Boundaries? Not really.

I have about seven minutes (perhaps less) to post before I must return to my living room and join my roommate for a back episode of Project Runway.

What's that, you ask? Nina... has a roommate?

Yes. Yes, Nina does. LAS and I are now roommates in New York City. What's that? You think it's really risky to move in with someone you met on the internet?

Well... for me, this move involved relocating about 2 miles east. For LAS, it involved relocating about 883 miles east. Bigger risk for her for sure. Plus we have been getting to know each other for... four years. That's long enough.

And what about the old advice that you should never become roommates with your best friend?

Well... this is about the most uncomplicated and unconfusing decision I have ever made in my life. I have no doubt this is going to work out, whatever smart people might say about boundaries. LAS has been here a week and we are having tons of fun.

So how are all of you?

Why all the fuss?

OK so I finally got Google Analytics to work. It told me what I already knew, which is no one stops by here anymore, which means I need to start posting every day again - that even though (as discussed) the narrative arc has closed - there is more to say.I'll start with the obvious: what the hell is going on?

In August, after my last day of work, I made the decision to allow myself to be underemployed for a semester in the hopes of getting my mental and physical health back. From September through December, I have been doing just that, and you know what? It has been fucking great.

I feel so much better.

But now it's time to work, and though I am still teaching part time to keep a roof over my head, I need to do more work to make the financial part of my life function. Right now my choices are:

1) get a job in retail. I am thinking Bloomingdales, fitting gals for bras. I would be so good at that.

2) go to a temp agency and indicate that I am good at several office type skills and see if they can give me a job two days a week.

Please note: everyone thinks I should go with option 2 because it is far more professional. But I kind of want to help young ignorant women learn how to pick out a bra.

What say you?

PS another foot of snow to fall tonight. Yippee!

I'm available

No. Not in that way. Stop looking at me like that.

As of eleven days ago, I no longer have a job. Oh wait, I do, but only until August. Then I will be most assuredly available (unless I want to move to North Carolina.) (Which I most assuredly do not.)

Everything but my wallet says I should not go there - that I should stay here and try to make my way, somehow. Any which way.

And y'all know what? I have no idea how to do that.

For starters, I don't think I want to teach anymore. I have been beyond burned out for a long time. People (almost everyone I know) say I should finish my doctorate. Ha! Those people think "getting my doctorate" is something as simple as running out for a jar of peanut butter. (IT"S TOTALLY NOT! IT'S A COMPLETE PAIN IN THE ASS!)

So what should Nina do? (She is open to suggestions.) (But maybe hold off on telling her to get her doctorate.)

While I Wait

I have about $200 worth of prescription medication being filled right now, and gosh I don't know whether to feel grateful that such medication exists or melancholy because the reality is I need all that stuff to keep me... alive. Well, let's go with gratitude, since gratitude is more attractive than self loathing.

Speaking of attraction, suddenly I am questioning my "celibate for life" policy based on nothing but the fact that celibacy now seems somewhat severe. Sometimes (often... always) when I am at the gym, I look at the men in the pool and consider whether they are my type or not. People, I haven't had a type since Bill Clinton was president. What to do about this? Should I start applying lipstick again? Should I try to get into my skinny jeans and attempt to be attractive? I really don't know. More on this later.

Oh! I moved. A block away from my job. Two days ago I got the worst performance review in the history of my career, but since I am focusing on the positive, we'll just not talk about that. Well, not today.

Caution! Here is what could happen to your apartment if you go to graduate school a whole lot:



Oh and I bought a dresser that fit perfectly into my apartment. (Please note that I had to buy children's furniture in order to accomplish this.)



One more! My bed matches the dresser. Maybe if I fit into my skinny jeans and start wearing lipstick again I will meet a man person who will tolerate a full size bed. Full beds are kind of small for two people. (What the hell am I talking about? Celibate! Forever!)





See you... next time.

