A guest entry.

Sarah started this blog with the intention that we would both contribute to it, but as you can see, my participation has been more than a little lacking. And I wish I had a good reason for that, but I don’t. Since I’ve been working from the comfort of our living room (and occasionally the bedroom or office), I’ve had more than plenty of down/break time. Unfortunately, I usually use that time reading bad articles about pop culture, looking at “funny” internet pictures on Reddit, obsessively checking Facebook to make sure that I didn’t miss anything important (as though important things happen on Facebook anyway), and, lately, playing my favorite childhood video game, Final Fantasy 3. My life, in other words, is spent staring at a computer, occasionally interacting with it. I think that this is probably the result of having internet (which is called “online” here—to my mind, online is a state of being, not a thing. Anyway…) for the first time in about five years. The thrill will soon be gone, I hope, and I’ll find more interesting things that take up my time. But I digress. I have actually been doing some fun/interesting things, some of which Sarah has already written about, and some of which she hasn’t.

First: work. Thrilling topic, right? In her most recent post, Sarah wrote that she didn’t think I’ll be getting this Bedford/St. Martin’s job that I applied for. It’s looking more and more like she’s right, which is too bad. I put a hell of a lot of time into making trips to the office to interview with people. Eight people, to be precise. And I read some sample chapters from one of their textbooks and wrote a review analysis, which was about a two-day project. Without a doubt, it was the most rigorous interview/hiring process I’ve ever been through, and it seems to be all for naught. I know it’s a learning experience, blah blah blah, but you know how it is. You really think that something’s going to work out, and when it doesn’t, you feel a little caught off guard. ANYWAY. Moving on. I’ve had plenty of work to do from home, thankfully, writing ESL workbooks for a school in Korea and copyediting books for the University of Nebraska Press. Sometime this month I’ll also be starting to score GRE essays. From home. It’s starting to look like I’m never going to leave my apartment.

A couple of nights last week, though, I got to do some “real” work. (Having grown up in Nebraska and having spent some of my youth on my grandparents’ farm, I still have a skewed idea of what “real” work is.) My good friend Jocelin is a landscape designer, with a master’s degree from Columbia, and she’s doing some freelance work putting a garden together at a new apartment complex on Ainslie Street, which isn’t far from where Sarah and I have taken up residence. When she asked me to help her do some planting last week, I happily accepted. Together we arranged the rectangular planters and filled them with potting soil, then vermiculite and perlite, then more soil. Then we mixed. Meaning, we dug into the hot (previously bagged) earth and mixed everything together with our hands. It felt great. Then we put bamboo plants on top and covered them with more soil, then more perlite, then more vermiculite, then we mixed again. The funny thing was, on the way over to the garden one night, Joce and I could barely carry on a conversation because we felt so mentally dead after a day of staring at our computers. She was working her desk job on Long Island and I had been doing cleanup on a manuscript about the British navy. She said, “We just need to do some physical work, and we’ll feel better.” And it was true. We’re going to put in a full day on Saturday, fleshing the garden out with flowers to complement the tall stalks of bamboo.

So that’s work. Speaking of Jocelin, she invited Sarah and I to spend last weekend at her parents’ house in Belleport, Long Island. Long Island is generally beautiful anyway, but this house really took it to a whole new level. Joce’s parents flip houses. They’ve been doing it since Joce was young, which means that they spent more time moving during her childhood than I did (and for those of you that know, that’s really saying something). They live in a house while they fix it up, then they sell it and move on. Only this time, they built a house from the ground up with the intention of selling it, and they haven’t been able to leave. If you could’ve seen it, you would have understood why. The property itself is spacious and green, with bamboo (again!) lining the fence in the backyard, which houses a beautiful pool. The home is clean and modern, and Joce’s parents were excellent hosts, bringing us fresh bagels and cream cheese every morning, and buying us grillables for our backyard barbecue. A very, very nice weekend. Living in New York City is made even better (some people say it’s made tolerable) by the possibility of escaping from it every now and then, and when the place you escape to is roomy, quiet, green, and friendly, it’s even better.

I find myself thinking about money a lot. Not because I don’t have any or because I have money tied up in different things that I need to worry about. Just money in general. If you live in New York or have spent time here, you know that wealth takes on a whole new meaning. Nebraska wealthy and New York wealthy are two entirely different things. Nebraska wealthy means that you have a nice home or condominium, you drive a nice car or two, you vacation every now and then. New York wealthy means that you have an apartment/home in the city that cost you several million dollars, you have a summer home on Long Island (and perhaps in Europe) that cost a few million more, you send your children to private institutions, you have a very nice car and pay perhaps $200,000 per year for a parking spot, you work your own schedule, and you travel whenever you feel like it. You use “summer” as a verb. Clearly, this is on the extreme end of things, but that doesn’t mean you don’t hear about it or see it. So what all this has made me think about is, What do I need to do so that I’m not poor forever? My friend Will told me that you just need to find something to call your own, or find your niche, and carve out a place for yourself. The way that I’ve been thinking about money and jobs then is in terms of my niche, which I haven’t discovered yet. And that, I have decided, is my goal in living here. To figure out what I do.

I don’t have the faintest clue of what that might be. Le sigh.

I’m realizing that this probably isn’t the sort of thing that Sarah’s readership is expecting, but it’s what popped out of my head. Job woes and poverty aside, I can’t stress enough how much I love it here. I think I always did. It’s different this time, for a number of reasons. First, Sarah and I are here together, with our obese cat, and so my priorities are different. I no longer live in a 1.5 bedroom apartment with three other guys, and I pay much more in rent/bills than I did when I was here the first time. Sarah writes about the smells. I love the smells, even the bad ones, because—though this sounds extraordinarily cliché—they smell like life. Things aren’t as sanitized in Brooklyn as they might be elsewhere, because the city couldn’t possibly keep up. Things break, things take longer, things smell: but everyone here is pissed off at those things together, and there is a sense of camaraderie here that I haven’t felt anywhere else. Odds are, I’ll be ready to get out in a few years, but right now I couldn’t be happier.

And that’s all for now. This has probably offered more of a snapshot of my psychological makeup more than it has told you about “what’s going on.” So I’m sorry about that. If you read all this, then I probably miss you, and even if you didn’t, I probably still miss you. So come visit! Who knows when things might get more hectic.

-Tyler