but you're going to get a daily blog. it's not going to be as pithy as usual. it's going to be my 30 minutes of decompression. for, you see, i have a battle plan for dealing with this city. i have mental reserves now; i've even inadvertently trained myself to operate on bad sleep since it's the only kind i get here. i'm going to fix my mom and this apartment and i'm going to work on not being exceptional all the time, and i'm going to above all get out of here without a nervous breakdown or being alive.
and this will be my bubble. as long as i'm here, i'm going to take 30 minutes of quiet me time per day (where quiet means listening to relaxing music, of course), time to decompress and relax, the time before sleep. and i'm going to spend some of that writing, every day, so you know i'm here and alive. (if i miss an entry, it's probably because i've crashed on someone's couch, not because i'm dead -- i hasten to add.) you can read it -- i don't promise miracles. i'm never in top form in this city.
so. day one. i arrived at jfk ahead of schedule, and made my way through the subway to here. i noticed along the way that while i hate this city, i do fit in here. i know how to walk. i know how to epitomize a subculture (i'm the white nerd but not uber-nerd.) i know the subway system inside and out (although with the constant changes, probably only inside these days.) i'm actually vaguely comfortable.
and then i walked into my apartment, my mom's apartment. i was expecting mild improvement, since for almost all of the past 3 months she knew i was coming here. but no -- it's the same as always. but with the mental reserves in tow, that's okay. i'm actually even excited to attack the cleaning up. i should take day by day pictures, i suppose, although my mom probably won't have any of that so i'll have to do it surreptitiously. as opposed to the nebulous uncertainty of the past few weeks (which still persists -- you think i'm talking about a girl, but for once i'm not!), here is something i can do. i can take ridiculous amounts of stuff out of the apartment.
and if i offend my mom in the process, well, i'm financially self-sufficient. i just want a livable apartment, and i want my mom to be less of a corner case, more stable, more first world. there's no way that having more than 10 square feet of space not packed 5 feet high with stuff (not an exaggeration -- i'll probably post pictures intermittently) can be bad for someone.
and so it begins. day one.