Category Archives: Places

Checking In

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Checking in for a bit… Sorry I’ve been away for a while.

The shoulder is doing okay, although the doc is a little concerned about my range of motion. He may want to do another procedure on me, in which they put me under, and then wrench my arm around to break up all the scar tissue, and then give me lots of painkillers. It actually doesn’t sound too bad (I’m told it’s a quick recovery), but doc wants to give the physical therapy more time to work. I see him again toward the end of the month.

In other medical news, a couple weeks ago I broke a tooth, so I’ve been in and out of the dentist’s office getting a gingivectomy, crown lengthening, and a crown build-up around one of my molars, way in the back. Eventually I’ll get a crown back there, but in the meantime I have a mouth full of stitches and I’m in a lot of pain.

My roommate has informed me that he’d like me to move out by the end of August, which is fine by me since I’ve been plotting my escape out of this hellhole anyway. I had been trying to save up money to go through a broker and get my own apartment in a non-shitty neighborhood, but I’ve pretty much had to empty my savings account to pay for all this dental work. Unfortunately, it looks like I may have to move into another share situation for a few months until I can build my savings back up.

In happier news, next week I start a six-week medieval stonecarving workshop hosted by my church, the great unfinished Cathedral of St. John the Divine near Columbia. It should be an interesting course, and I’m hoping I’ll have portfolio fodder to show for it. Last summer I was learning all about cutting-edge theory and generative design at GSAPP; this summer I’ll be kicking it old school with a mallet and chisel.

I’m happy to report that our multi-year restoration project at the Cathedral is almost complete, and has hit a major milestone. Back in 2001 we had a severe fire that destroyed the north transept, and let to a huge cleaning and restoration project that has had various parts of the cathedral buried behind plywood and scaffolding for years at a time.

One evening late last week I had to make a trip up to the cathedral to retrieve something from the acolyte room, and while there, I decided to poke my head into the crossing for a minute. (This was after the church had been closed to visitors for the evening, and there’s nothing quite like having such a space all to yourself for a few moments.) While there, I was thrilled to discover that the huge wall separating the nave from the crossing has begun to be removed, and that the south aisle of the newly-restored nave is now open while much of the temporary barriers are being removed.

Here’s a photo I snapped with my iPhone:

This is the first time in over two years this space has been open to the public, and it was a huge thrill to see the space again for the first time since I moved away from NYC in 2004. There’s still a lot of work to do (later this month the crossing and Great Choir will be closed off so that all 8000+ pipes of the organ can be re-installed), and we’ll have a huge re-dedication service on Sunday, November 30th. There will also be a public “open house” that week for those who don’t feel inclined to attend a religious service.

Yesterday I met up with my former critic from last year’s Columbia summer program for a couple drinks… Just so happens that he’s now the director of the M.Arch. program up the street at City College. We chatted about my grad school plans, and of course he tried to sell me on City College. Not that he had to try very hard, mind you; City College is already very high on my list. But he also strongly recommended that I apply to Columbia and Harvard as well (both places he has taught at), in addition to a couple other programs. He offered to write me letters of recommendation, and he wants to meet up with me again soon to look at my portfolio.

Not a bad drinking buddy to have, huh? He might even be doing the stonecarving thing with me at the cathedral; he seemed very interested and I gave him the contact info.

I haven’t really kept in touch with my fellow students from the Columbia summer program, but apparently two or three of them will be starting at Harvard this fall, and another will be starting at Princeton. I’m thinking that summer program was probably the smartest move I’ve made in a long time… Hard to believe it’s been almost a year already.

In other school-related news, I still plan to finish up my BA degree next year. There really isn’t much left for me to do, so I’m hoping to spread it out over the next 12 months (but knowing me, I’ll most likely goof off for the first 11 months, and then work nonstop to finish everything during the last month).

A few days ago I got a letter from my college at DePaul University, informing me that I had received a Student Excellence Award for a project I had done last year. I was invited to an award luncheon that takes place tomorrow, but unfortunately, the luncheon is in downtown Chicago and I’m in NYC and unable to make the trip right now. I wonder if they’ll FedEx the plaque to me?

That’s all for now…

Nine Months

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Sorry I haven’t checked in for a while…. It’s been a busy time at work.

Unlike most of my previous projects, this one is with a quasi-governmental agency that insists on doing everything By The Book™. With the corporate projects I’m used to, some guy usually says “build it”, and that’s what we do. With this governmental stuff, there’s about a million hoops to jump through before we can even talk about building stuff, and loads of paperwork for each hoop.

With my right arm mostly out of commission, AutoCAD work is very slow and cumbersome for me, but I can manage non-mouse-intensive stuff like MS-Word and Excel. As such, I find myself doing a lot of clerical/administrative stuff like meeting minutes, emails, spreadsheets, transmittals, and such. Good news is, I’m directing a couple people doing the CAD stuff, so I’m sort of like a Project Manager Lite, which is good experience and I’m learning a lot. That said, I’d much rather be designing stuff and getting it built, so all this administrative crap has me a little down.

Speaking of my right arm, I officially have one more week in the sling, and then I begin a few months of physical therapy. (I say “officially” because I’ve been going without my sling on weekends… I’m so damn sick of wearing that thing. I do okay as long as I don’t try anything weird with my right arm.) My arm’s range of motion has improved substantially since the surgery, but still has a long ways to go… I saw the doc last week, and he said I’m right about where I should be at this point. It will be a long time before I have all my strength and mobility back, though.

