Ahhhh! finally, i am in my own new apartment. or rather, i am newly in an old apartment- but it is all mine. it is a little ghetto, but that seems only right. i would be out of place in fine furnishings. it leaves room for the imagination to devise the right thing. well, having no furniture and sitting on an aero mattress in the middle of an empty apartment helps that also. one day i will have a dresser! and maybe a couch! oh, a bed! a bed! siiigh.
more important than my bare floors is inwood itself, at least where i am. i have managed to strike a balance that will hopefully keep me sane in the city. walking my streets, you would be hard pressed to say this is manhattan. a snapshot could easily be from richmond or carborro. best of all, a short walk takes you to inwood hill park. now when new yorkers call something a "park" it usually means there is some grass fenced off, unless of course it is a gravel park for dogs. it is ridiculous. a few months in the city and i can definitely say a "park" must be something one can run around. yes, there is the illustrious Central Park, with great lawns, theatres, and hidden inlets. but it also has such a sprawl of people, meeting a friend becomes a classic game of Where's Waldo? to run in central park is to put yourself on display with the crowds of fashionably coordinated packs. this is not nature. it is an event.
now My park is something else all together. it is, by manhattan standards, immense. surrounded by the hudson river, an actual forest woven with trails and hills and even caves! is bookended with manicured lawns. on one side are baseball and soccer fields with the most gorgeous view up the hudson and down to the GW bridge. on the other side of the forest are lawns to rival central park. it is comfortably filled on the weekends, with families and couples and strays from Columbia U, and deserted on weekdays except for a handful of joggers and walkers and a whole lot of geese. an inlet holds manhattan's only remaining marshes, where at low tide the birds gleefully stomp through the mud.
more important than my bare floors is inwood itself, at least where i am. i have managed to strike a balance that will hopefully keep me sane in the city. walking my streets, you would be hard pressed to say this is manhattan. a snapshot could easily be from richmond or carborro. best of all, a short walk takes you to inwood hill park. now when new yorkers call something a "park" it usually means there is some grass fenced off, unless of course it is a gravel park for dogs. it is ridiculous. a few months in the city and i can definitely say a "park" must be something one can run around. yes, there is the illustrious Central Park, with great lawns, theatres, and hidden inlets. but it also has such a sprawl of people, meeting a friend becomes a classic game of Where's Waldo? to run in central park is to put yourself on display with the crowds of fashionably coordinated packs. this is not nature. it is an event.
now My park is something else all together. it is, by manhattan standards, immense. surrounded by the hudson river, an actual forest woven with trails and hills and even caves! is bookended with manicured lawns. on one side are baseball and soccer fields with the most gorgeous view up the hudson and down to the GW bridge. on the other side of the forest are lawns to rival central park. it is comfortably filled on the weekends, with families and couples and strays from Columbia U, and deserted on weekdays except for a handful of joggers and walkers and a whole lot of geese. an inlet holds manhattan's only remaining marshes, where at low tide the birds gleefully stomp through the mud.
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