Hi. I live in new jersey.
1 June 2008I am shocked by how quickly I was able to revert to my NJ ways. I guess it’s kind of like riding a bicycle, but it feels a bit more like Jason Bourne in the diner scene of the first movie (”I can tell you that our waitress is left-handed and the guy sitting up at the counter weighs two hundred fifteen pounds and knows how to handle himself. I know the best place to look for a gun is the cab of the gray truck outside, and, at this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Now why would I know that? How can I know that and not know who I am?”) where I find myself doing things I didn’t even know where part of my instincts. It was frighteningly easy to fall back into the pattern of “borrowing” my brother’s car without telling him, going to get my nails done (last time I got a manicure? Day before I started my current job. So, two years ago), recognizing the mom of my senior prom date at the nail salon and then trying to figure out if the fact that she didn’t recognize me is more due to the fact that I’ve matured so, so very much since 1999, or that I wasn’t wearing a floor length midnight blue dress with silver opera gloves (that I was, perhaps, not all that memorable to begin with as an 18 year old never occurred to me). Most of today was devoted to laying in my mom’s hammock with my e-reader (technology!) and not giving one thought to whether or not manhattan ceased to exist when I left it, as I suspected that it might. At the same time, I’m noticing things about my hometown that I’m guessing have been there all along and always seemed perfectly normal, but just… aren’t. Like how cars kept letting me cross the street in town even though it was against the light (”there’s a law about yielding to pedestrians in the crosswalk,” aunt roe kindly explained. “Really?!?” I kept trying to wave cars through after they had stopped for me. No, really, I’m fine! I’m just confused because there’s no little white man walking or red flashing hand). Or at our post office, how there are signs up on the cork board for (a) The Glen Rock Poverty Awareness Project, which, I’m convinced, is the work of Fight Club, there’s just way too much irony there. No one in GR is vaguely aware of poverty. If they are, it’s because they’re mad that they got a saturn instead of an audi on their 17th birthday and (b) various services for senior citizens, including something called Reverse 911, a phone service that you can sign up for, free of charge. With Reverse 911, you pick a time of day for a computerized service to call your phone, and then when you answer it, you punch in a set of numbers that tells the computer you’re still kicking. If you don’t answer the phone, the computer calls 911 for you. “Hey there, old people! Worried about your cats eating the face off of your dead body when no one notices that you’ve been missing for a week? Give Reverse 911 a try and get a free daily reminder of your mortality and apparently uselessness in society!” I appreciate the sentiment and intention behind this service, but, man. I’ll take my own life with a hammer before I’ll bow to Reverse 911.
I’m hoping that all of these oddities are just my natural defense mechanisms keeping me from really loosing it about my intentional, and long-planned, homelessness. I’m also hoping that all of this can someday be put to good use for someone else, so if any of you are about to move, let me know, and I’ll give you my 27 point checklist of Things You Might Not Have Thought Of. For example: Did you refill and then transfer all of your prescriptions? Did you either go paperless or update your address on all of your bank accounts? Did you know that iTunes is smart enough to know when you do this, so the first time that you log into the iTunes store trying to download “Alone” by Heart after hearing it in the CVS below your apartment on the last day before you move out and having been almost moved to tears thinking about how effing awesome this song is when sung by either the originating artists or your college roommate at karaoke, iTunes will make you jump through about 80 different hoops to update your account so that it matches your newly updated bank account and you’ll have to think “How badly do I want this Heart song right now?” Enough to sign into my account online and remember that I had to use my mom’s address instead of my PO box because of some unexplained draconian address regulations that Chase has? (answer: Yes. Of Course). Also, did you think about what might happen when a crane accident makes a building collapse on your street an hour before your movers were due to show up?
