To move or not to move

May 14th, 2008 10:01pm by rusty-halo | 19 Comments »

I have to decide tonight whether I want to move out on July 1. Tomorrow is the deadline for notifying my management company.

On Sunday, I took the L train to Bedford Avenue (Brooklyn) and wandered around the Greenpoint/Williamsburg area for a while. Bedford Avenue is nifty; it’s like they carved out a big hunk of the East Village and plopped it down in Brooklyn. (Which… is pretty much literally what happened; rents went up and places flipped to the other side of the river). I got as far as Graham Ave (in a meandering path, writing down the phone numbers of every realty company I saw); the area got increasingly sketchy as I went. Today I took the L to Montrose (definitely sketchy) and walked the gentrifying path all the way back to Bedford.

I like the Bedford area, the Williamsburg/Greenpoint border. It has an appealing energy and aesthetic. Crumbling warehouses inhabited by trendy bars serving dozens of microbrews, and art galleries, and stores selling expensive handmade things, and restaurants with vegan options, and record shops, and posters for rock shows plastered all over everything. Lots of young people. I know you’re supposed to scoff at hipsters, but fuck it, I was bored out of my mind growing up in rural Indiana and suburban New Jersey and now I want to be in the middle of a place with energy and culture. And it’s so close to my current neighborhood, just one stop away. Five minutes and I can pretend I never left. Ten minutes to Union Square. The L hooks up with every major subway line, so I can get pretty much anywhere in Manhattan easily. It’s crowded, yes, but I can deal.

Of course, I doubt I can afford to live right in the middle of the area I actually liked. I could try for a bit north or west of the Bedford station, toward Greenpoint. That’s probably my goal, although I have no idea if I’ll be able to find anything affordable. I could also try east, where I could definitely find something, but that’s where the area gets sketchy. I like to stay out late at night; I don’t want to feel unsafe coming home. Based on my walk today, I think anything west of Graham is probably okay, but I don’t know what the area looks like at night. Part of my reason for preferring Bedford also is that the streets are very crowded; I’m an introvert who loves crowds, because I can disappear into them. When you’re the only person walking down the street, anyone you see is looking at you.

So… yeah. Can I get a place near the Bedford Avenue station? Within a couple blocks of the L? I don’t know, but it seems worth trying. And if I can’t, I can probably compromise with something relatively safe and decent nearby.

The funny part is that if I move, I’ll almost certainly be paying more, even with the absurd amount my rent is increasing this year. But I’ll have my own apartment. I just can’t express how much of a difference it will make to not have a roommate. Everything will change: I’ll be able to decorate how I want, cook what I want when I want it, get up and go to bed when I want, watch TV when I want, clean when I want, not have to worry about someone else messing with my stuff, just everything. I’ll have control over the place where I spend the majority of my time.

No more possessions disappearing, or beer pouring into my bed in the middle of the night, or coming home to find my cat missing, or spending weeks interviewing prospective roommates every time one of them moves out, or hysterical crazy people coming home in tears and yelling at me, or wild parties at 4am, or my kitchen full of strangers with no warning, or the reek of cigarette smoke/noxious chemical air-freshener that the roommate thinks I can’t smell, or listening to strangers having sex right above my head, or someone cooking steak with my dishes and causing my kitchen to reek of dead animal, or listening to someone else’s TV 24/7, or finding gum stuck to the wall, or not being able to fit anything into my refrigerator, or hearing my roommate talk to herself constantly in a variety of strange voices, or having my sink full of garbage that my batshit roommate has dug out of the trash to wash (seriously!!), or having to paint the graffiti off the walls…

Yeah, I think I should move.

Current Mood: contemplative & worried