The pain has gone down a lot, but I still get occasional flare-ups. Nights are the worst, as there’s not really any position I can sleep in that doesn’t eventually cause my shoulder to start hurting. I haven’t been sleeping very well at all lately, and I think that’s been impacting my performance at work. Sometimes I wish I still had a steady supply of Vicodin, but the over-the-counter Ibuprofin usually does the trick, and without any weird side effects.

My next big task is to get myself into a better housing situation. I figure it will take me about 7 months to save up enough money to get my own apartment (first month’s rent + security deposit + broker fee), so I’ve opened a savings account and have begun putting away money. In the meantime, I’ve begun keeping an eye out for other roommate/share situations that would get me into a better neighborhood and possibly even save me some money. Although my current housing situation usually isn’t too bad, I’m dealing with a crappy commute from a shitty neighborhood, lots of noise issues, and I feel like I’m paying way too much for what I’m actually getting. Wish me luck.

On a somewhat related note, this is about my 9-month anniversary of moving back to New York last July. Normally a 9-month anniversary doesn’t mean much unless you’re pregnant, but in this case it’s significant because my last tenure in NYC lasted about nine months before I had a nervous breakdown and moved to Oregon. I’m happy to report that, despite my housing woes and occasional complaints about my job, I seem to be in a much better position now than I was nine months into my NYC residency in 2004. Let’s hope it keeps up.

Finally… Maybe because of the admin/clerical stuff I’ve been doing so much of at the office lately, I’ve been thinking more about grad school and how to get there. I don’t have much left to do on my undergrad degree and I have plenty of time to do it, but it still needs to get done. Hopefully I’ll be able to kick that effort into high gear this summer and fall, and not have much left to do by the time I turn in my grad school applications next winter.

This afternoon I took a walk up around City College, which at this point I would probably consider my “safety” choice. It’s local, it’s cheap as hell for in-state residents, it has good faculty and a good reputation in town, and I’m on a first-name basis with the interim director of the M.Arch. program, who was my studio critic at Columbia last summer. As a bonus, CCNY’s architecture program is moving into a brand-new Raphael Vinoly-designed facility next year. Not bad at all.

That said, I’ll probably still apply to a few of the “A-list” schools, especially Yale and Cornell. I’ve come to admire Yale’s eclectic approach to architectural education, and briefly visiting New Haven a few months ago helped me visualize the place a lot better. But Cornell in particular really got under my skin, as the whole vibe at Cornell felt great when I visited last year… I just wish Ithaca was about 3 hours closer to NYC, and that going there wouldn’t put me up to my eyeballs in student loan debt for the rest of my life. Ah well, I still have some time to sort all that shit out….

That’s all for now…

Anno Domini MMVIII

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I hope everybody had a good Christmas. Mine involved taking a 9-hour train ride each way to Raleigh, North Carolina and back to visit my parents. I’ve made this trip before, and it always brings up a lot of weird feelings. On one hand, it’s certainly nice to see my family again, enjoy my mother’s cooking for a few days, and generally take a break from the stresses of my daily routine.

On the other hand, it seems like those trips serve to remind me why I left home in the first place, and nothing makes me appreciate New York City more than spending a few days in a place like Raleigh. While I love my parents dearly, being around them somehow has the effect of turning me into a surly 14-year-old again, and I feel my stress and anxiety levels going through the roof at a time when I’m supposed to be relaxing. I don’t know why, but it seems like all my internal defense mechanisms go into overdrive-mode while I’m down there. Add to that the stress of holiday travel and living out of a suitcase for a few days, and it was with a huge sigh of relief that I stepped off the train at Penn Station Wednesday evening and found myself back on my home turf.

With everything so hectic and frenzied lately, I haven’t had the time or the energy to update this blog as often as I’d like. But now that the final hours of 2007 are rapidly slipping into the past-tense, I thought I’d take a moment to ponder how things are going in my life to date, and take a look at what direction I’m hoping for things to go in 2008.

The Home Front

As mentioned earlier in this blog, I’ve been living in a loft share in Bushwick, Brooklyn since the beginning of September. Although it’s probably the best housing situation I’ve had in New York City to date (which doesn’t say much, considering some of my prior situations), I’m still itching to eventually get my own one-bedroom apartment in a half-decent neighborhood, and be done with the whole fucking roommate thing once and for all… At least until my roommate is somebody I’m having sex with on a regular basis.

Bushwick is predominantly a working-class Puerto Rican neighborhood that is beginning to see an influx of hipster pioneers who have found themselves priced out of Williamsburg. Given that I’m neither Puerto Rican nor anything remotely resembling a Williamsburg hipster, there really isn’t much in this neighborhood for me except lots of loud stereos and car alarms. While I’ve never really felt unsafe here, the quality of life leaves a lot to be desired, and it’s not the type of neighborhood where I’d be comfortable going out for an evening constitutional. Luckily, the subway is only a block from my apartment building, so my daily exposure to the ‘hood is usually fairly limited.

