Getting Adjusted

Well, I think I can finally say that the idea of being a true New Yorker has sunk in. For a month now, I’ve been living here, first feeling like I was just visiting for the weekend or maybe spring break. Then I started work, and it felt like I was just going to be here for the summer, then in the fall I’d go back to Troy or Easthampton or…somewhere less cool than New York. But it all hit me the other day during work. I’d been out on site (getting paid to sit on a roof, eat cherries, and listen to podcasts on a beautiful day….and monitor a simple flood test) and was walking back to the office. I walked by a tiny hole-in-the wall bakery that also makes delicious empanadas (pumpkin scallion? Yes, please.). I’d been here many times over the past year after Nick introduced me to the place in the fall…but it had always been a destination. It was always a place I’d plan to go to, put on my agenda. Yesterday, it was just a place that I walked by on my way to work. It was part of the routine. It was just a seamless part of the life I now live!

When I put it that way, I feel like that could get misinterpreted, that it’s sad that things I used to cherish now seem normal…but to me, the beauty of the transition is that things are normal. That I’ve grown so accustomed to my life here, how smooth the transition has been. I guess because I’ve visited Potter here so much over the past two years, that helped.

I love the block that my office is on. It’s fairly quiet: no shops or restaurants or anything. But it’s got some fun tenants: there’s a store called “Mantiques Modern”. I haven’t been in, but it looks like they sell modern-looking antiques (or antique-looking modern artifacts? I can’t tell) that are “manly”…rifles, globes, “manly” furniture…the like. There’s also an Irish Repertory Theater, a doggy day care (with adorable dogs often sitting in the window), and a prop shop. What exactly is a prop shop, you may ask? Well they stock the things you’d need to make a movie, put together your dream wedding or…I honestly don’t know when you’d use some of these things. Some are normal: artificial trees with artificial foliage, Christmas trees with fake snow (a funny site on a NYC sidewalk in June), ivy-covered trellises. But then there are the odder things…like a 4’ plastic heart. Or a life-size blue plastic poodle. Every time I pass the warehouse, I see something new there, so it’s always entertaining. I should start taking pictures.