Love,

Nina

Snow, weirdness, pancakes

It snowed about a foot in New York City last night and today it is still... snowing. I wonder how this will impact my move to the new place. (And no, Karl, the drawing was definitely not to scale).

Here are some real pictures for you.




I know these are not very helpful, but it is a small apartment. As much as I am excited, I have an underlying feeling of dread. It has taken some time for me to sort it out, but I now realize the dread comes from having something to lose again, even if it is just furniture and dishes that match. So lately I have to kick myself in the ass about twice a day to remind myself that people do indeed buy furniture and utensils and bath mats and trash cans, and that no, owning these things does not make me frivolous and wasteful. Does it??? I am clearly not a very good consumer.

It's still snowing and I haven't gotten much packing done this morning. So the obvious thing to do is make pancakes. Flip! See you tomorrow.

Learning

Things I have learned this year:

1) People really can change. I have changed several times this year.

2) It is possible, with the proper motivation, to eat an entire bag of Veggie Booty.

3) And then drink a beer

4) Good grammar is wholly unnecessary if the sentiment is sincere.

Welcome to Latvia!

I was in the airport last week for six hours. And while I was there, I had a moment of pure ______________. It occurred to me that I had my passport and enough funds on my person to get out of the country. Options: Casablanca, Lima, Sydney, Riga, Hong Kong, Ulan Bator.

Seriously. I could have been gone. Just gone. Deferring problems so great and terrible that the very wizard himself would have fled the curtain and run screaming from the set. I could have been drinking fermented horse milk (and stuff like that). In Ulan Bator. (Latvia, I hear, is also an excellent option. Someday I will go).

I did not board a flight for some foreign land. I exited the airport and took my passport and my small accumulation of cash (some of which isn't even mine) and went... home.

Instead I am going to try to make my life work. Fix up the broken pieces and toss out that which cannot be fixed. All from right here: New York City.

Latvia will have to wait, but when I do make it there, I sincerely hope that I am wearing a set of raggedy overalls.

And how are you?

Love,

Nina

PS Photo from some recent decade when overalls were fashionable (at least among us Target dwellers). I still wear those sometimes...)

Time

Kate left today for Sweden, which means I am on my own in an enormous house for 12 days. To most people, such circumstances would translate: horray! or party on! or naked time! Bah. I'd rather she had just stayed home. Being on my own means no one to talk to and masses of time I normally spend puttering around with her that I can now spend checking myself for suspicious moles or calculating the number of seconds that have passed since the last time I flossed my teeth. Being alone is not what it is cracked up to be.

Kate left today for Sweden so between 10 and 2 on this fine day, I ran all her errands, which were: drug store, eyeglasses place, hardware store, cleaners, shoe repairman. I did all those things and then somewhere on the west side I got confused about where my train station should be and because I felt in no particular rush to figure it out, I witnessed the following.



Another look:



That is Times Square. With blocks closed for the purpose of allowing people to sit in lawn chairs and just... be.

One person I asked explained that it was a symbol of a deep rooted New York City civility; tourists could come there and be seated and experience Times Square without being run over by bicycle messengers, and oh, the rest of us who will mow down a disoriented Ohioan just for breathing too slowly in that neighborhood. Another bystander claimed it was a conspiracy to keep traffic out of Times Square and that those dirty Republican bastards who run the Mayor's office were to blame. To blame! For lawn chairs!.

One more picture:




In case that is unclear, it is a bicycle adorned stem to stern with Metrocards. Someone must have spent a good deal of money on subway fare before buying a bike. And then had a sense of humor about himself.

Such is New York. And since I will be all alone in it while Kate is gone, you, internet, will be my company. I plan and promise and really do intend to post every day until Kate returns.

Love,

Nina

Sister

I left the house tonight to go buy intoxicants.  (We'll talk about that later). 

As I rounded the corner, I threaded my way through a half dozen guys.  

Internet, in case you were not aware, I attract the attention of people who linger on corners.  The usual greetings are variations of: 

Baby, you fine. 

