they only come out at night

i admit to be a little exhausted right now. i'm relatively good at fighting the exhaustion caused by running between part time jobs and rehearsals and auditions and attempting to have a teeny bit of social life. however, i feel slightly justified as for the last week and a half my apartment has been a total disaster zone. living in a disaster zone is not conducive to restful happiness.

then again, it is really just your typical manhattan story. a few weeks back i get a call from the super announcing "they have the right" to break into my apartment. which they will be doing. through my window. this doesn't leave me feeling particularly secure in my little inwood abode. i mean who's cousin has been hired to so easily walk through my window into my apartment?? as fierce a hunter of large creepy, crawly, and flying invaders as Chui is, the only human she seems intent on taking down is me. my calves are particularly attractive targets when she is hungry.

though she has been known to leap onto my back when trying to make a point, she clearly put no such fight up to the invading hordes, who proceeded to demolish the wall of my bathroom. when the leak they claimed to be fixing could not be found, they haphazardly covered said wall in what appears to be black trash bags.

one does not want to be able to see inside the wall of one's new york apartment. one does not want the creatures that live in one's walls to be able to gallivant about ones bathtub as if on holiday. even when one has hungry feline friend.

the unknown plumbing bandits are still parading through my apartment while i toil at my "survivor" jobs, leaving bits of crumbling cement and tile strewn about.

little do they know, i've lived in africa. i have plenty of experience finding alternative means of brushing my teeth.

into inwood

 

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.