Funny how just changing the calendar (and a good night's sleep) can change your outlook. I'm sitting here in my PJs with a big mug of tea and a better frame of mind than last night, contemplating the new year and what's going to change:
For one thing, my address. After almost 18 years in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, I'm moving to Parkchester, Da Bronx at the end of this month. I moved to New York in July 1986, and I've been in this apartment since then. It's teeny and cramped and badly renovated in an old building and it's been time to move for a while, but I've been waiting for the right place. Patience has paid off. For $50 more a month, I'm getting a real 1-bedroom in a fabulous neighborhood at about the same commute that I've got now. My new landlord is a friend of mine who's eager for a good long-term tenant, and who doesn't mind me painting or putting some sweat equity into it to fix it up myself. So I'll be starting in a freshly painted (they're priming, I'm painting) place with a new fridge and probably a new stove (gas, again; yay!) in a place with more square footage than I've had in since living with my parents. I'll also have some beautiful hardwood floors, instead of nasty carpet, so I can find some lovely new rugs. I'll have a real kitchen (as opposed to a room with appliances in it), a real bedroom (as opposed to my livingroom with a futon in it), and a great new workspace. I have a new trundle daybed coming for guests. I'll have . . . (wait for it) . . . CLOSETS!
I get to hang up my new Pete's Wicked Ale tin beer sign. (It's a yard across, so this isn't trivial.) It'll look great in the kitchen.
So I have a new neighborhood to explore and learn and new furniture to buy, a whole apartment to arrange in a completely different way than I've been living, and new furniture to buy. I have to buy new bookcases, a new computer stand, and a new, smaller dining table, since my farmhouse pine table is going to become a work table. And a new bed. A real bed. With a real mattress. A headboard. A footboard. Box springs. And of course, new sheets.
Most exciting though, is the chance to get rid of things. I've been paring down for a couple of years, but faced with an imminent move, I'm even more motivated. The office and my dish cupboard are the two big trouble spots right now, and I'm eager to get at them. I still haven't decided whether I'm going to pack or just let the movers do it. We'll see what the price difference is.
I'm getting rid of my ratty Conran's wardrobe, my ratty Conran's bookcase, two filing cabinets; the extraneous plastic storage bins and milk crates still hanging around, since I will actually have kitchen cabinets now; two file cabinets; possibly my old steel barrister's bookcase, too; and once again, I'm going to do a shred of my office. I didn't do it last year and I know I've accumulated way more paper than I need. The goal is to get it down to two hanging file baskets, so I don't have to buy a new file cabinet, just another basket and the wheely platform. Dr. Em is taking one file cabinet, my kitchen cart, and my old faithful drafting table. The bookcase and the wardrobe are going into the junk, along with one of the filing cabinets. I imagine I'll be living out of boxes for a while, until I get the new bookcases and stuff. The first purchase will be a new computer desk.
I will miss none of it.
I will not miss this neighborhood. I won't miss the precipitous, Everest-like slog up the steepest and scariest front stoop in Brooklyn. (I have an elevator in the new building; did I mention that? Bliss!) I won't miss lying awake listening to the bikers next door. I won't miss the corroding linoleum in my kitchen. I won't miss the 9x7 claustrophobia of my office. I won't miss the cracked and peeling horsehair plaster walls that needed to be disguised with faux finishes (though I'm grateful for having learned how to do them). I won't miss floors so sloped that the refrigerator door swings open on its own. I won't miss the building doing the cha-cha every time the subway goes by. I won't miss the white noise of the Gowanus Expressway half a block away. I won't miss the roar of diesels from the loading docks down the street. I won't miss the lack of closets or cupboards. I won't miss sleeping in my living room and having no privacy when I have guests over. I won't miss freezing in the winter, or not having any AC in the summer. I won't miss the ill-fitting windows that I can't see out of because of condensation between the panes. I won't miss the leaking roof or the broken pipes. I definitely won't miss the mice and cockroaches and the "water bugs."
When I moved in, the place had a certain bohemian charm that has long since buffed off. The building's deteriorated sadly through three landlords, though Adriano's doing his best to fix it up. It's a job I wouldn't touch because it's such an old building. It really needs to be gutted and redone from the inside out, though there's nothing special about the exterior, either. It's not like it's a brownstone. It's just another rowhouse, semi-detached on one side. Event he stone stoop is looking a little shabby.
It's going to feel weird living in an apartment building too. The closest I've been to a development like Parkchester is my place in East Lansing, but it was only three stories high, with outside entrances and two apartments per floor. Even the dorms I lived in as an undergrad were renovated houses, with the exception of my freshman year, and that was an old, old dorm, more like army barracks. Most apartment complexes feel too much like hotels to me. This one doesn't seem to. It's six apartments per floor, and no long hallways to traverse, which is what I think gives that hotel feel.
I will miss the tin ceiling in the kitchen, the pretty molding, and my capacious bathroom (same size as my office, and thus more like a dressing room). I'll miss my wonderful laundryman. I'll miss the view on my commute, coming across the Manhattan Bridge. I'll miss looking out into treetop from my office window (I'm on the 6th floor in the new place). That's about it.
I also like the symmetry of starting a new year, more or less, in a new place.
Sounds like it's time to go, don't you think?
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Also to mark the new year, I got a new cell phone, since my old one wasn't holding a charge any more, and nobody makes the battery packs for it anymore. Geek that I am, I totally love it. It's a flip phone, a Motorola V60i, that's very Star Trek but not fancy. Since it was virutally free with the rebate, I'm delighted with it. I know people hate AT&T, but I've been with them for years, and my signal never drops and they have great deals.
I'm off to Marcia and Val's this afternoon for an open house, and then to dinner with an out-of-town friend tomorrow night, and Paul was just here last weekend (and will be here again in January some time), and then Ian and his daughter Catherine are coming over from England for a week in February. I'm supposed to go visit DeeDee in Florida this year, too. Busy new year.
Happy New Year with new beginnings.
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