A few months back, while prepping for yet another move, i couldn't sleep. so staring at the dark ceiling, i did a count of of how many different places i've lived. here it is...
- Parent's house (MGM)
- Nerd boarding school (ASMS)
- Freshman dorm (Paty)
- Co-op apartment (HSV)
- Sophomore dorm (New Hall)
- 2nd Co-Op Apartment (HSV, again)
- Junior dorm (New Hall, new posters)
- Senior apartment (Bryce Lawn)
- Study abroad (Uni Klagenfurt)
- B-school apartment (Reed St)
- Internship apartment (Xavier)
- 1st grown-up apartment (Clermont)
- 1st house (Fulton)
- Asia ex-pat apartment (Orchard Scotts)
- 1st NY apartment (Nyack)
- 2nd NY apartment (Swashington)
- 3rd (favorite) NY apartment (Tarrytown)
- Current apartment (CT)
Despite the seemingly constant moving, there's a relevant song that i keep coming back to.
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We just moved a few months ago. Not sure who had a harder time with it - me or my daughter. After thinking we had found the town/area we wanted to buy / settled down (Hudson Valley), jobs took us in a different direction - still int the tri-state area, but with traffic, etc - in a completely different part. Rather than buying, we got an apartment - location convenient - so we could get a feel for the area. It's just far/near enough to be new. So all the previously established advantages of local friends, community, etc is mostly out the door. We're starting from scratch, and now have less time to build anything back up (having a kid does has that effect, said every parent, ever)
Now as a family, we continue to go back and forth between staying in the area (love the culture/diversity, great job market, but damn it's expensive AND we're far from family/support network) OR packing up and moving somewhere else (the opposite - cheaper and potentially closer to family). But we keep kicking the can down the road. The recent (local) move from the Hudson Valley to CT didn't help tho - going from somewhere we know/love to...something
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So here's a fun aside - as an EX of some of the earlier above points (written on a long train ride, standing room only).
This past Sunday we drove ~45 min down to Brooklyn - surprisingly no traffic, likely bc of no bridge construction the BQE for the holiday weekend - to visit another ex-coworker (French) friend + his rockstar (Spanish) wife ...and finally meet their 1.5 year old daughter before they move (back) to Spain. There's an anchor baby/chain migration joke somewhere in there.
We walked along the waterfront and found a hidden playground for our kids to go down big slides, climb ladders, stomp in the sand, and collect bamboo sticks. My kid saw a nice (familiar looking?) lady with her kids. Said lady had sand buckets, so naturally mine asked if she could play with one. She said 'please' and 'thank you.'
Before leaving, we wanted a photo of our group - since no idea when we'll see our friends again - so asked the husband of nice sand bucket lady. The dad was pretty good at making faces and getting both our kids to (mostly) look at the camera.
After we said our goodbyes, we drove across the Brooklyn Bridge and up the FDR to the Upper East Side for lunch with my wife's Jewish Godmother. My kid bought her $12 pink daisy's from a Food Emporium on the ground floor of a nearby Trump brand apartment building (the guys name is all over the place). I bought 4-cheese mashed potato packets for our Thursday post-Thanksgiving office potluck (as that's when my startup's counterparts from Japan are visiting). After lunch, decaf and a chocolate babka was served.
Later that night, i got text from our Brooklyn friends. Turns out the lady is an actress on a number of shows/movies we like, and her husband (who took the picture) is plays a young Jim Gordon on television. We didn't know at the time, nor did we care, and are especially glad we didn't interrupt their family day with celeb BS. But the picture turned out pretty good.
There's a similar (funnier) LGA → MCO story where my better half punked* the airline pilot asking us to take a jetbridge photo of him + the soon-to-be Ant Man, while Mr. Lang just wanted to be left alone with his family + pick up his luggage gateside.
*She instead took a selfie...bc my wife is awesome.
That shit happens all the time here. But man it's expensive!
Who knows, maybe I'll stand behind Henry Golding in the hot dog line at a Montgomery Biscuits game and we can just move home.
Imperius Rex, indeed.
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