Postcard from Brooklyn

The best thing about this summer is that I’m done with my job! People ask me what I do with my time and the answer is simply “nothing.” It’s amazing. I’ve never done this before. It’s amazing to just be and not have to do anything or be a tourist with sights to see. Chilling out for two months is in fact novel to this Californian. It does however feel like a weird thing to be doing at 27. But there are a few things that make it fine: that I’m doing it for a finite amount of time (‘til September), that I have no rent*, and that when it’s over I’ll become a grad student at Harvard. Not bad.

*Footnotes to the first paragraph: “No Rent”? Am I living at home? No. Amazingly I’m living in the nicest place I’ve ever lived in my 4 years in New York. By the grace of God I found myself having beers with the newest member of the Policy Department at work in May at Loreley, one of my favorite beer gardens in the Lower East Side. My mom was there too since she’d announced that she was at Century 21 and wanted beer. So there we were and Megan goes off on this tangent about how she likes the columns at Loreley but the apartment she’s currently in has columns twice as big, and then how she’s got great apartment karma and has lived in all these amazing apartments in New York without ever paying more than $400. Megan’s incredibly nice and has this magnetic personality that you don’t run into much. It’s not hard to imagine that she makes incredibly nice impressions on people that result in this karma. Luckily I have good people karma. So when she got to the part about how she’d re-established contact with distant relatives who’d been bought out of this amazing apartment that’s slated for eventual demolition that she was now living in following their departure and that she was actually kind of lonely there since there weren’t many people left in the building, I volunteered that my Park Slope brownstone had just been sold and (with a bit of my Mom’s prodding) asked her if she wanted a roommate for the July and August. And her response? “Totally!” “What?” “Yeah, totally!” And so that’s how I ended up living in a 1500+ square foot loft condo conversion in the former Spalding Factory directly overlooking the Atlantic Yards in the footprint of the planned/future Brooklyn Nets development. It’s such a non-category in the New York living experience that I’m sure Malcolm Gladwell would gladly write about us if he’d ever heard about us.

 

This Eminent Domain land (as I like to call it) is quite the ironic place to be living right before going to graduate school for Urban Planning and after two years serving as land use policy analyst to New York City’s second highest citywide elected official. Although he doesn’t know it, Daniel Goldstein’s now my neighbor two doors down. Oh, and I have central air and chrome appliances. They’re pretty. I’m now sitting in the swing in the living room blogging about this (a funny spot considering that I proudly blogged in the backyard last summer and even photographed it—now I’m indecent so I’ll spare you). Every so often I daydream about co-hosting a giant party with Megan on the roof with live bands called “Rock the Yards.” I’ve made a few preparations, such as taking pictures of the building from the train yards themselves which are usually left open. So I took some pictures that I intended to use for invites. In the meantime I posted them to Flickr, and was immediately befriended by such lovely Brooklynites as “No Land Grab” and “F-Trainer.” ‘Til then it’s tame wine parties in a loft and on our roof both too big to fill ... punctuated by a lot of sleep.

 

So what exactly do I do with all this time? Well, I do have a few stated goals. Read, go the gym, find an apartment in Cambridge/Sommerville, fix my bike, go to museums, see the some new neighborhoods in town. I’m also considering rejoining the crazy Park Slope Food Co-op for a month so I can make eccentric fruit salads and just maybe learn how to cook. So far I’ve delivered on the reading but not the gym. I finally finished Kenji Yoshino’s book Covering (highly recommended to all), and earlier this week read Augusten Burroughs’ Running with Scissors, and Magical Thinking. I’ll join the chorus on RwS re wondering how the hell they’re going to turn this into a movie. Two weeks ago I started and immediately dropped both The Devil Wears Prada and Max Barry’s Syrup—Galeet's and Yana’s faults respectively ;). Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities is intriguing to us map/city freaks but I’m not sure I’d recommend it since it’s a bit obscure even to map nerds. Today I ordered books by David Rakoff and Sarah Vowell. And last week I finally started George Chauncey’s Gay New York. I’ve been meaning to read it for almost the whole time I’ve been in New York. In fact I bet Meghan doesn’t even remember loaning it to me the year she and Josh moved to Brooklyn from Jersey City. They’ve now left Brooklyn and moved back to Chicago. She had it from the core back at the University of Chicago. It crossed my mind that in my closeted days back then that I might have actually opted not to take the core sequence she took out of fear of feeling weird when reading a gay text in a discussion oriented class. It’s a weird thought especially considering that one of the reasons I liked the second half of Magical Thinking is precisely because Burroughs spends so many chapters describing how deeply in love he is with his partner Dennis. We gay twenty-somethings in New York really don’t have many role models in successful long committed relationships. There are several reasons for this: such as being in a relationship can easily translate to being a homebody when so much of the crazy New York life takes place in public places, or that there are so many dating options out there. The one gay couple I know my age here that’s been together for 6 years have I think finally broken up for the last time. Perhaps the longterm relationships come in our 30s? Or maybe just when we’ve left New York?

