January 17 2008, 08:45 PM You Just Want Back In Your Head

One of the things about living in this place is this: the ceilings are tall. This is quite helpful in the summer, as the warmer air in any room tends not to be where I am. I have found that this arrangement of interior space is helpful in the winter, too: it has pleasingly dawned on me that it is more difficult to go stir crazy in these little wide open spaces. Occasionally, the space can trend toward the absurd, sitting in the living room in conversation with someone in a chair, and noting in a moment just how incongruous it all is to have such great free height above them. The absurdity is most pointed in the kitchen and the pantry, where casual observation would lead easily to the notion that the Victorians were all eight feet tall, or spent their days on two foot platform shoes. Probably high-heeled ones, no less.

Well, that isn't true, so far as I know. Besides, they had help.

I have seen this effect flipped sideways. Once a friend of mine made a project of filling his room with bed; I am not sure how he did it, but he ended up with a low frame and sprawling mattress, somewhat even bigger I think then the weirdly named California King (they have Victorians in California, I could be given to understand). He showed us a trick with this bed. He stood at the foot of it with his back to the sheets. "Watch this," he said, and cast himself backward, landing in a fluff, supine on the comforter. In his progress he appeared to shrink. The bed was that big.

If your lover is restless in the darkness, and moves feet and knees while traveling in their dreams to your discomfort (or if you yourself do such things): get a bigger bed.