julian announced it the way he announces most things: as a neutral fact of the universe, already implicitly agreed upon. “we should have people over,” he said, making eggs in a way that suggests he has never been afraid of anything. “a housewarming. just a small one.”
i had to put my coffee down.
the thing about julian is that he experiences space as a location where certain functions occur—sleeping, eating, occasionally watching something on a laptop propped against medical textbooks. it doesn’t need to have a character. you just fill it with people and the people become the event. this is a very socially functional way to live and i’ve spent twelve years finding it both admirable and completely alien.
for me, a space has to be legible before it can be inhabited. i spent a decade as a visual director and in that decade i learned one thing about environments: they communicate before anyone in them does. the room speaks first. a housewarming before the room has been properly claimed is—and i mean this non-hyperbolically—an invitation sent on behalf of someone who doesn’t exist yet.
julian said my friends “don’t care about that stuff.” i told him that was a very telling way to talk about my friends. he said he meant it as a compliment. we clearly need to disagree more rigorously about what a compliment is.
we’ve been in this apartment almost two months. the floors are still the “driftwood” vinyl that feels like walking on a photograph of a floor. one wall in the living room is completely bare because i haven’t found a single thing i trust enough to commit to it. the furniture situation is ongoing: two excellent chairs, a table that has earned its place, and a sofa on provisional status pending my structural assessment at the six-month mark.
julian calls this “slow decorating.” i call it “not making permanent mistakes in a space i’m still learning to read.”
the paper plate thing came up approximately fourteen seconds after the announcement, and i feel it’s important for the historical record.
julian suggested we “keep it casual, maybe do paper plates so there’s less cleanup.”
i made a sound. julian has since described it as “the noise you make when someone drops something valuable,” which is not inaccurate.
i’m not precious about dishware in the abstract. but paper plates carry a specific cultural encoding i find difficult to metabolize. they say: we are not really here. this doesn’t count. they are the hosting equivalent of those people who photograph their food before eating it so the image can be validated externally before the meal is allowed to be real—which, per every trend report i’ve seen lately, is apparently the whole point of throwing a party in 2026. “events designed with the camera in mind,” one of them said. “every corner a potential photo moment.” i’d rather eat off the floor.
eating like a civilized human is a form of resistance. this is a sentence i cannot explain to julian, which is why i’m writing it here.
i’ve decided to let the housewarming happen. three weeks ago i would have deflected until the subject dissolved. but julian wants to host people, and actually i want to know what this room does with people in it—how it carries noise, whether the sofa’s provisional status becomes clearer under social pressure, whether the lighting i’ve been slowly correcting reveals itself as solved or merely improved.
the experiment has terms. no paper plates. no app-based activities. nothing requiring anyone to photograph their food before eating it. i’m working on the table situation and the stoneware situation, which will be documented separately and in the depth they deserve.
what i’m most anxious about isn’t the apartment’s current state—it’s the gap between what it is and what it’s becoming. showing someone a space in process feels like handing them a rough draft and asking them to review it before you’ve resolved the third act. you want to say: this isn’t what it’s going to be. give it time.
but maybe a space in the middle of becoming is actually the honest version of a home. maybe the rough draft is the thing.
idk. julian would say i’ve arrived at that conclusion approximately three months late. he’s probably right about that too.
anyway. people are coming over. the stoneware situation will be resolved before they arrive. the sofa will survive the evaluation.
we’ll see what the room does with people in it.
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