Starting the hunt

Well, I actually ventured out today and met: (1) a laid-back and (to my eye) trustworthy broker; (2) a friendly young (and, dare I say – cute!) resident/doctor-type who gave me his number and urged me to call; and (3) the side of myself that refuses to be sealed into a hermetic all-inclusive, pampered residential community for young professionals where “you’re not paying for the square footage, you’re paying for the lifestyle choice.” Barf. You can keep your cloying, snotty lifestyle, with the gym and the dry cleaners and the shuttle to midtown.

I have complete sympathy for those professionals, young or not, who are for whatever reason in jobs so demanding that the rest of their lives MUST be as undemanding and convenient as possible. I have a sickening feeling that I must count myself as one of those, if the experiences of my friends in the corporate law world are any indicator. You pay to have a life that is clean of the grit and grime, to have a life that functions without a hitch, because you don’t have time to deal with the hitches, or to dust off the grit and grime. I get it. Totally.

But I hate that a job would require that of people (well, maybe outside people doing really important stuff, like saving the world and shit). I mean, whatever, I have thoroughly enjoyed hiding out in Joiner’s fancy Upper West Side apartment with the health club and the indoor pool and the dozen doormen. But there were some places I looked at today that went over the line in my mind – they made it too easy to avoid anyone who wasn’t serving you in some way.

In a way, I think BC’s apartments in New York – the Upper East Side one she lived in just after we graduated college and her Harlem one later in grad school – became imprinted on my mind as the type of apartment that a real New Yorker lives in. Both were walk-ups in small buildings, on side streets in neighborhoods where a lot of people had lived for a long time. This is probably why, at the end of the day, I feel so kindly of the first apartment the broker showed me today. A tiny studio on East 52nd Street, it was most emphatically not hermetically sealed against the world – it overlooked the onramp for the Queensboro bridge and all the traffic noises filtered in. Not the most desirable quality in an apartment. But it was real in a way that the $2300- and $2500- and $2600-a-month studios in “luxury” buildings weren’t.

Am I romanticizing it? I admit that’s possible. But I also think that apartment, or at least that style, is more me than the ones in the fancy high-rises with the super views of a city I’m sealed off from.