I’m feeling a bit lonely. I have no plans tonight, and I have no plans tomorrow night. This is, unfortunately, too often the norm for me. I think it’s because I live by myself, because I’m shy about calling people to do things and can never think of things to do anyway, because I live in a city where there’s not a whole lot going on, and because crossing the river to Manhattan every frickin’ time I want to socialize gets to be a chafe.
I live in the “sixth borough,” as Jersey City/Hoboken is known, and there’s nothing to do here. I’ve complained about this for just about as long as I’ve had a blog.
There are apparently lots of gay men here in Jersey City, but the only place to meet them is online. There used to be a gay bar here, but it changed ownership a year and a half ago and is now a thriving heterosexual dive that hosts little-known alternative-music-type bands.
Because the only place to met gay men in Jersey City is online, I’ve met lots of gay men in Jersey City once, and only once.
Hah. When I typed “online” just then, I at first accidentally typed “alone.”
I dearly love my apartment. It’s quiet, it’s huge by Manhattan standards, it’s pretty, it has lots of windows, it has a washer and dryer. But perhaps when my lease ends I’ll move to Brooklyn. The commute to Newark would be long, but there seems to be so much going on in brownstone Brooklyn, and everyone seems to live there. I adore Park Slope, and the rest of brownstone Brooklyn is really nice, too.
Then again, if I lived in Brooklyn, I’d be as far away from Manhattan as I am now, and in some cases even farther away. (I live approximately here.) So my Friday and Saturday nights would be just as impeded socially as they are now. Unless the greater number of potential friends in Brooklyn, and the presence of actual gay bars in that borough, made the presence of a river barrier unimportant.
It’s Friday night and I’m tired of waiting for the phone to ring.
tsk tsk… start a gay poker night. or gay book club. don’t waste away dwelling on freudian typos! You’re a young, smart, attractive professional. Get out there and do something before you become a despondent recluse! (And avoid on-line trolls, for godsakes!)
Hmmmm… now what are my big plans? Oh yeah. Nothing. Pot, kettle, black, what?
Brooklyn is better than Jersey. No competition. And to be honest, you don’t have to leave Brooklyn to have a good time (drinking-wise, sex-wise, etc.) And even if you go into Manhattan on the weekend, its still easier to take the subway back to Brooklyn (24 hrs. a day!) than the PATH to NJ.
Yay Brooklyn!!!
The PATH runs 24 hours. Other than that, all true. Except for the commute to Newark. Anyway, now I think I want to live in Manhattan.
Not that I’ve learn the Stevie Wonder-ish “People are the same wherever you go” lesson. Or, it’s “It doesn’t matter where you live, it matters how you live” corollary. But, I ram this poem in my own face every time I wish some twister of fate would take me from my own metaphoric Kansas to Oz. And I wonder …
The Naughty Boy
By John Keats
There was a naughty boy,
And a naughty boy was he,
He ran away to Scotland
The people for to see
Then he found
That the ground
Was as hard,
That a yard
Was as long,
That a song
Was as merry,
That a cherry
Was as red.
That lead
Was as weighty,
That fourscore
Was as eighty,
That a door
Was as wooden
As in England
So he stood in his shoes
And he wondered,
He wondered.
He stood in his shoes
And he wondered.
There are more train lines back to Brooklyn though, and there are gay bars in the Slope and Williamshipsterburgh. I would like to live in Manhattan, but it’s all a matter of money.