Feliz New Year, everyone! I’ve just returned from 66 hours in my favorite city on the planet — NYC — which I spent with six of my closest friends. It was the first time I’d been back since my rather disastrous exit a year and a half ago…
I first moved to Brooklyn two weeks after 9/11 and stayed until December 2004, when I left for Mexico to research Mexican Enough. After spending the 2005-2006 academic year at Princeton, I realized the road was wide open. I had lined up some speaking gigs and residencies in the year ahead, but there wasn’t enough income to live anyplace in between — certainly not in the Northeast, anyway. So I took a vow of nomadism and stuffed three-quarters of my belongings into a U-Haul storage facility in Chelsea (Manhattan). It stayed there THREE YEARS, at $100 a month! I knew it was ridiculous to pay so much rent for a few (well, 20) boxes of clothes, photos, books, and mismatched cutlery (plus some errant furniture I’d swiped off the streets of Brooklyn late at night), but I didn’t know what else to do with it… until I decided to go to grad school. Then the problem became transporting everything from the U-Haul in Chelsea to my new apartment in Iowa City. At first, I tried to hire a moving company, but I kept getting quotes of $3,000 and more. It quickly became apparent that I had to deal with it myself. Gracias a Dios, my friend Sonya volunteered to help. Another angel appeared at the U-Haul facility itself: a guy from Bermuda who had just gotten kicked out of his girlfriend’s apartment, with nary a bath towel to his name. We made a deal: he’d take whatever I gave him, junk or treasure. Sonya and I spent three manic days sifting through all my stuff and either moving it into Bermuda Man’s storage unit or packing it up for UPS Man. Total cost: $600, but I swear I lost a few years in the process.
Anyway. That was July 2009, and I hadn’t returned since. It felt glorious to be back again. NYC, to me, is a place of reinvention. Read the rest of this entry »
