City Dwelling

Recently, an old college friend moved to the city.  She scoped out potential apartments before her arrival and signed the lease for an apartment in Brooklyn.  This apartment was so much better than the other ones she looked at, she said.

Her apartment had just been renovated.  Everything was going to be brand new.  The other apartments the broker showed her were nice too, but in less desirable neighborhoods or a farther walk from the subway.

The apartment she liked boasted a kitchen with full size appliances whereas the other places did not.  One apartment only had two college-sized mini fridges in lieu of one normal sized fridge.  So, in comparison, the apartment she chose pretty much sounded like a luxurious urban oasis. 

She felt pretty lucky about her decision… until she actually moved into her newly – not totally – rehabbed apartment.  Half of the apartment was either missing or not working. 

She lived for THREE WEEKS with NO:

1) Hot water

2) Kitchen sink

3) Gas

4) Working stove

Ben and I laughed and shook our heads with pity when she told us the story.  Nowhere, NOWHERE else in America would a person be expected to live in such conditions and pay rent.  But, in New York City, we are.

We do it with a smile on our face because it’s New York.  New York!  We know that surviving in this city will make us stronger (we hope).  We know that if we can make it here, we can make it anywhere.

Home

I don’t know when, exactly, or what triggered the evolution of my feelings and perspective over the past four months.  I just know that it happened.  It’s something that I’ve waited 2.5 years for and finally decided wasn’t going to happen.  But, then it did…

I have fallen in LOVE with New York.  I have fallen in love in a big kind of way, head over heels.  I now love New York so much that I often think about how much I love it, which somehow must equal even more love.

For a long time, I wondered if I would ever feel this way.  I really worried about it after my first year of rocky starts.  Everyone I had met loved New York (or at least said they did), so naturally I had to love it too.  For a long time, I tried to force myself to love a place that I didn’t feel 100% a part of. 

Then, everything changed and evolved around April or May of this year.  And, by June, I cemented my love for this great city.  I finally felt truly happy and at peace both in my heart and at a conscious level.

It hit me when I was flying home from a wedding in June.  As I walked onto the plane I got an overwhelming yearn to go home.  That’s right… home. 

It was the first time in almost three years that I felt I was going home.  I was no longer going to an apartment in a city that served as a shell of what was supposed to be my home, but really wasn’t in my mind.  It no longer acted as a substitute for what I missed in Kentucky.  It was the real deal.

I had waited for so long for that. 

This past summer only intensified my love for New York.  The reasons of why I love New York piled up everywhere I looked or went.  I couldn’t cross a street or turn a corner without finding something that I loved.

My job, of course, is one of my number one reasons of why I’m so happy. I’ll stay in New York as long as I can to continue to work at my school.  It’s my haven.

My second number one reason (I guess that’s called a ‘tie’) is my group of friends.  New York is New York because of them.  They changed everything for me.

And, lastly (to round out a list that could go on and on and on)… correction, ironically, all of the reasons of why I like New York now were all of the reasons of why I disliked it in the beginning.    Many things that bugged me, frustrated me, and annoyed me before are now the very things that I find oddly endearing and sometimes comforting.  It’s weirdly true.

Don’t get me wrong… some of the same things still drive me crazy and always will.  I will always hate to walk home 5, 10, 15 blocks without an umbrella during an “unexpected” thunderstorm, pay a million dollars for a box of cereal, and faint during run-ins with rats and roaches.  But, overall, the good far outweighs the bad.  The good makes living here fun.  The good added together makes it feel like home.

Happy Inhabitants

I greet fall weather with much enthusiasm. I wholeheartedly welcome the cooler temperatures.  I embrace the change of season.

Autumn means that we will no longer bake in the heat of our apartment, something that we’ve done since the loss of our AC unit. Our apartment is finally, once again, a comfortable temperature.

Our place no longer turns into a sauna when the sun beats in and we turn on the oven. We no longer feel heat from the street radiating up five floors. And, we no longer sleep with three fans pointed at us.

Temperate weather = tolerable apartment = happy inhabitants = us. 

Babies

Two friends from work had babies this summer. A group of us made a trip to visit them. We spent all afternoon oohing and ahhing over two very sweet baby girls.

Meet Avery...

 Meet Sabina...

Labor Day

Yesterday, we celebrated Labor Day in Central Park with friends at an impromptu picnic. Several thousand other New Yorkers also had the same idea thanks to the great weather. Fortunately, the Great Lawn can hold many, many people.

Getting together was the perfect way to end the holiday weekend.

Supernatural

Something fishy is going on with our Netflix account.  It’s been happening for a while now.  I hope that this post will fix the “situation”.

My movies never change positions in the queue. 

I frequently check our movie queue. I see my movies at the top of the list. I anticipate their arrival. 

But, they NEVER come.  Instead, we get movies I’ve never heard of, movies that were in the middle and at the bottom of the queue. I then get confused and recheck the list.

Hmmm, my movies are still in the same spots. They’ve held the top three spots for months now. Yet, they never move. They never come. It’s inexplicable! 

Amazingly, though, Ben’s movies ALWAYS weasel their way to the top of the list and make it in our mailbox.  His movies always mysteriously move to top at just the right moment, like on the day they’re sent. I don’t understand how their positions switch at the very last second. 

It’s so weird.

There must be a phenomenon that I don’t know about that prevents movies that I choose for us to watch to actually be watched.  Maybe that same thing happens elsewhere.  I’m not sure what the formal name for such a phenomenon is though. I will continue to research until I find an answer.