Ever since the first time I lived in NYC, I’ve wanted to get an apartment up in the so-called Hudson Heights area of Washington Heights, a quiet residential enclave along Ft. Washington Avenue between 181st Street and Fort Tryon Park. Perched along a high ridge overlooking the Hudson River, this neighborhood has lots of trees and parkland, diverse demographics, and a quiet domestic feel that is hard to find in most other parts of the city. The predominant housing stock consists of large art deco apartment buildings, and many of the apartments are stunning. The A train has two stops in the neighborhood, offering a quick ride on the 8th Avenue express line into Midtown and beyond.

Up until recently this neighborhood was still relatively affordable (by New York standards, mind you), but lately it has been “discovered” and many of the apartment buildings have gone co-op. I’m still holding out some hope that I can eventually find a rental in my price range up there, but I’m not sure when that will happen. The monthly rent is actually less of an issue for me than the upfront costs of the security deposit, first month’s rent, and especially the broker’s fee that will likely be required. Barring any unforeseen events and if I’m able to stick to a budget (fat chance), I might be able to start seriously looking for an apartment sometime in the late spring or early summer. Until then, I’ll have to continue to grit my teeth while living as a guest in somebody else’s home.

My resolution for 2008: Get my own apartment, or at the very least, find a better roommate in a better neighborhood.

Work

My job has its good days and bad days, but overall it’s been working out pretty well. A while ago I posted a blog entry regarding some of the issues I have with my job, and while some of those issues are still concerns of mine, others have been more-or-less rectified. They finally moved me to a new location (out of the stuffy corridor mentioned in that blog entry), and I’ve been working on a few interesting projects. One of those projects includes our own office relocation, as we’re bursting at the seams in our current space and looking for new digs. I’m not sure what the time line is for moving to a new office, but it feels like there’s at least a light at the end of the tunnel.

While the office remains busy with a wide variety of projects, the national economy isn’t looking so rosy, and we may be facing lean times in the near future. Hopefully my job situation will remain stable until I’m ready to head to grad school.

My resolution for 2008: Not get fired or laid off, do the best work I can do on some cool projects, and become more involved in the life of the firm.

Church

I continue to remain active as a volunteer acolyte at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Morningside Heights, despite my longstanding issues with organized religion in general and Christianity in particular. I’ve always struggled with matters of faith: while it seems to come naturally to some people, to me God has always seemed to be either incredibly distant, ignoring me, or just plain nonexistent. It’s been getting harder and harder for me to recite the Nicene Creed without wondering how much of it is just some human-invented myth that’s been handed down through the ages. I’ve tried my best to have a “personal relationship with Jesus”, but as with so many of my other personal relationships, I can’t shake the nagging feeling that the other party just isn’t interested.

Maybe the Calvinists are right, and each of us has already been predestined to eternal paradise or damnation since the beginning of time. Somehow I didn’t make the cut, and I just haven’t yet been formally notified. That’s a depressing thought, but if God actually exists, he certainly hasn’t been returning my calls lately.

Fortunately, I belong to a church where I can say all that without fear of being excommunicated or shunned. I tend to think of the cathedral as the spiritual counterpart to Rick’s Cafe in Casablanca: Sort of a safe haven in the midst of all the unholy wars raging outside, and a gathering place for a lot of refugees and misfits who wouldn’t otherwise have a spiritual home. If it weren’t for the Episcopal Church in general and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in particular, there’s a good chance I would have given up on organized religion altogether. While the cathedral isn’t without its flaws, for the most part the people there have been great, and it’s one of precious few places where I know I can show up at any time and be welcomed with open arms without being bludgeoned to death with a King James Bible. Regardless of wherever I stand on theological matters, that’s what keeps me coming back more than anything else.

2008 should be an exciting year for the cathedral, as we should finally be finishing up the huge multi-year cleaning and restoration project that’s the result of a severe fire the cathedral suffered in 2001. For the past several years the great pipe organ has been silent and various parts of the church have been buried behind huge walls of plywood and scaffolding, but everything is supposed to be fully open and operational by the end of November. I’ll be anxiously waiting, and then maybe we can get on with the business of finishing the building.

My resolution for 2008: To continue to support the cathedral in its ministry however I can.

School

If all goes according to plan, 2008 will be the year I finally finish up my long-sought undergraduate degree. I made some good progress at DePaul University in Chicago, and I accomplished everything I set out to accomplish this summer at Columbia (which DePaul will accept as transfer credit). The end is finally in sight. The few remaining outstanding items:

  • Math and Physics. In addition to counting towards my BA degree, these are also admission prerequisites for most graduate M.Arch. programs. I’ll be taking these classes at the Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC) downtown, which is part of the CUNY system. DePaul will accept these as transfer credits, and I plan on starting them within the next couple weeks.
  • Externship, Advanced Project, and Summit Seminar. These courses are specific to DePaul’s adult education program at the School for New Learning, and will need to be taken before I graduate. The Externship is sort of a community service requirement, the Advanced Project is like a mini-thesis, and the Summit Seminar is simply a one-day meeting with my advisors to tie up any loose ends. Ideally I’ll do this stuff in the spring quarter so that I can attend commencement in Chicago this June, but it can wait until the summer or fall if needed. (These can be done on a distance-ed basis, which is how I can still be a DePaul student while living 800 miles away from campus.)
  • Independent Learning Pursuits (ILPs). Another thing specific to DePaul’s School for New Learning, this is the mechanism by which I can earn college credit for “real life” experience that’s relevant to my focus area. Given that I now have 11 years experience working in various architecture firms, it won’t be a challenge to earn some ILP credits; it’s just a matter of getting everything properly documented and submitted for review on time.

