when i leave reality, realty is there waiting for me

my compulsive 'nesting' efforts via craigslist have taken me to many different neighborhoods, most recently murray hill and yorkville. murray hill i found especially unsettling. it's nice, clean, and hip in a safe, this-was-edgy-ten-years-ago,-have-i-got-it-right-yet? sort of way. it's the kansas of manhattan (even tho the people who are actually from kansas are all in williamsburg). all the new york fixtures are there—duane reades, pizza places, dry cleaners, delis—but nothing else is. it's a clean, generic new york neighborhood. i didn't know that existed. i knew there was anywhere, USA, but i didn't know there was anywhere, NYC. everything was rootless and scary. the whole point of being a young person in new york is the way the purpose and importance of the place is allowed to stand in for the obvious lack of those things in your own life. and now i'm finding out that i can be anywhere and be in new york at the same time.

which may explain why i have red hook envy. i'd rather be nowhere than anywhere. faced with the many aspirational-lifestyle themeparky 'nabes' hyped in time out, i'd feel downright transgressive moving to an overgrown weedlot waterfront only accessible by bus. whenever i read about the bakery on van brunt with its malted chocolate cake or see a mention of the liberty tap room's six-point ale or remember the roofdeck view of the apartment ed and i saw, i am struck by the overwhelming singularity of each thing—there just isn't anything else. park slope has so much. i couldn't begin to pick a restaurant. i want the choices made for me and i want the things around me to be monumental. living in red hook is the real-estate equivalent of the raw-foods diet. it is extreme and not always satisfying and often lonely. but it has definition. that is about all it has.

i can see that i'm better of in park slope, mainly because i'd spend most of my red hook time transgressing on the bus, loaded down with groceries from whole foods.