This leads in well to what’s really eating up all my time. I finished my job and thought to myself that I have about eight weeks, wouldn’t a summer boyfriend be great? Bad idea. Despite my optimism that I could somehow find an instaboyfriend, online dating is a black hole for my free time, and all the good contenders have big jobs that make them busy all the time.

 

So that leaves me in the murky waters of either becoming friends with those few folks after a nice date or two or being thrown to the rather vast hookup crowd that I’ve always avoided. This logical proof didn’t somehow stop me from going on a number of first dates. I'm not entirely sure why I went on them since there's no time to develop a relationship with these people. But I like meeting new people. I think I'm a people junkie.

The most notable/weird date in my mind was actually a closeted guy I met. I thought maybe I could be a good influence to this 25 year old hasid who wrote me. He immediately called when he learned that I was at least somewhat observant growing up (we did Shabbat every week and I know what a shidduch is). His parents are non-religious Russian immigrants, and he’d become religious by his own accord, gone to Yeshiva in Crown Heights, had an arranged marriage, had a kid who’s now 3, since gotten divorced and become his kid’s primary guardian, and is apparently gay. He’d never been to Park Slope despite being a Brooklyn native. We had coffee at the Tea Lounge. He was clearly uncomfortable there. So we ended up sitting by the door where it wasn’t possible for other people to see us. With his full beard, after asking me if I liked Matisyahu (which I don't -- as if he were somehow emblematic of our one pop culture overlap), he went on to tell me he made himself enjoy having sex with his ex-wife who he otherwise freely described as immature and psychotic, and took part in a group called “Jonah” (an acronym for "Jews Offering New Alternatives to Homosexuality") where young hasids who suspected they might be gay learned to “channel” their sexual desires away from members of the same sex. I made a mental note that I'd never heard new-agey words like "channel" used to mean intentional suppression of sexuality. He then went on to tell me how less religious Jews like me are unknowledgeable and don’t truly experience our Judaism and that I should seek out various Chabad rabbis out at Harvard and Berkeley.

It’s as if meeting the hasidic gay guy were some sort of proselytizing derby: I to let him think it was ok to be gay, and he to tell me that I should really be more Jewish. Maybe I shouldn’t have presumed he’d want to meet someone online as a stepping stone to coming out, because I certainly wasn’t looking for someone like him to tell me I should be more religious. After all this he wrote me a text message the next day saying how great it was to meet me and that we should do it again. All told I thought our meeting was pretty excruciating. Clearly not friendship potential. I’d like to be able to help him but I just didn’t connect with him substantially enough to feel interested enough in taking him on as any sort of project.

Short of finding a boyfriend, I decided to theme a mix for one. In June I joined the International Mixtape Project after DailyCandy wrote about it. It’s an international list where you are randomly assigned someone on the list, and someone else is randomly assigned with you and you both send and receive a mix once a month. I just got mine for July from someone in England. And my August one, which goes to some girl in Virginia I’ve decided to call my “Summer Boys mix” – it’s an indie mix where every track includes the word “boy” somewhere – stuff like: “I wish you were my Boyfriend” by the Magnetic Fields, “The Boy who Never Lied” by Ultrasport, “Sexy Boy” by Air, and “Music is my Boyfriend” by the Hidden Cameras. It’s cute and actually pretty good. So is the mix I made last month which all the friends I visited in trips to Chicago and Philadelphia now hold copies of it that, I'm told, they adore. And so I make an offer to anyone who’s made it this far in this post. Well actually an offer and a request. The offer is a mix – send me a SASE (with at least $1.20 on it) and I’ll send you a mix. And the request is that I’d like this to be Invite-Jesse-To-Lunch-With-You month. I think it’d be fun. I could see where you all work now that I’m soon to be leaving New York. Also if you manage to invite me to lunch and request your mix in tandem, you can skip the SASE. And if I get my shit together and join the co-op let’s do a dinner at the loft.

 

Photo Key: Silkscreening T-shirts at the SPACE1026 in Philly (I got many t-shirts out of this.. they rock). The "pretty" appliances at the loft. The loft building from the Atlantic Yards. Drit and I on the roof. Sunset on the roof. Brett and Emilie at their wedding in Oak Brook (Jordan went too; Annika was my date and host in Naperville; I also brunched with Brette G on that trip--my third to Chicago this summer following my 5th college reunion and Misha's graduation from Northwestern). Alison in our swing. Close up of Maurice on the roof. Erica (who just returned from 2 years of Peace Corps on an electricity-less Central Pacific sub-island of Kiribati) and Louisa on the roof after sunset (the three of us went to high school together in SF). An art-deco fire dept I liked in Red Hook near the Brooklyn entrance to the Battery tunnel.