Mama, take me home. 

Bring it, sistah. 

Baby, I'm your man. 

Etc. Etc. Etc. 

Most women find this kind of attention insulting.  I do not.  Why?  Because these mildly disrespectful greetings acknowledge that yes, I exist, and yes, despite my vice-like grip on celibacy and a single life, men still find something, anything about me worth comment. 

Today, however, was different.  As I rounded the corner, the guys did their gawking and I did my walking and I heard, plain as glass:  "Girl, you go on with them 40DDDs. " 

And internet, something happened.  It happened in the region of my brain responsible for poor decision making.  Instead of chuckling inwardly, I turned and faced the man and his poor estimation of the size and character of my breasts.  

I said, "Are you kidding me?  Not even close.  Want to hold them?" 

And the man who had spoken the numbers to me laughed so hard I thought he might lose a lung.  His friends laughed too.   And frankly we all had a good laugh about my boobs and then went on with our evening.  Half an hour later as I passed those very same guys on my way back from the store, they treated me with reverence typically reserved for nuns.  The very corner dweller who guessed my bra size tipped his hat and said, "Good evening, sister." 

So to him I said, "Good evening, sir." 

And a good evening to you, internet.  

Love, 

Nina 

Oh Dear Jesus God have Mercy

I will explain later why many families had made the last 3 weeks of my life... challenging. For now, I leave you only this:




A preamble to the photograph I mean to post about the burial.


More on that later.

Another crack in the firmament

This weekend, I broke my all anonymous, all the time rule. I met LAS of This Too Shall Pass in New York City. She was here to visit friends, and since we spend most every day on chat tied at the back of the mind, I figured it was cowardly and absurd not to meet her. Several thoughts went through my mind as I contemplated this meeting. In no particular order:

1) What if online simpatico does not equal real life simpatico? What if in person the whole thing is just wrong?
2) What if she thinks I am stupid, ugly, fat, or smelly?
3) What if we can't agree on whether to eat nachos or burgers?

Like all post-modern problems, these seemed terribly important until the moment when LAS got out of the cab and we met on the corner in front of the house (the one I live in now).

Really knowing someone over the internet is not easy to do. To read a person's blog is not to know the person. LAS and I didn't really know each other when we met on Saturday and now we do. I am glad of this and I hope she is, too.

Sidebar: my befuddlement continues. I am doing much better, but finding myself hesitant to write about the really interesting stuff in my life right now. This might be the time to make a natural break from blogging - or to at least find a new home. Wordpress? Anyone with any strong opinion is invited and encouraged to let me know.

I miss reading all your blogs and I miss writing mine. See the above befuddlement. "It" is not over, but it may, in the long run, be different.

Love,
Nina

So much to not say

This has never been a blog about politics, and I have never pretended to endorse a politician or even to have feelings about anything related to local, or regional, or national politics. (I am against feelings. If you read my blog, you know why).

Time will come that I will talk about what it is like to live here (ie, the place I am living) and what it is like to be a New Yorker, probably for the first time, and to witness this election... from here, where people are delighted and dancing in the streets and setting off fireworks and chanting "Yes we can".

But not today. If you are among the 4 people who still stop by here, bless you. If you stumbled in here by accident, I hope you return.

Thank you for reading.

TBA

Hi!

If I neglect my blog for even one more day, I will be charged with TBA: Total Blog Abandonment (not to be confused with To Be Announced, which might fit the bill as well since I am going through a transitional thing that has me befuddled).

What is this transitional thing?

1) I moved to a new pace.

2) I cut off all contact with my step mother.

3) I found out (yesterday) that my current full time job (the one that includes benefits) might evaporate due to state budget cuts. This might happen in January. Or May. Or if things go better than forecasted, not at all. That news is TBA, too.

