I find it pretty difficult to find things near me, and finding things near enough to me is hard too. Google Maps doesn't take into account one's inability to drive, and thus its estimation of relative proximity is for shit, and my own knowledge of subway stops etc is not what it could be, and so I end up just picking whatever place google maps shows me first, and saying to myself OK FINE LET'S GO THERE. So I ended up in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, this afternoon. I have never been that south in Brooklyn, so I was a little nervous what I'd find when surfacing from the subway pit at 86th Street. It was actually not too bad at all, though. Not where I'd want to live, but not scary. And I even had a nice little milkshake, at a place Zagat's deigned to notice, where the old lady at the cash register had some kind of funny accent (British? a long-standing faux British accent?) and called everyone, even me, darling. Then I went to find a Staples to buy a print cartridge, out where I thought it would be nice, because it seemed relatively close to Prospect Park on the map. Ohhhh, it was not nice. I saw a dead cat. And there were other ways it was not nice.

And now I am in my apartment, my printer cartridge refuses to work and I can't figure out why, my back is killing me from I don't know what, apparently I tense every muscle I have in my neck/shoulders. I still very badly want to go home.
I have this plan now to move by September to some nice brownstone, but that sounds like a hard plan. Tomorrow seems hard, too, because I have to leave early to find a fax and copy place, and I have to go to a placement fair in the afternoon where I will try to talk to a lot of people but not get hired. It all has gotten to be such a mess. And it doesn't straighten out at all. I was thinking mornings here are pretty bad, but afternoons and evenings are too.

I try to figure out what is so wrong about here, but I suppose the real question to me is how do people like it here? There's money, yes, that helps, you can get a lot of things here with that but then also...I don't know. There's the idea that this is the most important, or one of the most important, places in the world. People want to be in the middle of that. People are determined to stick it out here, to "make it" whatever that means. To show they're important and have a place? They have a place because they fought really hard for it? I am babbling now probably, and really I hate reading any of my blog entries anymore, but there's nothing else in me to write right now.
Anyway, I don't feel like I need to get my sense of self-worth from where I am. Except that that's ridiculous, because that's what we do. But I just want where I live to not stink as much, and to not be as difficult. New York is so difficult. I struggle and struggle and I don't even know what I'm aiming at here. I guess what I'd wanted was to feel like a woman who can take care of herself wherever, and make the most of things...and the idea of city life, with the nice places to go and the culture, that's a neat idea, but I guess I don't think there's any center to the idea...you can find that city life here because people believe in it and fight hard to maintain/achieve it, but culture? You can find that anywhere and make it anywhere. There is a lot here, I know, but not all of everything and so I feel I've been oversold.
I don't think New York sucks, but every time I'm here I'm really disturbed about its...ego or something, really disturbed by everyone's insistence on the realness of the New York myth, the greatness, because that widespread insistence seems like all that makes it at all real....but then, it is real, right? Not if you aren't one of the people insisting on it, maybe? So, that's good and babbley. I really ought to quit now.

I saw Bebe Neuwirth (sp?) I am pretty sure, at the R stop somewhere in Manhattan today. Yes, I was in Bay Ridge, AND Manhattan. I saw Bebe Neuwirth AND a dead cat. Quite a time. She looked very pale, stylish, but kind of old. She looked uncomfortable. To be fair, subway stations are uncomfortable.