Act Locally

Have I told you about my New Year's resolutions?

Generally, I don't make them and dismiss them as at best, trite, and at worst, just setting yourself up for failure. But this year, I felt the need to do some things differently and since I am now settled in my own apartment, the new year just happens to fall in line with a good time for me to make some changes.

I've decided to take my top five most purchased groceries and buy them all locally and organically. My top five most purchased items are:

Apples
Salad greens
Milk
Bread
Cheese

This is actually requiring more work than I had thought, as a recent trip to the grocery store proved. Although there are apples produced locally and organically in New York state, all of the apples in the grocery store came from Washington state. As far as dairy goes, there are local dairies, but unfortunately, they aren't organic. Salad greens are also a tough one; it's easy to find organic greens, but since they're not in season right now, they have to come all the way from California. I may have to give up my addiction to greens for more seasonal vegetables. I'm still working on my research for the bread.

The other part of this resolution is to replace one poultry or beef serving a week (which I generally only eat once or twice a week) with tofu. It takes a lot of energy and acreage to produce beef, and there is a local place that grows soybeans and produces tofu, so I'm a go on that resolution.

This past year, I've gradually made some changes to reduce my ecological footprint, but I'd like to get the process moving faster in 2008. This past year, I've been bringing my own canvas bags to the grocery store, bought my mom some canvas bags so she can do the same, started using CFL bulbs in my bedroom, and begun cleaning with vinegar, water, and baking soda. I'm not going to say I should shower less than I already do, because as it is, I'm a bit of a hippie when it comes to showering and honestly don't do it unless a trip to the gym or some serious hard physical work dictates that I spare everyone around me some discomfort and just get clean.

By the way, has anyone found a good ecological footprint calculator? I've been using this one, but it's not very detailed and I don't have a clear idea of their methods.

Other resolutions that are getting back on track:

Flossing more regularly, at least several times a week
Getting back to my meditation practice, which I stopped when I was couch-surfing and had no privacy to do it.
Doing more yoga (at least a couple of times per month)

That's it so far. I'm posting these in the hopes that it will help me keep track of my progress over the next three, six, nine months and beyond. What are you changing about 2008?

In With the New, Part Deux

I got a new job.

I'm scared, elated, hysterical, happy, and so anxious my stomach is threatening to give up its entire contents. I'll be working with an international nonprofit that works on preserving world monuments. I'll post a link to the place here later, when I actually start the job, but just for now, I'm keeping it private.

This is a real-person job. Not my no-benefits, take-off-when-you-want, sneakers-and-jeans job that I have at the university where I work. I will have health insurance (thank God!), more than one coworker (no more lonely at work time!), and I'm pretty sure I have to be there right at 9 am. I'm, in fact, embarrassed to tell you that my current work schedule is very cushy (11 am to 6pm) but in return for cushiness, I get pretty much nothing. As a college student, and later a grad student, I have been in and out of the workforce for a couple of years, and this is my first salaried position. Hard to believe, eh? It's all too true.

In the next two weeks then, I have a pretty tall order: get some nice clothes for work, move stuff out of storage, practice getting up and out of the house by 8 am (which means practicing getting in bed by 10 or 10:30pm), and in general, get my shit together.

I am now a Real Girl. (And it scares the shit out of me).

In With the New

This year in a time capsule: Complete and total mental breakdown, i.e. crushing depression, set in, sucking up my time and energy like a vacuum for the majority of the last months. I would say, if needing to give an estimate, that 90% of this year was spent in that state of mind. And I haven't even wanted to blog about it; when you're depressed, it's depressing to think about how depressed you are. When not absorbed in depression, my energies were spent agonizing over quitting grad school, having no health insurance, looking for housing, and applying for jobs. Up until about a week ago, I hated going to parties because I had to face countless people whose first question was: So, what do you do? And feeling spiteful, I would say "Nothing. I do nothing." Conversationally, it didn't really get us anywhere.

While I still resent the question, I realize the social necessity of placing people in context. When I was in India, the questions were about what my parents did, how much schooling they had, if there were any boys in the family. And I do believe that I prefer the question of what I do versus disparaging comments about how I have no brothers. I suppose I would prefer a question more along the lines of who I am, but to ask someone "Who are you?" seems a little too blatantly philosophical for your run of the mill party ice-breaker.

At last I feel like I have something positive to add to the capsule. I have a place to live, on the border of Red Hook and Carroll Gardens, in an old apartment building with two lovely, intelligent ladies. The medications are finally starting to add up to something substantial in terms of my mood, though I am afraid to say it for fear of scaring my newfound "regular person" feeling away. Still no health insurance or job security, but I am proud to have something to show for this year, some progress. And there's still time for the rest.

More of the Same

An apartment in Bushwick: $600 to live with six cats, in an apartment with crumbling cement walls, and a bedroom with no door. The cats are feral, which means that the entire time I was there, they were yowling and fighting with each other. Drunk guy on the corner slumped against the side of a deli. You couldn't pay me $600 a month to live there.

