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3-26-08 Why I have trouble decorating.

My least favorite room when I was growing up was my own, my bedroom. It had blue and white tile floors that were always cold, a single, thin blue rug in the center of the floor beside the bed which was also blue, a pale, rickety wooden desk along one wall and a set of industrial-style metal shelves laden with various toys and games along another. The lights were fluorescent and flickered when they came on, illuminating the white and blue with a pale greenish-yellow light. The walls that were not sheet rock were bricks (painted white, natch), while the only window in the room had bars on the outside and curtains inside with cowboys on them that I hated with a sort of unconscious, lethargic fury until I moved out to go to college at the age of 18.

3-9-08 Liminal

The day was spent walking the blocks around my new place. I now live right on the border between Prospect Heights (beginning to gentrify, but still affordable to certain people who want to live near the park but are priced out of Park Slope) and Crown Heights (decidedly not gentrifying in the least, entrenched poverty, hardcore gang tags and run down buildings everywhere), and as with all borders, war is the order of the day.

Each street shows the scars of battles, in graffiti and garbage and half completed condos. Outposts of money (a Pilates studio, a cute bar, a coffee shop with indirect lighting and a selection of international brews) jostle up against poverty (the apartment building with garbage in the yard, the empty lot full of discarded auto parts lorded over by a single baleful-eyed rottweiler) and the old-guard of the neighborhood (a Jamaican bakery, a hair salon, an auto-parts store), all uneasy, suspicious each of the other, wondering who will take each contested block.

2-19-08 What's Going On Here?

I've missed several days. I turned off the internet at my house in anticipation of the move and now the people I was leeching wi-fi off of have gotten wise and I am bereft, able only to post between assignments at work. Ah, well.

I'm trying to get rid of as many of my books as possible, and currently they're sprawled across the living room floor like confetti, waiting for someone to pick them up and give them good homes, so I decided to take them to the library (like the Humane Society for books) and give them away there.

1-7-08 Meta-bragging

"I don't want to only talk about beating Halo as my four sentences tonight," I say while carrying old hard drives and computer equipment out to the garbage area behind my apartment building. I have Katie on the hands-free headset, and I'm in a t-shirt and jeans because it's been so warm today.

"Well, could you put it in as a P.S. or something, like, 'I beat Halo, to be continued'?"

"Well, that would have to be part of the four sentences, too," I say, dumping the last of the old software CD's into the garbage and walking back up the steps to go back inside.

12-29-07 - We Gotta Get Outta This Place

If you sleep until noon, you don't get to feel bad when it gets dark at 4:30. My cat, Honey, stayed at Steph's house while I was in Arizona, so today I went down to Brooklyn to pick up her up (Honey, that is, not Steph), and since Steph lives in roughly the same neighborhood as Katie, I rode to Flatbush and walked.

Amazing how a few days in car-culture will make you forget what it means to ride the subway everywhere you need to go: it took me an hour-and-a-half to get there, all of it torture. My resolve to move to Brooklyn was increased substantially.