Things calming down, Coney Island and my inability to take care of electronics...

Good morning. First day off in seven and I'm just finishing laundry and eating lunch. Also finally working on a piano piece that will be part of a cycle that I intend to submit to the SCI 2010 conference. August 1st is the deadline. I have the first piece in the cycle written and the second piece is in the works. Three is the magic number so I'm planning on writing a really simple ending piece in the next week while simultaneously finishing the current piece.

Distractions have subsided a little bit. The basketball goal is no longer outside so I've been sleeping a lot better lately and learning to chill the #$%&*@ out. I realize that, in the wake of my little freak out about my rent, it was too easy to find reasons to hate this place and convince myself that the only possible solution was that I needed to get out, no matter the cost. But now, I'm trying to look at things in a different light now that they've calmed down a bit. I'd be much better off sticking things out then adding more complications to my current situation. After all, I do like living alone, for now, and this neighborhood is not nearly as bad as I make it out to be. Let's face it, when you're the only one you have to bounce your own thoughts off of, there's no one to tell you that you're over reacting, over thinking, or just plain off the mark except yourself. And it's really hard to be honest with yourself at these times. The simple fact of the matter is that things could still be a lot worse. In fact, these hard times of having to scrimp by are teaching me, as they should be teaching the rest of America, how to live within your means. This is a valuable lesson and honestly, if I had a little bit more money and were a little bit more comfortable, my first thought would be that I had license to spend more and then I'd probably end up right back where I am now, through my own carelessness. If this is instilling in me a certain sense of caution then maybe this is the best place for me to be right now.

I'm not saying I wouldn't mind having a little more money to work with here. I've figured how long it would take me to pay off my debt if I were working full time hours...10 months. But it would require me to be working full time. There is good news on the job front, on all sides actually.

First, I got called for an audition for some paid extra work today and I'll be going in for that tomorrow. Second, Part time vs. freelance employment is on the horizon potentially at one of my jobs (I won't say much more because I don't know anything yet for sure). And third, a co worker recently asked me to help him finish off a score for his short film. So I'll start that soon.

Good things come to those who wait.

In the meantime, I went to Coney Island finally yesterday. I am twenty minutes away from the beach and I haven't even realized it all this time. I was certain it was at least a thirty minute train ride. Karishma and I basically walked up and down the boardwalk, purchased some disgusting cheese fries from Nathan's Hot Dogs, walked out onto one of the piers and finally dipped our feet into the ocean before heading back. Coney Island is dirty by NC standards but nowhere near as bad as some Florida beaches I've seen. I'll have to go back now and ride a few of the rides, though. Seems fun. Here are some pictures from the occasion, taken with the camera I've owned for about two years which has, regrettably just been fatally wounded while riding in my bag. Nice big crack in the middle of the LCD screen. And this is one of those cameras that has no viewfinder. I was heartbroken. As I was when I sat on my 8GB iRiver MP3 player a few weeks ago. Do I have some kind of problem with taking care of my electronics? Here are the pictures:

Coney Island best

Why I moved to New York and some info on how to...

As I walked from my work place in Chelsea to the West 4th Street stop, something I've been doing lately with the weather being nice again, I realized that I'm never going to get bored in this city. When my depression was at its worst in Raleigh, years back, one of the things that made my life feel so monotonous was having the same commute home from work every day. I would make ridiculous detours, anything to not have to drive the exact same way home every day. I'd even make excuses to leave early and then go and buy coffee before work, just to change up the routine. When I left work today, I thought, "I'll just walk to West 4th Street instead of having to take two trains." I even walked a different way then I have in the past, all the way to 6th Avenue along 15th Street and then south to the station. Other days I've walked down 9th to Hudson to Bleeker and then hung out in Father Demo Square (which is actually the shape of a triangle) just to get a change of scenery and not have to dive right into the muggy subway platform and stand sweating for ten minutes waiting for the train. If I'm going to sweat I might as well take in the city.

I love exploring this place. My present problems and discontent aside, it never disappoints, this city. There will always be something to see, whether it be some old building, apartments I'll never live in, a park I would have never normally found, or just the people of this city going about their business half of them oblivious to it all. Or just life going by in a big city. I can't explain why this is so different from Raleigh. I admit there are things I came to love about Raleigh but perhaps a sheer lack of creativity brought on by my near paralyzing anxiety and depression when I first graduated college kept me from really discovering Raleigh. But either way, I needed a change of scenery, though I'm not naive enough anymore to think that the scenery is all that has healed my anxiety and depression.

