Content

It hasn’t fully hit me yet that I live here. This is my apartment. Mine! I can’t get over how happy I am in this place. Rather, I don’t want to get over it. I keep making myself appreciate it so I don’t take it for granted. I play thought games. I pretend, Well, it’s so great that my friend has let my use this terrifically spacious and beautiful and quiet apartment for the past week. Too bad I have to go home tomorrow. And then I’ll say, Hahaha! Surprise… THIS IS MY PLACE NOW! This is home! I can stay here!

I can’t get over it. It feels so strange to enjoy where I live. It’s been more than two years since things have been like that. When I graduated from law school, I came back up north and lived with my parents for four months. Then I moved down to Princeton, moved in with a random roommate whom I found through the classifieds. We got along horribly, so I left after four months and moved into my friend’s guest bedroom temporarily. “Temporarily” turned into six months, while my belongings remained in storage, but I always knew it wasn’t permanent. Then I got my clerkship in Newark, so a year ago I moved up to Jersey City into an apartment that I knew from the get-go I wasn’t going to like. And finally, a year later… here I am.

It’s been so long since I’ve felt this way. In fact, have I ever felt this way? This apartment is terrific. It’s absolutely terrific. I love my apartment, and I’ve never been able to say that before.

On top of that, I’m in an economy-proof government job. Also, last year I knew my clerkship had a finite ending date. This job doesn’t.

So I have an apartment I love and I have a stable job.

And where all that stress used to be, there’s now a big hole. I’m so used to feeling stressed out. I’m not used to not having to worry about things like this. I don’t know what to do with myself. I’m not quite convinced it’s real, either. But it is. It’s really real.

Perhaps these are things you take for granted, but not me. I can listen to the radio or to a low-key classical CD at night without interference from loud blasting Latino music or loud yelling people on the street or my upstairs neighbors. I have cable. Tonight I watched “North By Northwest” on Turner Classic Movies. Yes, I vegged out on the couch with the Sunday Times crossword and a plate of food and watched a classic Hitchcock film on TV. What a great evening.

As for yesterday: in the afternoon, my parents came over to see the new place, and they loved it. My mom kept fantasizing about how she’d decorate it. She had some great ideas, actually. If only I could afford those ideas!

After hanging out in my apartment for a while, we went for a walk. We walked around the park and took note of all the different brownstones with their elegant moldings. Then we went to this international food store in town. I’d never been there before; it was enormous, cavernous. I got some things and they got some things and we waited on line for an interminable amount of time. God, the cashiers are slow there.

In the evening, we drove to Hoboken and had dinner together. We wandered into this really nice, relaxed, and cozy restaurant, called The Brass Rail. Had a bottle of Cabernet. Our appetizers were fried calamari with a Thai lemon dipping sauce, and Phyllo-wrapped shrimp. For entrees, my mom and I split a steak for two and my dad had swordfish. For dessert I had an apple tart with caramelized walnuts. We had great, laid-back dinner conversation. And there was a TV over the bar, so at around 7:30 we slowly began to turn our attention to awful Game 6 of the World Series.

Afterwards, they dropped me off at home, and I wound up having a low-key evening. “Fiddler on the Rood” was on Turner Classic Movies. Then I wound up chatting online with a guy I’d chatted with several times before. He came over. We’d never met before.

We watched Saturday Night Live together and ate cookies and drank apple cider. Then he went home, and we ran into each other online again, and so he wound up coming back over here, and… uh… stuff happened. It was really really good, actually. My favorite body type, small and slim.

Do y’all watch “Sex and the City”? Remember when Carrie had met this great guy (the guy from “Northern Exposure”) who wound up buffing her floors, and while he was buffing her floors she ran off and had sex with Mr. Big? Remember how she self-sabotaged her new relationship?

I don’t think this is quite the same thing. I’m not sabotaging anything, because Piano Man and I have no agreement to be exclusive. Heck, technically we’re not even an item.

And yet, for some reason, that “Sex and the City” situation is coming into my head.

So that was yesterday.

Today I met up with my friend Nick at the Barnes and Noble in Lincoln Square and we walked up to the Church of St. John the Divine. Neither of us had ever been there before. Huge cathedral. I felt like an ant, like humans were supposed to feel back in the twelfth century when so many cosmologically-sized cathedrals were built.

I also called both Wes and TRHG guy today to see if either of them wanted to get together this week. So far neither of them has called me back. Of course in my paranoid mind I wonder if they’re sleeping in each other’s beds and that’s why they haven’t called. That’s totally not the case, I’m sure, and even if it is, I shouldn’t care.

When I met up with Nick, he was sprouting a new goatee. It looked good on him. Later in the afternoon, he suggested that I’d looked better with a goatee. I shaved it off two months ago, but now I might grow it back. I dunno:

Oh, here’s my novel so far. I wasn’t going to post it, because I didn’t think I wanted people to see it, but then I figured, why not? After all, other people are posting theirs. Anyway, some names are made up and some names aren’t, and my product so far has no consistency at all — I’m writing about one thing and then I’m writing about something totally different — and some of the grammar sucks because I’m typing and typing without looking back. Okay, apology over. I have no idea what I’m doing here; I don’t even know what my novel’s about or who’s in it. I’m driving a car at night with no headlights. I’ll either get home or I’ll drive off a cliff. I don’t care either way, as long as I hit 50,000 words by the end of the month.

So, yeah, I’m focusing on content. And I’m content. Haha, get it? The title of this entry? Con–

Oh, never mind.