I’ve taken a hiatus from school during the fall while I got settled into my new life here in NYC, but now I need to get back at it. By this time next year I’ll hopefully be a college graduate, and I’ll be wrapping up the application process for my M.Arch. degree.

That will involve a lot of work in putting together a portfolio, lining up letters of recommendation, and wrapping up any remaining prerequisites. I went through the whole M.Arch. admissions process in 2006 (thinking that I could finish my BA degree much sooner), and it was almost a full-time job in itself. I didn’t get accepted to any of the schools I applied to — no surprise, in retrospect — but it gave me a good idea of what to expect the next time around.

I’m still not sure which schools I’ll be applying to, but the top contenders include City College, Yale, Cornell, Pratt, maybe Columbia, and maybe Harvard. No doubt there will be some changes to this list when the time comes, so stay tuned.

My resolution for 2008: Finish my damn BA degree already, and apply to M.Arch. programs for fall 2009 admission.

Money

I had made some good progress in climbing out of debt while living in Chicago, but moving to NYC and enrolling in the Columbia summer program left me even further in the hole than I was two years ago. The good news is, I’m now making better money at my job and I no longer have the expense of owning a car, so I’ve already begun chipping away at this new mountain of debt and I’m hopeful that I’ll have the bulk of it paid off within the next few months.

My resolution for 2008: Right now I’m about $6000 in debt (not counting student loans) with about $500 in savings. I’m hoping to have at least reversed that ratio by this time next year.

Relationships

One day last week I took a nice walk through Central Park during my lunch break. I came back into my office building feeling refreshed and invigorated. An attractive young woman came into the building behind me, and we both waited for the elevator in the lobby. The doors opened, she went in first, and I managed to smile at her as I boarded. She politely smiled back. I got off on the third floor, while she continued further upstairs.

Not a bad little encounter, I thought. Maybe sometime soon I’ll see her again and strike up a conversation.

I returned to my desk in pretty high spirits, and then went to hang up my coat in the closet. It was then that I discovered, to my horror, a giant glob of white bird shit on the black leather sleeve of my coat, the same sleeve that had been inches away from the face of this woman in the elevator.

I went to the bathroom to clean off my coat, while entertaining serious thoughts about moving to a different country.

That little vignette pretty much sums up the vast majority of my experiences with romantic relationships: Meet somebody new and get excited that things are going well, only to later discover that I’ve inadvertently committed some unforgivable breach of human decency. Sometimes I wonder if I’ve had that giant glob of bird shit on my sleeve for the past twenty years, and I’ve only discovered it just now. That would certainly explain a lot.

This is the area of my life that has by far been the most problematic, and the aspect of my life that causes me more depression and anxiety than all the other issues above combined. I’m pretty much convinced that I was born without the dating gene, or that I was absent from class the day they taught mating skills to young boys. I hate to sound so desperate, but fuck it. If the shoe fits…

There’s much more to this issue than what I feel comfortable sharing here, but suffice it to say that it’s almost impossible for me to meet women who I think might be compatible with what I’m looking for. Of the women I do meet who seem like a good match, the vast majority seem to have the common trait of being completely unattainable. It’s very possible that my hopes and aspirations are totally unrealistic, but I still fear the notion of settling for a relationship that isn’t really what I ever wanted.

I think one of my problems — at least one that has the possibility of being rectified anytime soon — is that I’ve always been uncomfortable with the idea of casual dating, and that I’ve had sort of an all-or-nothing mentality about relationships. What’s the point of dating somebody if there isn’t the potential for a long-term relationship or marriage? Well, lately I’ve been working to overcome that particular hang-up by starting to attend more singles events and expanding my scope of potential dating partners, and I think it might be starting to pay off.

This past weekend I attended a huge year-end party at Webster Hall organized by a few groups on Meetup.com, and despite the obnoxious music and the usual assortment of hopeless cases who reek of desperation (some readers would no doubt include me in that category), I actually had a pretty good time and met some interesting people without doing or saying anything terribly awkward. Maybe the vodka tonics had something to do with it, but I didn’t feel like the uptight bundle of nerves I usually am at such events. I’ve been in contact with a couple of women I met that evening, and I may be meeting one of them for dinner later this week. Stay tuned.

My resolution for 2008: Attend more social events whenever I can, continue meeting new people, and not be so damn shy about talking to strangers. Also, some counseling probably wouldn’t be such a bad idea.

Overall, 2007 has been a pretty good year for me with a lot of new beginnings, but with a lot of things still left to be done. Hopefully 2008 will bring continued progress on the new life I’ve begun here in New York, and maybe even bring a few new beginnings of its own.

I hope 2008 brings you all peace and joy… Best wishes for a happy new year.

Ghosts of Philadelphia

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While my feelings toward Chicago began as very positive and slowly became more negative over the years, my feelings toward Philadelphia are much more difficult to categorize. Chicago now seems relatively bland and homogeneous to me, but Philly is a city of polar extremes. In the same way that Philly contains stunning beauty and horrific ugliness only a few blocks apart from each other, I look back on my time in Philly as some of the best and worst days of my adult life.