Anyway, if there's one bit of insight that I've gleaned from the last 6 months it's this: That the best way to come to NYC is to forget all your belongings except the bare minimum and live in slight to moderate to terrible discomfort (depending on how you look at it) in someone else's apartment, month to month if you can swing it, until you are stable with your job and know what you can afford to live in. Of course, this is obvious and would apply to any city but I didn't think it applied to me. I thought I could go on living by myself, enjoying my solitude with all the random shit I'd accumulated comfortably arranged around me and simultaneously afford it all without having first established myself here. I was wrong. I jumped the gun. Now it's a question of whether or not it makes sense to do anything risky to fix it.

I heard today that my boss has put in a request to hire me part time. Which would mean a couple of things for me: steady hours, no limit on my hours and even some, gasp, benefits! We'll see how it goes. So, I may yet survive this, having done it the way I did, but I certainly feel like, especially after talking with a close friends who's lived here for 7 plus years, that I could have come off a lot easier if I had done the subletting thing and not worried about moving twice. Hell, here I am considering moving for the second time anyway!

I had a nice talk with this friend yesterday and, besides imploring me to get on Match.com, he gave me some really good advice about the whole thing. He's subletted for years living up here and is getting ready to give up his room in his Upper East Side apartment (1 bed in a three bedroom apartment for $975) to move into a co-op he just bought up in Bronxville. So he was showing me the room in case I was interested. At $200 cheaper then my current digs, and several square feet smaller, which might necessitate storage or getting rid of things, it might not be for me. But oh, how nice it would be to say that in my first year in the Greater New York Area I found a sublet in Manhattan. I love his neighborhood. It's around 71st and York Avenue, lots of restaurants, a really good beer bar on York Avenue that we hit up, and some really nice apartment buildings. It's actually quiet back there. But I'll probably have to turn it down.

I also don't know what's going on with subletting yet. I'm not getting very many responses and, increasingly, the prospect of having to worry about this place (the current apartment) while I'm renting in a new one irks me. Even though, I may possibly find a place I could go month to month with, if my subletter defaults on me, then I have to worry about getting them out and getting someone else in. Getting them out being the harder of the two tasks.

I may not even follow through with this at all and just stay here. The noise outside was only bad last week. Maybe I'll get used to it (As long as it's not one of the days where I have to work at 6am).

So right now, I don't know what's going to happen. My plan is to see how subletting goes and, if badly, ask the landlord about getting out of the lease if I don't manage to find a subletter. If it's too much of a fee, hell, I may stay. It's only 'til March after all. And I will have been here for 6 months already come the 7th of August.

Hipsters in Bed Stuy and Chubby Basketballers in Sunset Park...

Like a lot of people I know, I like to think things happen for a reason, even if that reason is so that another thing can happen for a reason and on and on until you've gone completely mad wondering where the hell your life is going.

It seems as though this stuff only started to get bad (sure before it was stupid but bearable) once I had already come up with the idea of getting out of here. I was inspired to get out of here for purely monetary concerns initially but now, it's making more and more sense to do it.

If they're going to be out there later and later every night playing basketball (last night it was 330 in the morning or later when I finally called 311) then I'm just going to go mad. 311 is not very effective, I can't go out there and talk to these thugs and expect results (I heard them making fun of someone else who said they had to work in the morning) and I tried cotton balls and sleeping with my hand over my ear and my other ear buried in the pillow. None of these work.

So, maybe it's just a sign that I'm on the right track thinking of getting out of here. Maybe I needed more inspiration to get out of here. Because I may not survive at this rate paying this much in rent but I was hesitant to do it before because I

I had a heck of a time last night though before coming home to those idiots. I went to a Rubalad party in Bedford Stuyvesant with my poker night friends. Basically it's a huge loft building with multiple floors, bands and DJs in different rooms on each floor, art covering every inch of the place (including things like a papier mache cave in one room and slinkys and other random things hanging from the ceiling) and sweaty hipsters. It was wholly impromptu on my part as I wasn't even invited until about 9:00 that night. The party started at 11pm or so and we arrived shortly after. Read more reviews here. I can't seem to find an official website for it and all I could find out for any reason behind the party was this blurb in the email that was forwarded to me:

"20 years ago this summer, 200 eastern European picnickers broke through the iron curtain into the West. We celebrate them, as we exercise our freedom to celebrate."