Because I hadn’t. I thought Friday was another beautiful day in the neighborhood, but that was because I woke up in New Jersey that day and only found out what had happened when family members started calling me and spurring this conversation: Cristin: Hello? Family: Oh, thank god. I don’t have any family members in the 5 boroughs, which means that geographic urgency is not really something I have to deal with. They have no idea where anything is. I get phone calls about things that are 20 miles away, but I also get away with not having to reassure anyone about bad things happening within striking distance because no one really know what striking distance is. But they all know I lived on 91st street, and that was enough to freak everyone, myself included, out. Some were more concerned than others– I did a preemptive call to my dad to be all “Hey, still breathing, it’s cool” and he said “Good to hear. Listen, we’re having an issue with the turtles.” My dad and stepmom are babysitting their grand-turtles for the summer, and the mechanical failure of their tank filter is apparently more pressing than their only daughter potentially being buried under a pile of rubble. Which is understandable, to a certain degree, because those little bastards can really stink up a place in a matter of hours if the filter decides to strike for better benefits, but still. Multiple former gentlemen friends of mine checked in to make sure everything was fine, giving me that mushy “aw-they-don’t-want-me-dead!” feeling, but I suppose my dad just assumes that I can curse my way out of any situation and that he doesn’t have to worry about me as a result. Maybe they’ve just gotten used to being on Terror Alert Red with me for the last 4 years that I’ve been in the shit, but let’s put a disaster within 2 blocks of the war hero or the rock star and see if they can’t pick up the phone about that one. (On second thought: No, let’s not do that. For many reasons). In any event, I knew that just being Ball Of Stress Cristin on moving day probably wouldn’t even put me in the top 20% of People Having A Bad Day In My Neighborhood on a regular day, but on Friday it was no contest. It shouldn’t take tragedies to make you feel fortunate, but they certainly do a great job of it anyway.
One of my pet peeves is the phrase “only in new york!” because it’s only ever applied to things that truly suck, like the people on the subway who are screaming at nothing and may or may not be planning on stabbing you, or broker’s fees. Like how people are quick to say that rain on your wedding day or having a bird crap on you is good luck, when really that was just made up because everyone got sick of going “Wow. That totally sucks.” Since I’ve been home, though, I hear myself saying “never in new york” for dozens of unimportant things, things like my mom’s request that I hose down the patio furniture or sneezing 4 times in a row and realizing that I might have allergies that I never knew about since I was never around grass or trees long enough for them to pop up. But all of this Fish Out Of Water Goes Back Into Water That She Swam In For 18 Years business that I’ll be exaggerating for the purpose of internet humor for the next 2 months or so has come with an accompanying sense of calm that I’ve been missing for most of this year, one that’s allowed me to do routine things that have become impossibly hard over the last few months (like sleeping, which I’m no longer class valedictorian at). I’m sure all of this will evaporate tomorrow morning when I haul myself out of bed at 6:15 in order to ride a commuter train with way, way too many parents of friends and friends of parents and have to explain that I didn’t MOVE home, I’m just VISITING, I’m not bankrupt or a drug addict or pregnant or anything else that would make me NEED to be with my parents, this was a CHOICE, thankyouverymuch, and one I’m standing by at least until the first one of them starts quoting my brothers’ accolades as recited by my father on a nightly basis at the (lone) town bar. If this is what it takes to make me settle back into myself, though–if it has to be a hammock and NJ Transit and being woken up by Peej stumbling home at 3 every night and the realization that I haven’t grown out of having road rage, it’s just been lying dormant, waiting for me to have to find a parking spot in Ridgewood on a Saturday in order to buy Sex & the City movie tickets for my mom and my aunt– then I’ll take it, no questions asked.
4 Responses to “Hi. I live in new jersey.”
June 2nd, 2008 at 11:07 am
OMG, that crane thing was on your block?? This is why I hate LA news stations. They simply report “A crane has fallen in New York City,” causing me to yell things at the television, like “WHERE in NYC? How about a BOROUGH, for Christ’s sake? A neighborhood, narrow it down, give me something here!” I’m glad that your apartment was unaffected and you are okay
June 2nd, 2008 at 11:49 am
I saw a Virginia license plate the other day that say “NY 4LYFE.” I don’t think it was supposed to be ironic.
I also think it’s funny that there’s probably a “NY 4LIFE” license plate out there that prompted this driver to have an alternate spelling.
June 2nd, 2008 at 3:07 pm
My mom called me when the Staten Island Ferry crashed. I lived in Brooklyn back then and somewhat sleepily explained to her the unlikeliness of me being on a ferry from one island to another at 7 a.m. when I lived on a third, completely separate, island.
June 4th, 2008 at 8:16 am
Baby, we were born to run.