December 2009 Archives

Another thing that I expected to happen, being in New York this December, was for me to be imbued with the Holiday Spirit (not like the people at my work party, who were marinated in holiday spirits).  Maybe it’s because my vision of this city prior to me moving here was heavily informed by Home Alone 2, but I sort of expected my day-to-day life to be sweeping cinematic shots of the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center and the holiday decorations on the street and trains full of Santa Clauses and shopping and carrying around bags full of wrapped presents.  But this Christmas has been none of those things, probably because it hasn’t snowed yet and I am far, far too poor to buy anyone any presents.

Sorry in advance for that, anyone out there who might have bought me presents.

So I’m not rich.  Poor people can still have awesome Christmases, right?  I guess so.  Those awesome Christmases usually involve family, or little Christmas trees that you get on clearance and which look totally retarded until you put all of the ornaments and lights on them, or standing outside some rich dude’s window and going “It’s Christmas Day, sir!” and having him throw a couple of Euros at you so you can go get a tofurkey.  Still, none of those things have happened to me.  And they probably won’t.

Really, the only feasible thing that will happen to me is that I will eventually learn the True Meaning of Christmas.  I don’t know how it will happen, but it’s supposed to snow tomorrow, and I feel like it’s going to happen in the snow, and it’s probably going to involve a kindhearted, irascibly cheerful bum who I accidentally trip over in a subway station.  Maybe it’s because this bum will have decorated the pile of old blankets he sleeps on with a Christmas tree made out of magazine clippings and old store display boxes.  Or maybe he will have baked cookies and be giving them out, even though he has nothing, thus showing everyone that Christmas is not about having or getting, it’s about giving.  I, of course, even as I accepted this universal message of love, would refuse a cookie from a bum, being suspicious of where the dude who sleeps on a pile of old blankets gets access to an oven.  There’s an 80% chance those double chocolate chunk cookies contain absolutely no chocolate at all.

I’m just saying.

So this is the most non-traditional Christmas I think I’ve ever had.  There’s no advent wreath anywhere—not on the dining room table, like when I was a kid, or at church, like when I was a teenager, or at work, like when I sang in a church.  There has been absolutely no Christmas music; no singing at all, as a matter of fact.  No Messiah Sing-Along in Graham Chapel, none of the familiar hymns, no choir music to learn.  I haven’t seen my family since Thanksgiving, and I didn’t even see all of them then, and I didn’t help put up the tree at my parents’ house, and I don’t even know if there will BE a tree there this year now that I’m not there to guilt everyone into making Christmas special.

As my brother Stu put it, I’m suffering from a case of the Christ-meh’s.  Yes, portmanteaus run in my family.

I want this paragraph to be all about how I’m starting my own new holiday traditions and somehow managing to stay connected to the things that are familiar to me.  But unfortunately, I don’t have the means to do anything that would make me feel good.  I mean, I want to get presents for everyone.  I want to be thoughtful and wrap things and put effort into this holiday and Save Christmas, which I am famous for doing in my family.  But I can’t: I’m halfway across the country, I have no money for presents—I’m lucky to have a way home, in fact—and there won’t be time for baking and being the captain of everyone in the few days that I’ll be home. Yes, that’s right, bossing people around puts me in the holiday spirit.  What’s it to you?

I mean, I know that Christmas with my family is going to be nice and special, but I won’t be able to be excited about it until I’m there and it’s happening.  The excitement building up to the day is half of the fun, and I feel like I’m being somehow cheated out of it.

But this problem illustrates a more universal problem with my life right now, which is that I don’t feel connected here yet, although I’m slowly getting there, and there’s no sense of permanence or ritual or comfort or stability that I have, previously, been quite successful in constructing for myself.  I think, while I was still in St. Louis, that I mistakenly thought a job would be that security blanket for me, but obviously that was only one piece of the pie: it was also the familiarity of my friends and family, of my environment, and the comfort of having a nice place to live.  I mean, there are worse places than my current apartment, yes, but my room smells like feet and there is no room anywhere else in this apartment for my shoes.

I’ve been told time and time again that starting out in New York is like the hardest thing about living here; adjusting to the city and to the place(s) you live, getting used to paying twice as much for a quarter as much space, getting to know your surroundings, carving out a social niche for yourself, having to shove your way through the crowds to get what you need because you need it and it’s not going to get got for you.  I guess this is how all of these things have heard about are manifesting themselves in me: I’m having a happy blah-lidays.

Stu’s was better.  But you get my point.

Next Christmas should be better: I’ll be more stable, more used to the city, and I’ll probably live in a place where I know my landlord isn’t going to knife me, bleed me dry just to sell my platelets on eBay,  So maybe, instead of getting excited for THIS Christmas, I should spend the remaining pre-holiday time getting excited for NEXT Christmas.  And I should write down all of my gift ideas this year so I don’t have to come up with all of them again next year—that will save time.

Let me take this chance to wish everyone a Merry Christmas, or a Happy Last Night of Hanukkah, or a Joyous Kwanzaa, if anyone actually really celebrates that.  From my family to yours: please send money, because JESUS CHRIST.

Tee hee.   *<|:)

Well, it’s been a while, and I owe lots of people, specifically the people who mentioned to me rather pointedly that it has been a while since I’ve written here and who would like to know that I’m still alive, an update.  Maybe I will write one entry for each night of Hanukkah.  Didn’t that start today?  Shit, I just googled it and it was yesterday.  By which I mean Friday.

I always sort of pictured a big move across the country as the next big step for me.  Even when I was in high school, I saw a move like this on the horizon.  Not that I necessarily hated St. Louis—I mean, like any place, it has it’s troubles and I certainly complained a lot about the things that bugged me (coughTRANSITcough).   The longer I was there, the more I only saw the city-rot, the urban sprawl, the chain restaurants (Applebee’s upon Applebee’s!), and a lack of a certain je-ne-sais-quoi that I always felt when I was in a bigger city like Chicago or Paris or New York, which are the biggest cities in the world that I’ve been to.

