i live here now

Posting has been scarce this week due to moving. And the purchasing of furniture, and the assembly--with much cursing--of furniture, and the unpacking and arranging of books, and the imminent painting of walls, and the stocking of the kitchen (the latter requiring trips to Jackson Heights et al). Housed! At last. I'm sharing a lovely brownstone on this block--I won't tell which one; it's not foregrounded--with two other women, and a feminist nonprofit in the basement. We're equidistant from the food co-op, the subway, and the Y; very close to the local branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, and even closer to several of my favourite 5th avenue bars, a weekly farmer's market, and, dangerously, the best secondhand bookshop in this part of town. I'm delighted to have finally found a place--this long-nourished fantasy of a quiet room perched up in a brownstone, looking out onto a leafy Brooklyn street, has come true.

The purchase of furniture (didn't have any before; just clothes and books, and a few Uzbek textiles, plus the odd Burmese vase or Turkish miniature....) led to an episode of neurosis that greatly amused my friends. I've always been in hand-me-down mode, both in childhood and in these adult years of college, travel, and grad school penury--living in furnished rented rooms or college housing, with the occasional secondhand bookshelf or decrepit side table scavenged from a streetcorner for temporary purposes, but really nothing that couldn't be packed up and moved across an ocean at short notice. This week, for the first time in my life, I bought a room's worth of furniture, and promptly freaked out about it (and worse, the expense of having stuff delivered and moved--it's hard to get my head around the fact that no, it's not an unreasonable extravagance to hire a man with a van, instead of hauling suitcases and boxes one by one via subway.) My instinct was, as ever, to scrounge used stuff off craigslist or better yet, hit the streets the night before garbage collection day and see what I could carry home. Instead, I took a deep breath and went to IKEA.

"You're middle-class now!" said SF, and I suppose it's true, or will be once the first paycheck rolls around. But it's not just the money that is strange (although I'm certainly not used to spending a few hundred dollars in one fell swoop on anything other than an international plane ticket). It's the physicality of owning all this damn stuff: a desk, a bed, lamps, a chair, bookshelves. It implies a certain solidity, an end to my cherished peripatetic lifestyle, the twenty different rooms I've lived in over the last ten years. For all that I've claimed to pine for rootedness, some obstinate part of me wants to keep the escape valve open, to know that there's nothing holding me down that can't be thrown in a suitcase and carried away. (Wisely, SF interjects: "You can always just sell the furniture, or throw it away!" Of course, she's right.) In the end, I resisted the urge to scrounge anything from the sidewalk, leaving this month's haul of dilapidated desks and bureaus to other, more needful scavengers. With one exception--a copy of Adam Gopnik's Paris to the Moon, left in a giveaway books pile on a stoop on 6th Avenue, and a source of laughter and late-night emails to dear S. all week.

Oh, and I did buy my secondhand bed via craigslist, and that turned out to be serendipity in action--the stranger I purchased it from, as I discovered after rapidly recognizing the photographs on his wall as Middle Eastern in origin, was moving to Cairo--where he will no doubt encounter the host of my friends who have relocated to Misr since we finished the MPhil. And someday I too will sell the bed, in preparation for another journey across the ocean. I'm sure of it.