Apartment hunting...a little early...

Next on the roster is the impending doom and/or excitement of apartment hunting in New York City. Again. It's hard to believe we're approaching that. Can I just take a second to gush about my accomplishments? Can I? Can you all grant me that?

I can't believe how far I've come. Sometimes, it just doesn't cross my mind but then sometimes, I do feel like I need to just take in a deep breath, forget whatever is bothering me at that particular moment and take it all in. It's been almost a year in New York City. Random song for the moment:

Only Living Boy in New York

Anyway, I can't help but think back to what I was doing a year ago: Sitting in front of the computer looking at craigslist.org apartment ads, corresponding with potential roommates, eating-sleeping-reading-breathing New York City and actually starting to despair a little bit. Doing something like this (this being setting a goal, however modest, and accomplishing it) really does something for your self esteem. And it sort of insulates you against any negative thoughts or pessimism about future goals that I may or may not have even set yet. And that's a brilliant thing to have. It's a forward momentum. It's motivation to the highest extreme that anything I think up, dream up, I can go and, at least try to do.

All right, I'm done. It's a bit exciting, to be honest, to not only be slightly more seasoned and street smart but to also have a virtual veteran of New York City on my side in the hunt for apartments. As I said before, we've little more than thrown out some ideas about neighborhoods and talked roommate rules and the like. But it's starting to feel closer. What else can I say but wish us luck?

Blurb #15

It seems like my blogs of late are always beginning with the fact that I've been working a lot. I'll skip ahead and assume that you've already divined as much since I haven't blogged in a bit. It's late so I'll make this short though. I have a friend coming into town this weekend, one who is considering moving to NYC in the near future, so you can imagine this is going to be fun for me. I've already been having these moments where I start thinking about where I was and in what mindset, etc. this time last year. There was a great deal of scouring craigslist and job search sites going on, daydreaming and internet research. But now I get to watch another friend go through it. From a different perspective. It is a great feeling though to look back on your own journey and see how far you've come, especially if you can distinctly remember bouts of hopelessness, where you thought you'd never make it and how you trudged on through them and how now you can say, I did it!

Anyway, other news, I may have a roommate for next year, tentatively speaking. Won't say too much because I don't want to jinx it. My apartment is clean and enjoy living alone but it's time for a transition in my lifestyle to something more cost effective.

And as for music? I've played my piano the past few days...and thought about some pieces. Really, I've been that busy. Sometimes the most creative I get is during my down time at work when I find myself drumming on various surfaces, which prompted an idea. Instead of buying a drum pad or an electronic drum set to perform drum lines for my recordings, it might be a cool idea to build a few drum pads into my computer desk and have them swivel out, have a kick pedal under my desk and have it all wired in via MIDI cables so that, when I get bored sitting at my computer, and I catch myself drumming some awesome beat, instead of having to map it all out manually or get up and walk across the room to a drum set, I could just play it by drumming on my pads and using the kick pedal under the desk. Sound crazy and like a lot of work to achieve something creative? So?

That having been said, I should go to bed...this wasn't really a blurb was it?

6 months...

6 months in New York City today. Well, yesterday. It all kind of hit me when I bought my metro card for the month on Thursday and realized it was my seventh one since I moved here. But I've been so busy I couldn't blog on the day of. It's funny when you look up after all you've been through and realize for the first time how far you've come. I kind of got into this in my last entry, feeling accomplished and finally satisfied with the pace of things even though I still can't see how this will all fall together. Anyway, the 6 month mark seemed like as good a place as any to pay homage to the fact that I have indeed come this far and might just go a little farther yet.

It's just been 6 days in a row of work (at both jobs combined, so no overtime, unfortunately). The weather has been amazing. Dry, mild, and windy. I wish I could send you this weather in a text message or something. Think of the warmest, sunniest day in September and raise the temperature two degrees. That's here, right now. The kind of weather you wish you could drink out of a tall glass with a few ice cubes.

At NY 1, there are plenty of parks in the vicinity to hang out in on my breaks. The Highline is one, Hudson River Park is another and I can even walk down to the riverfront and eat my lunch if I should so choose. Yesterday though, I had eaten lunch prior to my break so I just walked down to 7th avenue to a pizzeria near the corner of 15th and 7th, grabbed a slice of cheese pizza for $2.50, folded it in half and walked down the block back to the Hudson River Park on 10th Avenue, a favorite spot for business people, sunbathers and that bum that's always sitting at the corner of the park near 15th and 10th.

One thing that happens in six months in any new place is you start to get these little routines going. They're the backbone of your own stability and they sort of ground you and make you start to feel like you belong, like you get what this place is about and you're cool with it. I'm finding out little secrets as well. Things I'm sure other New Yorkers have noticed but don't tell anybody.

I was riding the D train in to work the other day and, somewhere between the Broadway Lafayette stop and West 4th Street, I looked up out the window of the train and where you usually see blackness or tunnel lights flashing by, I could see, on a track somewhere above us, another train running along side us. I knew it had to be the A, C, or E train since we were about to pull into West 4th street where both the blue lines and the orange lines connect, which meant the train I needed to connect to would be at West 4th street at the same time as the train I was riding. To connect from one train to the other I have to go up two flights of stairs and I'm never sure if I need to bother rushing up the stairs because I can never tell if the train will be there or not. That was before. Now, I have my little secret that I can look up between Broadway Lafayette and West 4th and see if the A, C, E train will be there at the same time as the D train...which could save me a good ten minutes depending on how long I have to wait for the next train.

At any rate, these little things like where to get a good cheap slice of pizza on my break and how to make sure I don't miss my train connection are starting to make me feel fully integrated into life on this little island. Who knows how I'll feel in a year. Beyond having steady employment that I can count on, I'm hoping to make my next move to a better neighborhood and apartment in a year so I think I'll focus on learning everything I can about the real estate in my ideal neighborhoods so I don't have to find some squatters hell hole in East Williamsburg or something. I have a good six more months to think about what I want out of my new living situation and to figure out how to go about getting it. And if those first six months went by so quick, it'll be no time at all before I'm looking again. Wish me luck.