Sunday, August 2, 2009

New Neighborhood; Little Israel, Spanish-speaking gangstas & Crazies, Part I

First, I've got to apologize for the delay. Moving, they say, is stressful enough to rank right below the death of a child/parent. That tells you something. Considering I've lost a parent at a young age, I can safely say that moving doesn't come close to that type of stress, but I get the point. It is damn aggravating to search through your stuff, get rid of half of it, move, and decide that you should've gotten rid of more useless things.

Being a packrat, it's hard for me to let go. It's always some sentimental reason or some use I'll have for it in the future. I can never just chuck it the way Alex does. He tosses about half my shit into plastic bags, most of which he doesn't ask me about since I'll invent some reason for holding on to it. If I don't see it, I can cope with the purging of accumulated baggage.

Baggage is exactly what it is.... I read an article that talked about how ridiculous it is that we pay for storage units. According to the author, 'How much shit do we have that we have to pay extra to store it?' I won't look down on people who rent them because, quite frankly, we considered getting one to store all of Adele's many baby trinkets. However, being the nerd that I am, I did the math. $50 x 12 months equals $600/yr x 3yrs = $1800....Hmmm, is all her baby stuff worth almost two grand. For that price, we might as well get all new, more bulky, more advanced baby crap.

Moving with a ten-month-old child is like juggling knives; although possible, it's highly likely that someone will get hurt. I don't think I can count the many times I stopped Adele from putting a piece of sticky packing tape into her mouth. We ended up getting a sitter to distract the baby from the disaster we called our apartment.

Once moved in, Adele cried for two days, bewildered about her new surroundings of boxes and bins. I think there was a crawl space for her between the pillars of luggage and laundry. To her, it must have seemed like midtown Manhattan.

Slowly, we unpacked boxes and made our space liveable, but we still had a couple strange occurrences.

For instance, no one told us that our next door neighborhood (being a coop, he's not more than three feet away) was insane. I mean he is certifiably nuts. Our super told us that if he doesn't take his meds, he can be rude and downright mean. Our first day, he squatted on the lobby steps and watched us move. I thought he was the super at first, but Alex told me, 'No, he's our crazy neighbor.' I thought he was kidding at the time.

That day, although a little strange, he was nice--holding the doors open for me, saying 'Howdy neighbor' and all. The next morning, I get in the elevator with him and he gives me the meanest look. He mutters 'bitch' and considering we were alone, I am pretty sure he was talking to me.





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