Their was an option to come in costume. The theme? Picnics. We opted not to try and figure out what that could mean and devise some kind of costume ourselves. Instead we just went as is and people watched all night. But what a weird scene it was. I wish I could say more. After hanging out on the roof with the friends I'd come with, I went back in with a few of the guys, into the muggy dimness of the rest of the loft, I wound up waiting in line for the only bathroom for about twenty minutes. Well, the only bathroom that had a door and was not a mere sheet labeled "pee tent" draped over a structure on a corner of the roof. It was wild.

But anyway, back on the topic of getting the heck out of here. I also have a few options for places to stay cropping up. A friend that I made at a party back in March is looking for someone to fill a spare room where he and his girlfriend live. I'm going to proceed with caution on this one because it might not be for me. It's a three bedroom for one, and I think it's in Bed Stuy, the neighborhood I was in last night (famous for being seedy...seriously there's a Billy Joel lyric about this place), and also it may be too small for me and my stuff. I've decided, though, if I end up cheap enough on rent, wherever I end up moving, I should have enough extra money to rent a storage space for the stuff I can't bring.

And so the logistical nightmare begins. But I'm okay with that. I guess I have to pick which nightmare I want to deal with right now. And I think a little bit of shuffling of my stuff around is worth potentially removing myself from a place where I have to endure a couple of tubby high school kids playing basketball shirtless outside my apartment until 4am, then I'm game. It's goes without saying, of course, that any place I do move to must be quieter in that respect, i.e. a few floors up or at least not street side.

And so and so forth. I'm going to the West Side tonight with Karishma to watch the fireworks. Hopefully, it won't be a total cluster and hopefully we'll be there soon enough to actually catch them. Wish me luck. Pictures ensuing to include my day around Madison Square Park with cousin Katrina.

Okay, so I'm still thinking about that plan in the last blog entry...

I decided tonight that I'm going to stop looking at my situation as a disappointment that I can't do anything about. And start looking at it like this. I came to NYC, yes. But in many ways, I'm not here yet. So I shouldn't consider the experience of living here as though, I got to NYC and it's nothing like I expected and I actually hate it. This is just about where I'm living, where I call home. There are so many aspects of living and working this massive city that have shattered all of my expectations. But the place I live is not one of them.

Sure it's comfortable enough but, living in this neighborhood, I feel apart from everything, as though I were living in the suburbs. I thought about this tonight as I strolled through Sunset Park and it felt like I was in the South Garner Park of New York City. The neighborhood of Sunset Park feels to New York City what Garner felt like to Downtown Raleigh. But on a grander scale and therefore worse in some ways. The morons who litter and make noise and call each other "n____" and play basketball directly outside my apartment. The idiots who pulled up in a Lincoln Towncar last night and parked in front of my apartment(and I'm sure they'll do this again) and blared their Mariachi music while belting out the lyrics at the top of their lungs, all the while spilling beer out the side of their car and smashing the bottles on the pavement. (Yeah, I called 311 for the first time last night) All these, I'm sure, have some kind of counterpart down in Garner. I remember moving out of Garner to North Raleigh for similar reasons. There was domestic violence and after hours noise, etc. so we just broke our lease back then and moved on to better things. I don't intend on doing that here, breaking my lease, nor do I think I could.

Anyway, I've decided to look at my present situation as a step along the way instead of a dead end. I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting to be far away from this shit. Nor do I think there's anything wrong with expecting things to be different in another neighborhood. I'm well aware that I may find some other things not to my liking in a new place, but, honestly, if I could wake up for once to my alarm and not to the person across the street, who has one of those warning beeps for reversing on his van, sitting with his car in reverse, the beeping incessant for about five minutes straight, then I'd be slightly more content with my situation. I could transcend all of this and agree that I shouldn't let it bother me as much. But then, well, you try it sometime. It's actually quite maddening.

So, the plans begin. I've got a little time to think calmly about how to most easily get out of here and to get advice from people who've sublet before. I've even got time to really take care with where I live next and whom I live with.

I suppose I could stick it out until March next year...but that's 7 months away. No thanks. I'll keep updating about this aspect of the New York Experience, the whole discontent with my living space. It's sure to raise some interesting stories. The basketball game is still not over and it's almost midnight. It's turning into a f@#$in' block party out there. Oh, save me from this.

