Over my last few months absence, paying bills has apparently been a rather low priority item for my roommates. As a result, I returned to New York to find our apartment with no telephone service, no internet access, no cable, and no electricity. Well, actually, yes electricity, but only because I was able to catch the people from Con Edison on Friday morning just as they were turning it off.

Further, it seems part of the flushing mechanism in our toilet broke several weeks back, and instead of calling the landlord to have it fixed, they’ve simply been reaching in to the tank to manually lift that little rubber stopper at the bottom.

It’s been a few years since I’ve had roommates, and I’m beginning to remember why.

Went down to the Meatpacking district today to eat lunch at Pastis. On the way back, I passed a man holding an elaborate phone conversation on a banana placed to his ear. Ah, New York City, it’s good to be home.

I vividly remember, from when I was growing up, the feeling of returning home each summer at sleepaway camp to a bedroom all my own – the sense of vague uneasiness in a space so quiet, so unsharedly still. I felt a twinge of that again this morning, after dropping my colleague Yoav at the airport and returning to our LA corporate housing. For the first time in a month and a half, I had the place all to myself – with my colleagues off at various film festivals, I’m no longer sharing the apartment, the car, nor our workplace. And while the silence is a bit odd, it’s also deeply relaxing. I can lose myself in daydreaming. I can once again hear myself think.

Earlier today, in a bout of productivity, I decided to walk up and down 9th Ave a few blocks in each direction from my apartment, collecting menus from restaurants that deliver. Over a span of four blocks, I collected 23 menus. I’ll never be leaving the house again.

I’ve made it across to the new apartment, unpacked at least the majority of my boxed worldly possessions, and can now get down to business (and blogging). Lots to talk about, from Thanksgiving break escapades to moving misadventures. Come tomorrow, I should be back on a daily schedule.

In the past year that I’ve lived in my current apartment, nearly every single person coming to visit has cracked a joke about the hallway. Its not just that the hallway is bad – which it is – but rather that it also seems remarkably out of place in a building that is otherwise reasonably upscale.

Entering the building, for example, one passes through a two story high lobby, tastefully decorated with large pieces of Asian art. Then into one of the elevators, marble-floored and oak-walled. Upon the doors opening onto the 24th floor, however, one is suddenly transported from New York luxury building to mid-’70s Howard Johnson: faux-bamboo wallpaper, quasi-psychedelic orange/brown carpeting, and bizarrely overwrought and underlit lighting fixtures.

Sensitive to this issue, the building’s management has been gradually upgrading the halls – jumping ahead twenty years from ’70s HoJo to what strikes me as more of a mid-’90s Holliday Inn. About six of the floors have been converted, and so far as I can tell, there isn’t much rhyme or reason to the order in which they’ve been tackled, so I’m not sure to what I can attribute the luck of my floor being the latest endeavor.

Normally, I suppose, I would be excited at the upgrade. But as I’m only in the building for another few weeks, I don’t suspect I’ll get much time to enjoy the improvements. Instead, I simply get the intensive ongoing construction – tearing out the carpet, wallpaper and fixtures, re-wiring the lighting, adding a drop ceiling and wood moldings, re-painting, re-carpeting and re-wallpapering, and so on. If I’m working from home for the day (as I usually do a few times a week), I’m trapped in my apartment by the piles and piles of construction equipment and materials, serenaded by the sound of power tools and loud Springsteen-esque rock in various foreign languages. In the evenings, after everything has been cleared out, the entire hallway remains covered with a fine, asbestos-like dust of indiscriminate origin.

On the plus side, however, that same dust makes most of my shoes remarkably slippery on marble flooring, allowing me to skate out of the elevator, across the lobby, and onto the street with enough casually-effortless aplomb to make Nancy Kerrigan proud.

After staying out way too late on a date last night, salsa dancing at a little club on the Lower East Side, I woke up this morning with a sore throat, a slight fever, and a general case of the I-don’t-want-to-leave-my-apartment blaahs.

So, with that in mind, and with my pending move cross-town to Hell’s Kitchen only about a month off, I spent most of today taking everything I own off of shelves and out of closets and cabinets, and then putting everything back in place, in an attempt to weed out the random items that clutter my home despite the fact that I’ll never, ever use them again.

The pile I’ve accumulated in the center of my living room now contains such gems as a circa 1997 cell phone (approximate weight, 32 pounds), a Gap sweater vest (also, apparently, circa 1997, as I don’t believe I’ve seen one worn since – ah, if only I still had a pair of carpenter jeans to complete the quasi-retro look), and the utterly fascinating read Advanced Computational Techniques in Biological Statistics.

Yessir, I may still feel stick as a dog, but now I’m also brimming with the joy of good-Samaritan-ness, as I’ll be giving that pile away and helping people! Whoo boy will some homeless guy be lucky to get his hands on that stat textbook! Even better, this being New York (where even McDonalds delivers), apparently I don’t even have to leave my home to make the donation. Come Monday morning, some poor sap from Goodwill will be coming to my apartment to cart all those gems away.

But that’s just the kind of guy I am: helping to change the world, one act of lazy indifference that, being reasonably borderline in terms of global karmic impact, might be mistakenly construed as loving kindness at a time.