Philadelphia first came onto my radar screen in 2000, while I was still in Boston. I had been living in a summer sublet in Brookline while trying to trying to find permanent housing in anticipation of starting classes at the Boston Architectural Center that fall. I thought I had secured a place to live down in Jamaica Plain, but those arrangements fell apart at the last minute, leaving me with very little time to find something else. (It didn’t help that I was now competing against a billion returning college students for the same twelve apartment vacancies.) Boston sort of rubbed me the wrong way anyway, so I took this as an opportunity to leave the city altogether.

Before I left, though, I had found out about the architecture program at Drexel University, which was structured in a way similar to that of the BAC: Students work full-time during the day, while attending classes in the evenings. At that time I thought it was the perfect scenario for me; I could go to school and pay my bills. During a weekend visit to New York, I made a side trip down to Philly to scope out the city for the first time. Given that SEPTA’s R7 train goes through the worst of North Philly’s ghettos on its way to 30th Street Station, my first impressions of Philadelphia were somewhat less than stellar. Drexel’s architecture program and Philly’s affordable housing market were strong attractions, but I decided to shelve those ideas and give Chicago a second chance. I moved back to Chicago a week after Labor Day, having spent just three months in Boston.

The next two years back in Chicago turned out to be one dead end after another, though, and Philadelphia was looking better and better to me. I visited Philadelphia a couple more times and explored more of the city, I got accepted into the architecture program at Drexel, and finally moved there on Labor Day of 2002. At first I rented a bedroom across the river in South Jersey, and a few months later I got my own one-bedroom apartment in Philly’s verdant East Falls neighborhood. In the meantime, I had begun classes at Drexel, I was working full-time for a mid-sized architecture firm in Collingswood, and I had developed some close friendships within the Canterbury Club, the Episcopal campus ministry for UPenn and Drexel. I had also purchased a newish car, and I had begun corresponding with an attractive woman from out west (on whom I soon developed a major crush). Things were looking pretty good, and my only regret about moving to Philly was that I hadn’t moved there straight from Boston two years earlier.

In addition to the positive life changes, Philadelphia itself was turning out to be a fascinating city to explore. The downtown area is loaded with historical sites and colonial charm, while some of the outer neighborhoods and suburbs were lush with varied topography and mature trees. Fairmount Park should be the envy of every American city; imagine mile after mile of Chicago’s Lincoln Park waterfront combined with ravines, waterfalls, and hiking trails like you’d find in the Appalachians. Most of my social life revolved around the beautiful Penn campus, and we often branched out to a variety of interesting bars and restaurants in town. Within a few weeks of my arrival, I seemed to have discovered everything in Philly that I had found lacking in Chicago.

Things were going pretty well for the first six months or so, but the cracks began showing soon enough. The first major problem was my workload: Between my full-time job and my part-time classes, I felt like every ounce of my energy was being sucked right out of me. I was able to keep up with it for a while, but it eventually began taking its toll. Putting in a full day’s work at my job became harder and harder, as did putting in the required effort on my school assignments. I felt like I was falling further and further behind, and my long-simmering clinical depression began to rear its ugly head again. A nasty case of food poisoning in January was quickly followed by a month-long bout with the flu, which sent me reeling physically.

The fatal blow came on my birthday in March. My love interest out west had earlier announced that she would be visiting Philadelphia on her spring break. I have a bad habit of getting my hopes up way too high when it comes to relationships, and that bad habit kicked into overdrive when she announced her visit. She’d come visit in March, we’d finally meet face-to-face after months of instant messages and phone calls, we’d fall in love, and we’d live happily ever after. With everything else in my life finally working out well for a change, why should this be any different?

She arrived, we met, we had a good time, and… A day later she called me at work to slam the brakes on the whole thing, without explanation. All my high hopes came crashing down, and I was in shock. I knew all along that I had been setting myself up for a huge letdown if things didn’t work out, but I had fallen hard for her, and those are the times when any sense of logic or rational thought goes right out the window. To make matters worse, for the past few weeks I had been wearing my feelings toward her on my sleeve at work and around my friends, and the implosion of that relationship became a very public spectacle. My Canterbury Club friends took me out for my birthday dinner that evening, but I managed to single-handedly turn the party’s mood into that of a funeral. I don’t think my friends appreciated being dragged down into my dysfunctional relationship issues, I sensed a subtle cooling-off of a couple friendships afterwards.

The relationship meltdown by itself probably wouldn’t have been enough to send me into a downward spiral, but combined with everything else, it was the final straw that set a vicious feedback loop of anxiety and depression into motion, and I felt my life spinning out of control.

The first casualty was school. I abruptly withdrew from my classes in April when I found myself utterly lacking the energy to finish a major project before its due date. I was already up to my ears in tuition debt, and I had no hope of repaying it before the next quarter’s registration deadline. I also felt that my performance at work was seriously slipping, and that I needed to put every effort into keeping my job.

