Day Before Yesterday's Post

Yesterday, Feb 1, a day after vowing to post every day, I skipped. Didn't mean to but I did. Fell asleep with the darn computer in the bed. Here's what I would've written - or part of what I'd written - if I hadn't! I was determined to finish this quickly so that Feb. 1 would still be yesterday when I posted, but I didn't make it. So. This is now the day before yesterday's post.

The first thing to say is: I'm in dazzling, insane New York, where I flew up yesterday for a job interview that took place today.

So yesterday, Monday Feb 1, I had gotten up at 4 am, flown to NYC, taken a bus and the subway and then walked myself and my luggage for an hour all over the Lower East Side (bad google map directions + "I can't buy an iphone yet" cheapness + "I don't need to buy a map" stubborness) before I found my destination - 41 Division Street, a skinny banged-up grey door in the heart of Chinatown. My host, K, who owns the 4th floor loft I had rented a room in for $55 a night via airbnb.com, told me to take the freight elevator to the left of the door - hooray, my heart delighted, no more suitcase hauling! - but a fat iron padlock on its bars mocked my hopes.

I swung stairway door (never locked) and stepped onto a dirty patch of floor that reads "Meyer & Vesele" in blue-on-white octagonal tile, from a time when others made their lives and livings here. A couple stood on the narrow stairs, arguing in Chinese. They let me maneuver around them, as I reached the 2nd floor, a different woman (where did she come from?) pushed past me and into another unlocked door on the 2nd floor landing. The room she slipped into was bright, industrial-looking - the upstairs of the market below, perhaps - and On the other side of the landing, cigarette smoke seeped out from under a mesh metal door. I looked through the door. I think jumped. Seamless rows of wide, black-edged computer screens with Chinese teens in front of them, all gaming or on email. A Chinese underground gaming cafe (minus the coffee, plus the cigarette smoke), completely invisible from anywhere but this tiny landing - but clearly not hurting for business. Onward up the stairs. I'm greeted in Loft 4A by K and his sweet dog R, an English white lab with a pit-bull-wide head and a tail that thumps against the wall when I pet him.

And now I'm in a world of clean white walls, raw pine desks, exposed brick & pipe, previously expensive second-hand sofas, a flatscreen TV, and a tall white guy with tousled brown hair who 2 decades ago could have been drinking a pitcher at Naples pizzeria after intramural lacrosse while my girlfriends and I huddled at the next table to deconstruct late-'80s sexual culture at Yale. He says R's coat is not so clean now, but in the summer he swims every day. I ask where R swims, wondering if the Hudson is safe - or maybe it's a nearby swimming pool. "The Hamptons," says K, in a funny flat way that says, "Don't ask me about my place in the Hamptons". He changes the subject. I am oddly relieved.

More tomorrow (which is, by now, yesterday...)