Items one and two - the moving and the surgical removal of my step mother from my life - have had a powerful stress lowering effect on me. This is excellent. However, the powerful stress lowering effect has produced a trancelike indifference to the news that I might be losing my job. The scariness of that (it should be scary, correct?) is not registering. I find myself unable to respond with the appropriate levels of panic and terror. An alternative explanation for my inappropriate emotional response to this news is that because the cause is budget cuts, it's not my fault, so I don't care. Wait, that makes no sense. Maybe it is because the last two years have provided me with excellent training with regard to being warned that something terrible is going to happen that I can't control. I might have learned not to work problems that I don't have the means to solve.

I'll write more when I can find a clean sheet of unlined paper. When I find one of those, I will diagram my new place and post the drawings in lieu of pictures. In the meantime, if you don't hear from me for a few days, it's only because I am re-calibrating my brain in response to dramatically lowered stress levels and dramatically unwelcome news that I can't seem to muster the gumption to freak out about.

Thank you for reading.

How 'bout

I haven't made the drawings yet. I am not yet organized. Rest assured that I am tucked into my new place and when I find myself able, I will write about the move process and talk more about what it is like to live here. Meanwhile, let me say only that I feel immensely better. (In case you missed it, I was feeling unwell, recently). In the interest of maintaining something like interest, I post herewith a picture of... well, it's not my neighborhood. But it's New York City, which is everyone's neighborhood if you know which way to turn your feet.



I am on the road tomorrow, but I will post from there.

Cool

Everything is cool. I am okay. Will post tomorrow including drawings of my new place. Maybe also I'll describe the new neighborhood.

Love,

Nina

More differentness

I spent my second night at a place we'll call Bob and Kate's Home for Wayward (Middle Aged) Women, and it is not half bad, so far. My cat, who you might recall biting me in violent resistance to ever leaving my apartment, seems to be taking the transition well. I put out food and water and he ate and drank and found a place to curl up and doze and I thought... gee. Now there is an enlightened being. I should be more like that.

So for two nights now I have slept amid the rubble - boxes, bags of "stuff" - unfamiliar furniture, curtains I did not hang - and I have been ok. I am not breaking any records for mental health or anything, but I feel pretty much... yeah. Fine. (This is either numbness due to over-stimulation of my entire everything, or it is disorientation so profound that the needle just flails around until it gives up and hits the middle. Or... maybe I am... fine. I have no idea).

I just have to figure out where to put all my stuff. And then I can cross off my list the "move to the other place" item and perhaps I will calm down even more. And then maybe I can read blogs again, work on other projects long overdue, and oh, see my friends some time soon or even... make it to the gym.

Thanks to everyone who has helped me cope for the last six months (or really year and a half, if you started reading last June). The move puts me one step closer to sanity and one step further away from financial ruin; plus, it is a huge, stressful project that is now over - save the putting away of the stuff, which I find I am in no terrific hurry to do.

Am I still talking? Let me stop now.

Thank you for reading.

Done and Done

If I get a chance to write tomorrow, the story will feature my doormen sneering at me, the porters sitting on their asses watching me move everything all by myself, me breaking down crying every time no one was looking, several things I care about getting stolen as I unloaded the car, and finally my cat biting the bejeezus out of my hand because he was afraid to get in the cat-carrier at 10 o'clock tonight when I finally got back up there to pick him up.

I don't even blame him. I'd bite too if I had a ready victim.

Love,

Nina

Last night in the Gothic Castle

I graded papers and packed all day. Tonight is my last night living here:



Of course it doesn't look like this right now. It is half empty and stacked with boxes and battered furniture. Tomorrow morning I have to finish packing the kitchen and then I have to track down a few more boxes to shove books into. Gah. The good news is that I have passed beyond stressed and freaking out and settled into a lovely hypnotic "who cares" kind of mood that I hope lasts until morning. (It probably will not).

I would post pictures of the new place if I had authorization from Newsy, but I feel it would be an invasion of her family's privacy.