Sublease...

I'm going to sublet my place. I've done a lot of thinking about this over the past week and it makes the most sense out of any other plan I've come up with. The reason is that this place I'm living in has become too expensive for me to afford with any amount of uncertainty about my hours at work. I stand to save about $400 a month by doing this and that alone has been enough to assuage any apprehensions I have about moving again, leaving this place, going through the hassle of finding a subletter and a new apartment in the same month and any other random concerns that have come up with regards to this process.

To me, it's as good a plan as any and that it's a plan with a definite set of consequences, the bulk of which are good for me, makes me feel a million times better than sitting around worrying and trying to find extra side gigs and begging my bosses to hire me full time. That all can wait. In the meantime, the name of the game is to make a gigantic stride towards being able to effectively spend less than I make for once. I've reached my limit with all of my other expenses. I literally can't cut back anymore short of not eating or drinking a few nights a week and unplugging even my fridge when I leave the house and never using my A/C ever.

Survival instinct has kicked in. This is what it has come to. I had an epiphany that my lifestyle right now is essentially what is expensive and that I needed to consider doing this one big thing to change my lifestyle, i.e. roommates instead of living by myself, in order to not be so stressed out about it. That's one of the root causes of panic, when you feel like you have no other options. So I just needed to add some options to the table. At least one other, that is.

And now, I just have to go and put the plan into effect. I cannot decide if I should take care of finding a new place first or if I should sublet this one first. Let me explain. I've read on the NYC Rent Guidelines Board website that in order to sublet I have to give written notice to my landlord 30 days before and in this letter I must include the name of the sub lessor and my address during the sublease. ??? How the eff am I supposed to do that? So then, I get thinking. They don't need to know when exactly the sublet starts. I could make like it's starting in August, thereby giving them thirty days, but I could go ahead and get the sub lessor in here now and myself out. Or at least fudge the days a little. This way when I write them the letter of intent to sublet I can at least have a name of who is subletting and where I will live. But then, if they turn down my request? This is what confuses me. If there's the potentiality that they will turn down my request to sublet, why am I going to ahead and find a place that I could end up having to turn down? Maybe I could just give my parents address.

Not to bore you all with the details of it all. Half of this is just me writing it out so I can read it back to myself and, by that, perhaps make more sense out of it all. I think I'll just write them a letter of intent to sublet and keep it at that. Turn it in tomorrow morning and wait.

I hate that it's come to this. In some ways. In other ways, I'm looking forward to the potential to get out of this neighborhood sooner rather than later (March 1st next year). Also, I think it would solve a lot of my problems with socializing in this city if I can find roommates around my age that have been here for a while and have a network in place and if I can move to a neighborhood where there are sundries and hangouts nearby and I can feel like I don't live in suburbia. Incidentally, this is one of those random reasons I moved to the city. To be closer to people. It seems a bit ironic, sometimes I complain about the noise in my neighborhood or I come across as a bit of a curmudgeon but honestly, I'd love to be around people my age. That's the qualifier: my age. Not around families and high school kids. I feel like an outsider here (and not just because it's mostly Hispanic and Chinese and Indian families here who keep to themselves).

I was hanging out in Park Slope the other night with some people from my UNCG days, people that studied film there and that I could be found hanging out with just about any day of the week back then. I'm looking around the bar and seeing all these twenty and thirty somethings doing what I'm trying to do. Live a life in New York City. I've had apartment jealousy, I've had neighborhood jealousy. Now I'm having life jealousy. I know how absurd that is, by the way, to look at someone and, effectively making a snap judgment by the way they appear to me, wish I had what they had. Especially since I know nothing about their lives. It may suck to them. But at any rate, it looks shiny and attractive to me, and though I'm wary of wanting, I still want it or something like it. Comfort and stability are one thing but at least to be able to pay my bills and live near people my age would make my content. After all, there's nothing wrong with goals is there? Just getting attached to results. I'm certain that I will want something else as soon as I move to that brownstone apartment in Park Slope.

Anyway, I've got a formal letter to write. If anyone has any advice or information on how to go about subletting if you've ever done it before, please let me know what you know, I'm all ears. I'm off. Have some pictures from my romps last week:

J Scott's Visit

And here's some from poker night last night:

poker Night