Struggling actor trying to promote himself. Screenprints images of his face on women's underwear to sell on the Internet. To whom would he sell such a thing? I HAVE NO FUCKING IDEA. His apartment is stuffed to the brim, with boxes and assorted objects stacked to the ceiling. Also, some squares of particle board painted with Oprah quotes. Once again, you couldn't pay me to live there.

I'll be happy to be in nice, normal Salt Lake for Thanksgiving. I'm leaving tomorrow. See you there.

Not so Much

So NaBloPoMo was a failure. Just couldn't do a blog per day. What with looking for a place to live and trying to get my brain slash life in order, it just wasn't going to happen.

Which brings me to my next topic. Apartment hunting, or rather, roommate hunting. Oh, the people I have seen:

Two unemployed filmmakers in Williamsburg who opened their closet door, explaining that "this is where we keep our cleaning supplies," and voila! It's empty! Yet somehow, they were serious. Which leads me to suppose that IF they had cleaning supplies, that's where they would keep them.

A bitter late thirties actress, who works in medical transcription by day, and had a Wall of Shame of roommates she had kicked out because they hadn't paid their rent. Imagine a wall filled with headshots of failing actresses/actors who had been kicked out by a woman who has spent way too much time working an unfulfilling day job and definitely has not been laid in a loooong time.

Then there's the nice people whom you really want to share an apartment with, and they never call you back.

Just like dating. God save me.

Out

Two weeks out.

Two weeks out of a place to live. I’m staying with a lovely friend in a quiet neighborhood south of Prospect Park in Brooklyn. I love the neighborhood; it’s full of native New Yawkers with nasal accents and teenagers congregating on the corners with nothing better to do than tease each other, but at least not getting into trouble.

The only flaw of Windsor Terrace (sounds like a neighborhood in London, doesn’t it?) is that you have to truck your laundry a couple of blocks away and the laundromat is fairly expensive as these things go. I mean, $2.25 to wash a load of clothes! Also, there’s no grocery store nearby, so my back hurts from carrying milk, orange juice, and whatnot back up to the apartment (why do clerks always put all the heavy groceries in one bag? It makes for uneven soreness when you have to carry your groceries home, LIKE ALL NEW YORKERS HAVE TO DO. You’d think they’d learn.)

My mood remains touch and go. Some days are fairly good, meaning that I don’t obsess over the world’s problems or agonize over all the terrible things that can befall humankind. That doesn’t necessarily mean I’m a sunny optimist on my good days, but it’s progress and I’ll take it. Bad days? I’ll leave those to your imagination.

Reading: I was involved in a book of short stories by Hemingway. It was spare and beautiful, but the stories were eminently depressing. In the best of his stories, the major plot point is death. I could have no more of it. So I started reading Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. I’m whipping through it quickly, due to some long commutes on the F train, and am quite satisfied with it.

Also: even though I’ve taken a leave of absence from Pratt, no one from either of the graduate departments I was enrolled in has called or emailed to see why I’ve taken a leave or inquired as to how I’m doing. The history of art department emailed me last week only to see if I was planning on enrolling in a course that is reserved for upper level grad students.

Thanks, Pratt. I’m glad you love me for more than my money.

Homeless

I have to pack my life into fifteen boxes. Those boxes, and an assortment of furniture, will go into storage on Friday morning for an indeterminate amount of time. This weekend was sort of a kaleidoscope of shifting emotions; I was okay, even content, for awhile to be packing up my stuff and moving on from a bad living situation. The next moment I was hyperventilating; I don't have full-time employment, my health insurance runs out in November, I don't have a permanent place to live, and I don't know what I'm doing with my life. It's a tall order if you think about it too long.

Given the uncertain situation, my mood is more stable than it has been in a long time. I can look out of the windows on the train when it's passing over the bridge and see that the water is beautiful, the skyline is beautiful, and even feel a bit grateful to live in this difficult city. It's easy to fall in love with New York in the autumn and again in the springtime. Pretty much anytime else, it's just as easy to feel put upon by the palpable humidity of the summer and the drenching rains and bitter winds of the winter.

A few friends and I took a train up the Hudson River to see the Dia: Beacon Museum. The landscape is so beautiful after you escape the dirtiness of the city, particularly the ride through upper Manhattan, that you don't wonder how anyone could indulge in what can be the most dull of all kinds of genre painting: landscape painting. You see altogether too much landscape painting in Utah, which is why I generally think it's a tired art form, but some of it, particularly the Hudson River School of painters (contemporaneous with writers such as Thoreau and Emerson), starts to make a little more sense after a trip up to Beacon. Dia: Beacon, by the way, is the most incredible museum you haven't seen or heard of.

I move on Friday morning. Saturday morning at 6am I will be going to a peace march in Washington, D.C. I've never been to D.C. but I can't think of a better, or more opportune, time to visit.