Living Solo

Discoveries I've made since living alone:

• I actually can kill spiders, given a heavy enough shoe that can be attached to the end of my swiffer. 
• I'm messy. That will shock no one I suppose, but I always thought I was just messy when I only had small spaces to work with (like my bedroom or my desk). Turns out the messyness just expands to fill the space. 
• I might not like the color green as much as I thought I did. I have a LOT of green stuff. 
• It becomes really easy to leave doors open when no one else is around...bedroom doors, bathroom doors...there's no one to separate from!
• I love yogurt and cheerios, together. That's been my dinner for the past four days. Still trying to get around to unpacking my kitchen.
• I need to take more pictures (I have so few to put up in my apartment) but I now have a lot less to take pictures of - I'm not going to take pictures of myself sitting on the couch, reading on my bed, standing in the kitchen....the solo apartment doesn't lend itself to exciting photographic remembrances. 
• I cannot tolerate sleeping in the heat. If I were on a jury and a murderer testified that he lost his temper because his bedroom was hot and that's why he killed the woman who cut him off on his way to work....I'd let him off.
  

The New Place and Some Old Places

Two of my favorite places in the world are Walden Pond (Concord, MA) and Central Park (NYC). My new apartment is nowhere near as cool as either of those places. BUT, I think there are some similarities.

• When Henry David Thoreau went to Walden Pond, he "wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if (he) could not learn what it had to teach." I came to my apartment for sort of less profound, but similar reasons. I was ready to be on my own. I aslo needed some separation from my parents, which apparently Thoreau did not - he still had his mother do his laundry.

• Thoreau was not completely isolated at Walden Pond, but he clearly had a lot of time on his hands to think...he wrote a 300 page book with chapters like "The Bean Field", "Solitude" and "Brute Neighbors". Since I've started living here, I've written in my journal almost every day. And in fact, one day I wrote about how much I like being alone (solitude) and yesterday I wrote about my neighbors! I don't plan on writing anything about a bean field.

• I live by Liberty Park, which has a pond. 

• It's a little harder to show similarities between my new place and Central Park. There's actually just one thing that reminds me of it, and that is the squirrel. When I went to Central Park I remember being really surprised by how many squirrels there were, and how they didn't seem to be afraid of anything, humans or otherwise. Well outside my living room window lives the most obnoxious squirrel in the world. Every morning I wake up to him squeaking away for no apparent reason. It took me awhile to find him, but when I did he seemed to be squeaking right at my neighbor, then he went to another tree and was squeaking at some bird, and on and on. I had no idea squirrels could be obnoxious, I don't even think I knew they could really make noise. But now....well I never understood the point of BB guns.