Hated Despite of Great Qualities
"Hated Despite of Great Qualities" is what I thought was the title of a Blonde Redhead song I like. Then I realized it's a melange of two Blonde Redhead song titles, "Hated Because of Great Qualities" and "Loved Despite of Great Faults." Nevertheless, it is the title of this post.
Meg and I have caught the moving bug. We now live in the top floor of a small brownstone in Carroll Gardens (or Boerum Hill, or something; no one seems to agree on what neighborhood this block belongs to). It's small, with low-ish ceilings and a floor that slopes with the house's redistribution of its hundred and twenty-year-old weight. There are windows on both sides, and out the back we can see into the garden and patio space of our landlords, who live below us, and whose sensitivity to the small but not non-existent amount of noise we make while walking and talking in the evenings adds a certain amount of stress to the whole situation. The light is beautiful, and I painted my walls this soft cocoa/peanut-buttery brown color. They still have the preternatural eggshell cleanness that comes with a fresh coat. The kitchen is tiny, the refrigerator "fun-sized," and the bathroom little, too, though I've calibrated my movements within it and it feels normal now. But Meg's working at home two days a week, and there's not really a devotable place for that. Also the wall between our rooms barely deserves the title; it's a flimsy piece of something just a step up from cardboard. It looks like a wall, if you don't tap on it, and as long as we both remain functionally single the whole arrangement is basically fine, but between that and the working at home thing and the landlord thing, we are feeling a little cramped.
So yesterday evening we went to check out an apartment in Red Hook. Red Hook is notoriously inconvenient to transit, so we carefully timed our walk there from the closest subway, the F/G at Smith & 9th Streets. It took 20 minutes, and a long 20 minutes at that, cross a highway and through a park and past a very big laundromat and a seemingly un-ending progression of housing projects. The building that the apartment was in was white-painted brick, not especially distinguished looking. We rang the bell a few times, but the super who was supposed to show us the apartment didn't answer. We didn't really mind. Between the walk and the looks of the building, we were not, as they say, feeling it.
Picture us walking up Van Brunt Street (leaving Red Hook a different way than we'd come in). The heat wave of the past couple weeks has broken; it's in the lower seventies, the humidity is gone. There's purple twilight over the neighborhood, a gull hanging in it, a light breeze and probably some narrow clouds with tender golden underbellies from the fading sunset. And here we are, feeling a little stunned, a little dejected. Why does New York have to be so damn beautiful? Why does New York have to be so damn hard?
We stopped into a bar on Van Brunt called the Bait and Tackle Shop, or something, to ponder over these very serious questions.
(To be continued...)
Meg and I have caught the moving bug. We now live in the top floor of a small brownstone in Carroll Gardens (or Boerum Hill, or something; no one seems to agree on what neighborhood this block belongs to). It's small, with low-ish ceilings and a floor that slopes with the house's redistribution of its hundred and twenty-year-old weight. There are windows on both sides, and out the back we can see into the garden and patio space of our landlords, who live below us, and whose sensitivity to the small but not non-existent amount of noise we make while walking and talking in the evenings adds a certain amount of stress to the whole situation. The light is beautiful, and I painted my walls this soft cocoa/peanut-buttery brown color. They still have the preternatural eggshell cleanness that comes with a fresh coat. The kitchen is tiny, the refrigerator "fun-sized," and the bathroom little, too, though I've calibrated my movements within it and it feels normal now. But Meg's working at home two days a week, and there's not really a devotable place for that. Also the wall between our rooms barely deserves the title; it's a flimsy piece of something just a step up from cardboard. It looks like a wall, if you don't tap on it, and as long as we both remain functionally single the whole arrangement is basically fine, but between that and the working at home thing and the landlord thing, we are feeling a little cramped.
So yesterday evening we went to check out an apartment in Red Hook. Red Hook is notoriously inconvenient to transit, so we carefully timed our walk there from the closest subway, the F/G at Smith & 9th Streets. It took 20 minutes, and a long 20 minutes at that, cross a highway and through a park and past a very big laundromat and a seemingly un-ending progression of housing projects. The building that the apartment was in was white-painted brick, not especially distinguished looking. We rang the bell a few times, but the super who was supposed to show us the apartment didn't answer. We didn't really mind. Between the walk and the looks of the building, we were not, as they say, feeling it.
Picture us walking up Van Brunt Street (leaving Red Hook a different way than we'd come in). The heat wave of the past couple weeks has broken; it's in the lower seventies, the humidity is gone. There's purple twilight over the neighborhood, a gull hanging in it, a light breeze and probably some narrow clouds with tender golden underbellies from the fading sunset. And here we are, feeling a little stunned, a little dejected. Why does New York have to be so damn beautiful? Why does New York have to be so damn hard?
We stopped into a bar on Van Brunt called the Bait and Tackle Shop, or something, to ponder over these very serious questions.
(To be continued...)
posted by katherine | 10:48 PM
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