The Glory of Adulthood is Finding Something You Love to Futz Over

I’ve mentioned before that my girlfriend and I will be moving on from Brooklyn next spring. It’s a big decision, and I’ll miss it here very much, but I’m also really ready to go. I could go on at length, but the reality is that we just need more space, and space is one of many things that I can’t really afford in Brooklyn that I can readily afford elsewhere. I’m just ready to exist on an easier difficulty level financially. We have to wait until my Substack income turns two years old next March, and then we are likely on our way to somewhere cheaper.

So I’m dreaming of a lot of things, as one does when one is planning to buy a home. (Sometimes I’m dreaming of Fed interest rate hikes, those are the stress dreams.) There’s the obvious like, again, SPACE - blessed, lovely, life-giving space. A bathroom where things don’t fall off of shelves onto my head and a kitchen big enough that we don’t have to slice onions on the coffee table. A second “bedroom” that I can’t cross in less than three paces. A yard, as bourgeois and environmentally questionable as that may be. A place for our car that we own, like a guaranteed parking space, which blows my mind. Space for my stereo system and a chair next to it that’s not uncomfortably close to the cat box. Light and circulation from adequate windows. A bathtub that isn’t comically small for my large body. Central air. A porch. SPACE.

Most of all, though, I’m dreaming of a pizza oven. An outdoor pizza oven, for my backyard. I have researched, my god, have I researched, but even more I’ve dreamed. You see, a conventional home oven will rarely get you any hotter than 500° Fahrenheit, which is not ideal for pizza; lower and slower results in a denser, doughier crust, when what most of us want in pizza crust is the right combination of snap and chewiness. A dedicated pizza oven can cook at 800°F and up, sometimes even 1000°F. This allows for the gases within the dough to expand faster, giving you that signature crust of wood oven pizzas. You can get pizza stones and pizza steels, and decent pizza can be made at home in a cast iron skillet or even an ordinary cookie sheet, but for good Neapolitan, there’s no substitute for pure heat. And you can cook a pizza in a minute and a half.

(I can assure you that trying to convince me not to want a pizza oven in the comments will be a profound waste of my time and yours.)

I told someone about all of this, and he asked about the price and the procedure. So I told him all about it. He said that it all seemed expensive and like a big hassle. To which I said, precisely. Because one of the best parts of being an adult is finding that thing you love to waste money on and worry over. I know it’s not breaking new ground to say that it’s good to have a hobby, but my point here is that the wallet-draining and time-wasting elements I’m talking about today are not unfortunate side effects but the whole point.