So with this in mind, I was properly primed to appreciate all of the things New York has to offer: a fucking fantastic system for public transit—I don’t think I’ve had to wait more than five minutes for a train, ever, with the exception of that one time I thought it would be a good idea not to take a cab to the airport for a 6AM flight; a vibrant arts community with awesome museums and live music coming at you from every direction at all times, whether it’s your ukelele-playing neighbors down the hall or some crazy gender-non-specific person with a guitar at your local subway station; a diverse population in every sense of the word; and crazy, maniac energy oozing from everyone’s eyes (everyone is always on their way somewhere or crossing the street purposefully or doing something real important, and they are not afraid to mow you down to accomplish this goal).  Okay, so that last one is kind of a mixed blessing.  But I should iterate that it is, in fact, a blessing: for someone whose life feels ho-hum, it’s important to be made to fight for something every once in a while, even if it is your spot in line at the grocery store.

But, and although I am loathe to admit it to the myself of four months ago who couldn’t wait to leave St. Louis forever, there are certain things that I really, really miss.  And it’s taking me time to adjust to life without them in New York.

For instance: I have lived in two apartments so far, in the less than three months that I’ve been here.  I learned a lot about myself in my first place: for instance, that I don’t want to live with anyone who is just as obnoxious sober as they are when they are high and/or drunk.  In my current apartment, I am experimenting with living in a very small space: I have share an apartment with four people and a vegan pit bull (that’s right, a pit bull who is vegan), have no common space, and my bedroom approximately 72 square feet.  Inside this very tiny room is crammed all of the stuff I could cram in from my former palace in St. Louis: my dresser, a chest, a full-size bed (which I initially bought in a misguided attempt to be prepared for overnight callers, and in which I have never hosted any overnight callers, unless you count a box of Snackwell’s and the taste of shame), a bookshelf, and my nightstand.  I did not have room for: my desk.  Too bad my only computer is a desktop; I have it set up on my windowsill and I am typing this from my uselessly spacious bed.

So I guess you could say I miss the sense of stability I had for myself in St. Louis.  I mean, my apartment could have been featured in a magazine (presuming there’s a magazine out there that does features on apartments with green walls that are covered in cat hair), and I was really set there.  Set in the way jello sets and becomes solid (well, gelatinous) and stable (ish).  Bad analogy.  But you see what I mean: I had a real apartment, where I could cook things, and I could invite people over, and it was nice.  Here the kitchen is gross and only two roommates really use it: one to microwave Brussels sprouts, which I can only assume are dog food, and the other to make a week’s worth of lunch in his slow cooker and make my bedroom smell like rack of lamb.

It was also really great in St. Louis not to have to wait in line for twenty minutes at the grocery store when all you’re getting is cookies to dip in Nutella because you’re out of real food at home and you’ve made bad choices with your life.

It doesn’t help my St. Louis nostalgia that I am on the outs with my crazy landlord.  It feels a little bit like La Bohème, actually, with so many people in this apartment and not being able to give my landlord all of the money he wants, and with a fancy coat that I might eventually have to sell to pay for meds.  The only thing that’s missing is the obscene amount of sex I’m sure I would be having were I living in 19^th-Century Paris and working as a writer or a musician or a seamstress.  Er, seamster.  Tailor.

But to get back to my original point, which was that I had a fight with my landlord this week, which occurred entirely in text message form, in which he, in (bless him) his broken English told me I should stop trying to be smart and pay him what he asked me to pay him in rent, versus what was actually written on the lease.  I will say this: for a man whose native tongue is not English, he certainly is fluent when it comes to swearing in text messages.  For all his fluency in English swearing, he has very little capacity to understand English logic.  Isn’t linguistics funny that way?

I also have to admit that I took my network of family and friends for granted while I was in St. Louis, and I’m finding starting everything over from the beginning in New York is harder than I expected.  I have friends here, definitely, but not a zillion.  In St. Louis sometimes I would be so resentful that people called me all the time to ask me to do things—that is definitely not the case here.  Instead I often wonder who I could call to come meet me for a Diet Coke when I’ve had a particularly stressful bout of text messages with my landlord.  Everyone I would normally call is in St. Louis—I can talk to them on the phone, but it’s not the same.  And I miss my brothers and my parents!

So I guess I have the usual complaints that a native Midwesterner would have coming to New York: so little space, not so easy to trust people, everything’s more expensive, nowhere gives you free refills, and your friends and family are still in the Midwest.

But I think what I have to gauge is whether or not it’s worth it.  As I recall, I had similar complaints about everything—except the free refills—when I first started college: all of my friends scattered around the country, I had to work to build new relationships with people, and I started seeing my family less and less (okay, maybe I wasn’t complaining about that in 2002, but still), and I didn’t know who I could trust and who I couldn’t.  I was also in a pretty uncomfortable living situation, as some of you may recall.

But really, it turned out okay.  I made amazing friends, I accomplished a lot, I did tons of singing, and I came out of it with a degree!  Eventually.

I think what I’m getting is that I know this is a tough time for me—it would be tough for anyone—but I think that the tougher it is the more it will pay off in the end.  After all, people move to New York from all over the world to do exactly what I’m doing, and most of the time they don’t have the luxury of a cushy job and a family that’s just a few taps on the iPhone away.  It’s hard, yes, but I’m really lucky to have what I do.

And that’s what I am learning here in New York.  I’m learning a lot about getting what I want, but more about what I had before—and how maybe those two sets of things intersect more than I thought they did.