A wise man once observed: "everything in New York City comes back to real estate". Anyone who has lived here for any appreciable period of time recognizes the essential truth of this statement. We come back to real estate as surely as we desire things we cannot have; obsessing over apartments is the New Yorker's way of reaching beyond our grasp.

Lisa and I make a good living by any reasonable standard. But we have little hope of ever owning a real home in this city, where the average apartment runs a cool million. So we compromise. We rent slightly below our means, saving our pennies and waiting -- praying -- for the bubble to burst. We have a decent-sized one-bedroom apartment on a convenient Upper West Side block. It has everything we need, none of the things we dream about: it will do for now. It has ample closets but faces an airshaft; the bedroom is larger than the one in my old apartment, but -- and this is finally the point -- the kitchen is smaller.

New Yorkers know a lot about square footage; how it gets eaten up by bathtubs, hallways, and retrofitted "conversion" walls. Very few of us think about cubic footage though. My old kitchen not only had a six-foot-long counter, it had cabinet space above and below the whole six feet, plus a closet-sized pantry and above-sink cabinets. (It also had a gas range, but that's another story). In a room with nine-foot-high ceilings, each square foot you give up a loss of three square feet* costs you a cubic yard. So to make room for the detritus of a wandering, accumulated life, you have to think vertical. You cram every cubic inch of headroom with storage, you make more of less.

This is how we made room for all my pots and pans in our new apartment; we hung them from the ceiling. Suspended in mid-air, waiting on the chance that I might come home in time to use them. It's not ideal, but for now, it will do. And Lisa seems to be happy with the arrangement, even though these pots and pans are hanging just beyond her reach.

*Thanks to Felix for pointing out my faulty arithmetic.