It was too late. I got fired in May, and with a bureaucratic snafu in collecting unemployment benefits, my financial house of cards began to rapidly collapse. The states of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Illinois were each telling me that I needed to file my unemployment claim with one of the other two states. Then, it turned out that my former employer had never reported my income to the state of New Jersey, making me ineligible for benefits until I could get more paperwork filled out and verified. I finally began receiving benefits after several months of navigating a warren of red tape, but by that point I had gone the entire summer of 2003 with zero income. Job interviews were few and far between, and given that my car had been repossessed in July, my work options were very limited.

One afternoon in August I received an eviction notice from my landlord’s attorney, informing me that I had a week to vacate my apartment. By this point I felt like I was completely backed into a corner with no escape, and that every endeavor I had attempted in my life had been a failure and would always be a failure, be it work, school, relationships, financial security, or even simple friendships. I decided that I was going to get very drunk that evening, fill my bathtub with hot water, climb into it, and slit my wrists.

Before doing so, though, I went to Evening Prayer at St. Mary’s Church, which had been my one daily routine during this time. Mainly I just wanted to let God know that I’d soon be meeting him face-to-face so that I could tell him to fuck off in person.

During my walk to the train station and on the ride into 30th Street Station, I began to realize just how dangerous of a place I was in, and that I needed to get myself some outside help, fast. I probably should have gone straight to a hospital, but God knows what they would have done to me once I arrived and told them what was on my mind. (And given that I had no insurance, God knows how much it would have cost me.) I had the feeling it would only make my problems much worse. I began hoping that I’d bump into one of my Canterbury Club friends at the church. That didn’t happen, so afterwards I walked down the street to the house of a couple friends who lived nearby.

By some miracle they happened to be home, and had invited some other friends over for a barbecue out back. They had recently gotten married, and there was a large keg of Yuengling left over from the wedding reception that needed to be consumed in an appropriate manner. They invited me in, and I actually had a pretty good time. One of the other people at the party happened to be a landlord in Philly, and when I told him about the eviction notice, he explained how the process works in Philadelphia, that what my landlord was doing was illegal, and what steps I needed to take to keep my apartment.

The group of us spent the evening sitting on the deck out back, passing around a glass boot filled with beer. When a person finished off the boot, they’d have to tell a story to the group before refilling the boot and passing it on. I got very drunk that evening, but instead of opening up my veins in my bathtub, I crashed on their living room futon for the night. I still felt incredibly shitty about life, but at least I had gained some breathing room.

My friends probably have no idea how close I was to suicide that evening, but I’ll be forever grateful to them for answering their front door when I rang the bell. I honestly don’t know how this story would have turned out if they hadn’t.

Having hit rock bottom, things began to improve very slowly. My first unemployment check finally arrived, retroactive to when I had first lost my job. I was able to catch up on my rent, buy some groceries, and head up to New York to purchase an old Volvo beater in Queens for $300. More importantly, I finally began regular counseling and medication at a community mental health clinic in my neighborhood. It was a slow process and nothing changed overnight, but the clouds eventually began to lift to the point where I could start taking steps to rebuild my life over the next few months.

One of those steps involved becoming more aggressive in my job search, and I made the decision to move up the road to New York City. My closest friends in Philly were making plans to head off to seminary and wouldn’t be around much longer. The job market for architects in Philly was dismal, and I had begun to mentally associate Philadelphia with all the misery I was going through. The city itself has an inferiority complex so thick you can cut it with a knife, and Philadelphia’s notorious self-loathing hangs like a dark pall over the city. I began to feel like it was contagious.

While my time in Philly had served an important role in the grand scheme of my life, I felt like the city had become haunted by my ghosts, and I wanted nothing more to do with it. One night in February I loaded up a U-Haul truck and moved to Brooklyn, and I began working at an architecture firm in Manhattan a short time later. With that, my time in Philadelphia was over.

My life over the next few years had its ups and downs. Within a few months I had become burned-out with New York City, and eventually moved back to Chicago yet again, but not before spending three months exploring the mountains of western Oregon. Back in Chicago, I spent a couple years getting my life back on track to the point where I felt like I was ready to give New York City another shot. That tale is recounted elsewhere in this blog, and is still a work in progress. So far it’s been looking good, but nowadays I try to be much more cautious about getting my hopes up too high.

The funny thing about Philly, though, is that sometimes I wonder if I gave up too easily on that city. My major regret about Chicago is that I kept moving back there only to be reminded of why I left. I should have moved away much sooner, and stayed gone. But If I have any regrets about Philadelphia, it would be the nagging feeling that I might have moved away too soon. Maybe there was still some untapped potential down there that I never fully took advantage of.

Earlier this month I decided to rent a car and head down to Philly for a concert back at St. Mary’s Church on the Penn campus, the same church I went to when my thoughts were at their darkest. (My high school friend Kevin in Poughkeepsie was to join me, but a sprained ankle forced him out at the last minute.) I had made a couple of brief visits to Philly since I had moved away, but this was the first time I had a chance to get outside Center City. I wasn’t able to spend as much time in Philly as I wanted, but I after the concert I was able to grab a cheesteak at Jim’s and then take a short drive around town before hitting the Turnpike back to New York.

I wasn’t sure how I would feel about being back there. It brought back lots of old memories, not all of which were good ones. But overall, it was nice to be back, and I even found myself a little homesick. Not enough to make me want to move back there again, but enough to make me wonder how things might have worked out if I had decided to stick around a bit longer. The city no longer felt haunted, and I’m hoping that maybe I’ve finally made peace with the ghosts I left behind.

