Different

I saw the apartment in Williamsburg last night. Not my cup of tea. The neighborhood is a little too alternative for me; not only that, but the apartment is in a pretty run-down area. Kind of industrial, warehouses, and so forth.

So afterwards I was riding the train back to my apartment in Jersey City and I was thinking, you know, my place isn’t as bad as I thought it was. I have a fan now, which pretty much drowns out nighttime noise (especially when I run the fan while wearing earplugs), and my apartment is huge, and I have a very nice kitchen. If only my apartment were cheaper and in a different area.

What is it that I want? I want to live in Manhattan. I want to live as a yuppie, on the Upper East Side or the Upper West Side or maybe even in Chelsea, although Chelsea is way expensive and I don’t know if I could handle all the gay clones every day. But what is it that I really want? Sometimes, more than anything else, I just want to be typical. God, I just want to be like everybody else! I want to be a typical 27 year old. I want to have moved to New York immediately after graduating college and gone to work in the corporate world for a few years, instead of graduating college and spending a year drifting around my old college campus and then staying there for law school. Or, having gone to law school, I wish I’d gone to work for a law firm afterwards. But I just couldn’t do it. I just didn’t want to do it. I don’t know if I should commend myself for sticking to my principles or berate myself for being so stubborn and impractical. Tens of thousands of dollars in debt and I didn’t try harder to get a $100,000/year job? Even just for a couple of years? What was I thinking?

But you know what — I’ve tried. I tried during law school, I tried after law school. True, I could have sent my resume off to many more law firms, thus increasing my chances, but deep down, I just didn’t want to do it. And in interviews with law firms, I’ve never been able to convey a genuine interest, and I’ve never been offered a job by a firm. Well, once I did, a year and a half ago, by a very antiseptic suburban law firm, for 35K, but I had no desire to work there. Usually, in an interview, some lawyer will be talking to me and I’ll find myself just nodding and smiling, not really saying anything substantive, drifting off into la-la-land despite my best efforts not to, not listening to what’s being said, not really feeling like I belong there. Law firms seem filled with heterosexual back-slapping ex-frat-boys, or at least that’s always the impression I get, and I never feel like I’d be comfortable around them. Deep down I feel contempt for them, I do. Or maybe resentment because I’m not like them. Not to mention the hours. But dammit, if other people can be so flexible, why can’t I? Why do I have to be so protective of my individuality?

But I want to be typical. I want to be like some of the other people I saw lying out in Central Park on Sunday. I want to live in Manhattan so I can go running in Central Park. I want to be able to afford a cell phone and a Palm Pilot. I want to have a close group of friends and have people call me up and ask if I want to go do this with so-and-so and so-and-so on Saturday night. I want to be mister Yuppie Straight Guy, going to parties and straight bars with his colleagues and his friends and meeting women.

At the same time I know I’m wrong, right? Even if I do move to the Upper East Side or wherever, I’ll find something wrong with that. And I still won’t be Mr. Typical — I’ll still be me. I will always be me. I don’t even think Mr. Typical is really Mr. Typical. Everyone’s got issues, everyone’s got problems; people just put on good faces. We all think our neighbors have more verdant lawns, but they don’t. Even if the grass really is greener next door, the indoor plumbing is broken and there’s a termite problem. Right?

Maybe, maybe not. I think Mr. Typical has advantages. Mr. Typical Straight Yuppie is inherently more normal, taller, tanned, better-looking, more outgoing, more practical. He went to work after college or law school and has been building up his savings. He has a life of tanned success ahead of him. He and the world move in the same direction. And Mr. George Fucking Dubya gets to become president of the United States.

What do I have? I’m gay, so there’s a big strike against normalcy right there. I have an expensive law degree that was a waste of time. I’m living in an expensive apartment, I’m rent-poor, I’m not saving anything, I’m paying off my loans on the 25-year plan. I know someone my age who has his first book coming out in June; I’ve never even completed a short story. I want to be living a full life. I want to be following my calling. Time has gone by too quickly, I never had enough fun, I wasted too much time being afraid to move forward. I was too different to be like everybody else but too afraid to be myself. I wish I could just pick a fucking direction and go with it. What are you so afraid of?

As I write this, I realize that I’m probably exaggerating the bad and ignoring the good. But I’ve written it, and these are my frustrations, and they sting.