Rest assured, however, that I will post tomorrow night from the new place and try to say something funny about the moving process. I would feel more nostalgic about leaving here if it were not for the fact that this apartment has been the scene of a lot of __________. The new place, no matter what its challenges, is full of good people and in the long run I will be okay there. And moving puts a tidy demarcation line between then and now.

Until now gets here, feast your eyes on... oh, whatever. Here is a picture of me before I was crazy. I was cuter then, but I was also less emotionally seasoned. On the other hand, I still look pretty much like that except for the aging process, which.... oh, let's just let that idea drift away without further comment.



See you tomorrow from the new (and undisclosed) location.


Love,
Nina

Different

I got "clearance" to move out on Wednesday, which will mean I have access to the service elevator and my friend's mother said I could borrow her car. The only problem is I have no one to drive it. Is this a problem? I can't decide. I was just thinking I would haul my stuff down the service elevator, go get the car (a 30 minute operation) and hope no one stole my stuff in the interim. Huh.

Anyway I am out of here completely on Wednesday. That means nothing for you except I can't lean out my window and take pictures for you anymore. Pictures like this one:




Once I am moved into my new place, things will be different. Will they be better? Who knows? But different, anyway, and maybe the beginning of some other way of life. I must confess that I often feel like I would rather not have had quite this much "different" in the last two years, but what the hell, might as well. I am still alive, anyway, and that means things are still possible.

(Like what? She does not know. She will tell you when she does).

Black Magic Marker - or pantless?

To cap off my week of work insanity and general turbulence, I had to be prepared to have one of my classes observed. If you do not work in the teaching industry, let me just say this: being observed is terrible. You can really prepare for it because, duh, it's just the same job you always do and the real wild card is the students - who on any given day are in any given mood and always surprise you, whether you have a colleague sitting in the back of the room watching your every move or not.

So yesterday, since I was just about driven out of my wits by the extent of the work piling up around me, I tried to beg out of the observation by sending a polite email explaining that blah blah can we just do this next week? His answer: no. His schedule was fixed and blah blah see you tomorrow.

Well, well, well. ___________.

So I worked and worked and worked yesterday and did not stop until it was whenever, and I have no idea when I went to bed but I awakened at 5am after several surreal nightmares. I showered and picked through my laundry bag looking for something suitable to wear during my observation.

It was then that I observed, to my horror, that half my laundry was not in the bag - and since this were true, the other half of my laundry had to be downstairs in a dryer. For the past 48 hours.

So I ran downstairs at 5 in the morning, braless, barefoot, and a degree of unhappy just one degree shy of the degree of unhappy I achieved when I discovered that some unkind person had taken my laundry from the dryer and tossed it into a cart with someone else's wet laundry - and that the entire mixture had become sour with mildew in the interim.

The concequences of this laundry error were dire.

I had two choices of things to wear that would be acceptable: one, the suit I wore to my father's funeral, which had been crumpled into the bottom of a plastic bag for weeks, since I advertantly set my handbag down on some recently disgarded chewing gum , and without realizing it, lifted my handbag into my lap, ruining the pants of the suit with a splotch of gum the size of a sand dollar. In order to wear this suit, I would have to shake the wrinkles out of it, pretend it was not covered in cat hair, and use a black magic marker to disguise the gum. (I know most people would not consider this an option. Sadly, I would).

The second item I could potentially wear was a pair of buff colored linen pants with a pale pink shell with similarly colored sandals. Perhaps a bit summery for the time of year, but presentable. But this second choice had it's own issue: the near see-throughness of the pants. Only by wearing absolutely no underwear - MAYBE a flesh colored thong - could one ever wear these pants out of the house. I quickly realized that since I own no flesh colored thong and certainly would not spend the entire day I was to be put through teaching observation hell with a thong up my crack - even if I did happen to possess such a garment, the only way to make it out of the house in this outfit was to go commando.

Those were my options. I had no others. Knowing me so well as you do, what do you think I did? (I'll tell you tomorrow).

Love,
Nina