Checking In

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I officially have a place to live in Brooklyn. It’s not perfect (mainly because of the location and the fact that it’s not my own place), but it should be good enough for a few months. It could certainly be much worse… There’s plenty of space, it’s clean, it’s air-conditioned, and the living room has a million-dollar view of the Manhattan skyline. I’ll probably fly back to Chicago sometime next month and move the rest of my stuff to NYC. Most of it will go right back into storage at this end, but some of it — including my beloved Eames chair — will get brought into the apartment.

Lately I’ve been licking my chops over the new iMacs and the iPhones… Guess you could say I’ve drunk the Apple kool-aid. Assuming I can stick to my budget, I’m hoping to get a 24″ iMac maybe in late October (hopefully Mac OS X Leopard will be out by then), and maybe an iPhone in mid-September. I had been pining for a MacBook Pro, but I may hold off on a laptop until I’m closer to starting grad school… Most likely in 2009. More about that in a minute.

In the meantime, I just dumped 2 GB of RAM into my Dell fossil… All this time I somehow thought it already had 1 GB of memory, but it turned out to only have 512 MB. No wonder the damn thing seemed so slow… Anyway, it’s much faster now, so hopefully this will suit me until I have a shiny new Mac sitting on my desk.

About grad school: I have a feeling I’ll be sitting out the 2008 round of grad school angst while I save up some more money and sink some roots here in NYC. Now that I’m making decent money at a good firm, I’m not feeling as much of a rush to start my M.Arch. degree as I was in Chicago. Despite all the stress of this summer, life is pretty good right now, and I’d like to enjoy it for a while.

Housing Update

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Well, the apartment in Sunset Park didn’t work out (landlord decided to rent it to somebody else) but it’s looking like I’ll have a place to live next month. No money has changed hands yet and nothing has been signed yet, but I have a verbal agreement with a prospective roommate I met a few days ago in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn.

The neighborhood is pretty shitty, but the apartment is actually one of the nicest I’ve seen in the past couple weeks: A condo-quality loft conversion with two bedrooms and a huge living area with an incredible view of the Manhattan skyline. The apartment is only a block away from the nearest subway station (minimizing my exposure to aforementioned shitty neighborhood), and there’s a decent-sized grocery store on the same block as the apartment building. Prospective roomie is a construction manager for a local chain of health clubs, and seems like a decent guy. As a bonus, the bathroom has a huge shower stall with very good water pressure… It’s important to have your priorities straight.

It’s not my first-choice scenario (I was hoping to get my own apartment), but this will be a half-decent place for me to crash for the next six months or so while I save up some money, pay off some debts and repair my credit report, and eventually (hopefully) get myself a much nicer apartment than I’d be able to get right now.

I’ve actually looked at a few pretty nice apartments over the past few days that are within my price range, but most have been located in Bed-Stuy… Supposedly an “up and coming” Brooklyn neighborhood with tons of beautiful brownstone apartments, but the neighborhood still has a long way to go before it even begins to resemble a decent place to live: Most of the apartments I looked at were at least a 20-minute walk to the subway, and I didn’t see a single full-service grocery store or drug store in all my walking around the area. I have a pretty high tolerance for rough neighborhoods, but some parts of Bed-Stuy felt downright unsafe…. East Harlem feels like a country club resort by comparison.

I have to admit, it’s been a fascinating experience exploring just about every nook and corner of New York City over the past couple weeks; most of the places I’ve been to are places I’d never set foot in if I weren’t looking for affordable housing. I’m always amazed at how much variety there is in New York’s neighborhoods… Chicago seems so damn homogeneous and segregated by comparison. Here in NYC, you’ll find a colony of homeless people living on the same block as condos selling for over $3M…. Back in Chicago, the city is rigidly divided along racial and socioeconomic boundaries, and you can easily spend months in the city without crossing those boundaries. Here in NYC, unless you never leave Midtown, you can’t avoid crossing some of those boundaries, sometimes multiple times within a few blocks.

Lazy Sunday

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For the first time in weeks, I’ve had a weekend where my only obligation was to sleep in and veg out the whole time. Unfortunately, Saturday morning I somehow pulled a muscle in my neck while in the shower, and I’ve barely been able to move without huge amounts of pain since then. This has happened a few times in the past, and it’s a huge pain whenever it does… And it’s not as if I was doing anything particularly physically strenuous, either. It finally seems to be getting a little better now, though.

Despite that, I did manage to get over to Brooklyn yesterday to look at an apartment for rent… Nothing to brag about, but it seemed like a clean, decent place in a fairly stable working-class neighborhood. It’s a so-called “railroad” apartment in an old brownstone, in which all the rooms are in succession without a hallway. As such, one would have to walk through my bedroom in order to get to the kitchen. Not really a problem, since I’d be the only person living there. At least it’s got some character, with a lot of the original details intact. I put in an application on the spot; I hope to hear back from the landlord on Monday… Wish me luck.

