he can’t fucking move) because at a thousand square feet our house is not the biggest, especially for two people and one rowdy doggie and all their stuff (me: books, Christopher: electronics, Mojo: squeaky rubber things) although in all the design magazines it says that SMALLER IS SMARTER and gives all SORTS of practical storage solutions BLAH BLAH WE BUILT FLOOR-TO-CEILING BOOKSHELVES OVER THE WEEKEND! Actually, we didn’t build them. Wayne built them. We heart Wayne. Wayne can come build bookshelves for you, too!

BEHOLD: The Wall.

BEHOLD: The Books.

BEHOLD: Wayne.

BEHOLD: The process.

Aren’t they BEAUTIFUL? They match the FLOORS (which was planned) and they match THE DOG (which was not) and Christopher and I sat on the floor and ate take-out Thai food and looked at them (sort of how when we first brought Mojo home all we did the first week is stare at him. Or when we first moved into this place we sat on the couch and said, “You see that light switch, we OWN that light switch,” [although technically we only own twenty percent of the light switch. You get my point]). And then—and if you’re not a book person you’re just NOT going to understand the sheer, raw joy of this next part—I ORGANIZED THE BOOKS.

AND IT WAS AWESOME.

So. Here, now, is the library (which is also the dining room. And the living room and the kitchen. SMALLER IS SMARTER!), and the shelves are so high (nearly TWELVE FEET!) that if I need something from the A’s in nonfiction, Christopher’s going to have to stand on the barstool. At some point we’ll get a ladder, although probably not a sliding one. The wall’s just not long enough.

But see, that’s okay. Because my forty-year-old self has a dream: “I’m going to buy a house in the country somewhere, like Michigan or Wisconsin, and there’ll be a big yard and a screened-in porch and maybe a lake and stars exploding across the sky every night. There’ll be a huge stone fireplace in the living room, and we’ll cook big dinners and have parties and read books and the room will be wall-to-wall bookshelves with a sliding ladder and I’ll have a pencil skirt and glasses on a chain and Christopher will have a long white beard and we’ll do weekends in the city in our little condo in Uptown. We’ll run over to the Uptown Theater and see a show. We’ll eat Lamb Vindaloo at Marigold. We’ll enjoy the Hell out of this life.”