In the meantime, I’m settling into life at my temporary abode here in Harlem. The neighborhood can be a little intimidating to outsiders, but so far it’s been harmless. The apartment itself is small but nice, except for the fact that the central air is controlled by the landlord upstairs. Why this apartment wasn’t given its own thermostat (it’s a new renovation) is beyond me, but what’s worse is the fact that the landlord turns on the A/C only about three times a day if I’m lucky… The rest of the time this place is like an oven, even when it’s 65 outside with the windows open. Who turns on the A/C only three times a day? Why not just set the fucking thermostat at one temperature and leave it there? Arrgh…..

Stopgap

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Quick update: A co-worker of mine is leaving the country for three weeks due to a family emergency, so I’ll be subletting her studio apartment in Harlem through the end of the month. It’s not a permanent solution, but it gives me three weeks to find something slightly less transient.

Special thanks to my friend Karl for letting me crash in his kick-ass Chinatown loft for a few nights, and thanks to my friend Alfredo for offering his sofa in Brooklyn.

Evacuation Day

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4:00 AM: Wake up, feed the cat, check email for messages about possible housing situations, check craigslist for any new listings.

5:00 AM: Wake up, check email, check craigslist.

6:00 AM: Wake up, check email, check craigslist.

9:00 AM: Wake up, check email, check craigslist, take a shower, check email, check craigslist.

10:00 AM: Leave dorm room, stop at Starbucks to grab some coffee and a bite to eat.

11:00 AM: Pick up Zipcar from garage on 122nd Street.

11:15 AM: Begin moving stuff out of the dorm room and into the car.

12:15 AM: Finish moving out of dorm room, submit check-out form. I’m now officially homeless.

12:35 PM: Arrive at address where I had an appointment to look at a room for rent. No answer when I ring the doorbell.

12:40 – 1:30 PM: Drive around for a bit, with my cat and my belongings in the Zipcar, for about an hour.

1:35 PM: Arrive at next appointment, find a nice parking space across the street from the building.

1:35 – 1:50 PM: Meet with prospective roommate, express interest in renting the room ASAP. Offer cash on the spot. She asks for an hour to think about it. Agree to call her back at 3:00.

1:55 – 2:59 PM: Grab a sandwich and soda from a nearby deli, sit in car with A/C on in order to keep the cat cool and to to not lose the parking spot.

3:00 PM: Call prospective roommate’s phone number. No answer. Leave a message.

3:01 – 3:10 PM: Wait for callback.

3:11 PM: Call friend in Chinatown to arrange to crash at his place for a few nights. Leave parking spot, begin driving downtown.

3:20 PM: Receive callback from prospective roommate. She’s decided to rent the room to somebody else.

3:30 PM: Call Zipcar, let them know I’ll be an hour late returning the car, fully aware that I’ll be incurring massive late fees and causing great inconvenience to the next person who has the car reserved.

3:35 PM: Receive call from Zipcar giving me the option to extend my reservation by one hour with no late fees. Accept offer.

3:45 PM: Arrive at friend’s loft in Chinatown, begin unloading stuff from car up three flights of stairs into his place. Nobody can find the key to the freight elevator.

4:20 PM: Finish unloading car. I have exactly 40 minutes to get the car from Chinatown to the garage on 122nd Street.

4:25 PM: Find previously-unkown shortcut tunnel under Battery Park to West Side Highway, hit the gas.

4:25 – 4:50 PM: Continue driving at a very high rate of speed up the West Side Highway, while glancing at my watch and receiving multiple text messages from Zipcar informing me of dire consequences if I’m late returning the car.

4:55 PM: Exit Henry Hudson Parkway at 125th Street. Look at watch and panic.

4:57 PM: Arrive at garage on 122nd Street, return car to attendant. Look at watch and grin.

5:10 – 6:30 PM: Embark on subway ride back down to Chinatown.

6:40 PM: Exit subway on East Broadway, stop in Pathmark to grab some cat food.

6:45 PM: Arrive back at friend’s loft, open a beer and watch the last two innings of a baseball game, while wondering where the fuck I’ll be living this time next week.

More Panic

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Well, I looked at a moderately shitty place in Brooklyn this evening, and told the guy I’d get back to him tonight one way or the other about the room he had for rent, because I still had to check out another place in Harlem.

I went to Harlem and checked out the room, and although it was far from perfect, it was actually halfway decent. I told the girl I was interested in the room and offered to sign a sublease and give her money on the spot. She said she had to decide between me and one other person, but would give me a call with her decision no later than 10:30 tonight.

Meanwhile, there’s a place I looked at in Inwood last Wednesday night that was by far the nicest place so far, and I expressed interest in taking the room. However, the people there are taking forever to make a decision, although I’m apparently their “top candidate” so far. Unfortunately, they’re going out of town this weekend, and still want to meet a couple more people. (They’re a lesbian couple and would prefer to have another female in the apartment, but seemed to like me.)

So I get back from the place in Harlem this evening and wait by the phone… and wait and wait. 10:30 comes and goes. At 10:50 I call, but nobody picks up. I leave a message. Still nothing.

So, at 11:00 I called the guy in Brooklyn to let him know I was interested in taking the room he had for rent. Unfortunately for me, the guy who showed up after I did put down a deposit on the room.

So I called my friend in Chinatown who had earlier offered me a place to crash in his loft and took him up on his gracious offer, as it looks like I’ll be crashing at his place tomorrow night.

Where I go from there is anybody’s guess….