With spring upon us, and barbecue season consequently at hand, I spent the afternoon thinking about neighbors. About how, in suburban locales, people often meet other people who live nearby. And about how those of us who live in bigger cities rarely do.

For example, despite having lived in my new apartment for over three months, I’ve so far met just three of the fifteen or twenty people on my floor; and I’m embarrassed to admit I no longer even remember those three neighbors’ names.

But if the problem is bad in cities, it’s even worse online. Each day, my referrer log racks up a slew of visitors, and – even generously assuming regular visits by friends, colleagues, ex-girlfriends and my mother – I can only account for a startlingly small percentage. In short, dear readers, I have no idea who the hell you are.

So, in a move that’s either inspired in its community-building impulse, or insane in its likelihood of inspiring restraining orders, I’m fixing to change that, by inviting you to come one, come all to the very first Self-Aggrandizement Block Party.

On Tuesday, March 29th, at 9:00pm, I’ll be parking myself in the back booth of B.B. Doyle’s Pub & Restaurant, 302 W. 51st St. at 8th Ave., and I’m hoping you’ll swing by to join me for a drink or three.

I’ll be the guy with a rose in his lapel (who, more conveniently, also looks pretty much identical to his photo). See you there.

Growing up in a California house full of skylights and glass walls, I’m a huge fan of natural light. Which is one of the biggest appeals of my new apartment: with giant windows running along the front of my living room, and along two sides of the bedroom, sun streams in, and I can stare out at the city bustle on the street corner below.

Only recently, however, has it started to dawn on me that a window, by definition, works both ways. In other words, while I can look out, people can look back in as well. Not the people on the street, fortunately, as I’m high enough up to be out of the line of sight of pedestrian traffic, but certainly the lawyers in the huge office building directly across 8th Avenue.

I tend to forget about the lawyers, as, most of the time, they seem to completely forget about me. Working from home, I have the general sense that I could tap-dance naked in front of my window and still not generate much interest.

But, as the lawyers seem to work far too many hours to sustain even the vague semblance of a nightlife, a window-side female invariably causes them to sit up and take notice.

In the last week or two, due to the string of excellent repeat dates, and a slew of equally excellent evenings drinking with close female friends eager to critique my apartment decoration efforts, I’ve had attractive females passing through my apartment more evenings than not.

So by now, at eight o’clock, the lawyers across from me start frequently glancing in my direction, scoping out the evening’s potential for vicarious entertainment. I could, I suppose, draw the blinds (seeing as I’m not one, the contents of this site to the contrary, to derive real-life exhibitionist pleasure), but the evening city view is far too good to ruin for the sake of keeping out occasional stares from overworked drones I’m unlikely to ever actually meet.

Still, given the number of different girls that have passed through, and given the exceedingly unglamorous life I lead the rest of the time, I’m sure they’ve (rightly) determined I’m no ‘new date each night’ Cassanova. Instead, I suspect they’re convinced I’m simply moonlighting as a pimp.

Never one to pass up a good opportunity, I’ll therefore be picking up a set of dry-erase markers and scrawling my phone number on the office-facing window. While my visiting friends don’t seem to mind being part of an ongoing faux-reality-TV show, I’m sure they’d be much happier if it was pay-per-view.

I’m in. And despite having, after two weeks of vagrancy, returned to a spot less than two blocks from where I lived before, it still feels like a different world. I’m reminded of E. B. White’s This is New York, in which he tells the story of a woman who moves five blocks uptown, heads to the butcher shop she’s been frequenting for years, and finds the butcher crying tears of grateful joy: “You’ve come back!” he exclaims.

New York is an odd city like that, a place where, in any given few square blocks, you can find everything you need. Several hundred yards from my old apartment, and I’ve already shopped at a hardware store, a dry cleaners, a drug store and a supermarket other than the ones I primarily used over the last two years.
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Another thing about the new apartment: it has doormen. Which, in the minds of most New Yorkers, is a big plus. I can have packages delivered, screen visitors with a live person rather than an intercom, and generally look swank. But, at some level, contrary to the apparent nature of this site, I’m an intensely private person. Which makes me vaguely distrust the whole idea of doormen; I don’t like someone knowing when I come and go, and with whom.
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Deja vu: Although the bedroom is a different shape, and the closets are slightly repositioned, the apartment is otherwise nearly identical to the first I lived in when I came to New York.
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With the same layout, my old furniture, bought for that first apartment, would have been a perfect fit. Sadly, over two years of intensive roommate use, little of it was in good enough condition to justify carting in. So, once again, it’s back to furniture shopping. And to frequent Bed, Bath & Beyond trips, where they still don’t like people riding in carts on the shopping cart escalator. Apparently, the apartment has come full circle, and so have I.

After several days of packing everything I own into a vast array of small boxes, I’m out of the old apartment (the so-called ‘Gotham Sugar Shack’), and awaiting the lease start of the as-yet-unnamed new. Depending, as ever, upon the kindness of strangers, for the next week I’ll be holed up at 85th and 2nd, in the currently unused NYC pied-‡-terre of my parents’ Palo Alto next-door neighbor.

And while the Upper East Side feels foreign, the apartment itself is a strange bit of deja vu, laid out almost exactly like the one into which I’ll be moving two weeks hence. The main difference is in furnishing: my current collection, having slowly decayed over two rough years of roommate use, largely stayed behind in the move, leaving me nearly furnitureless. The borrowed apartment, on the contrary, is fully decked, with exactly the sort of things I’d buy given more money and better taste – minimalist without being cold, designer without being pretentious.

Still, sitting alone in the apartment does allow me to imagine at least a bit of what my life should likely be once I move in to the new place. And, mainly, I feel oppressed by the quiet. It reminds of returning from sleep-away summer camp, as I did each August; after spending my nights in a bunk-filled cabin, packed like sardines with seven or eight other campers, the solitude seemed unnaturally quiet. The sounds of snoring, of tossing and turning, of the fat kid’s barely audible asthmatic wheeze – all the things that irked me while at camp, that kept me up through nights – now seemed to leave behind gaps once gone. Each year, it would take me a week or two to readjust, to once again come to love the soundless nights achieved by simply closing my door.

But, for those first few nights, the change was jarring – perversely missing the boisterous crowd, I’d wish that, at least for a bit of the evening, I could once again be overwhelmed by the obnoxious sounds of it all.

This time through, though, as strange as the blissful quiet seems, I’m not too concerned about painful withdrawal. If I need a quick dose of loud and obnoxious, there are bars at every New York corner, filled with rowdy drunks all through the night.

In a combination of Thanksgiving family obligation and West Coast business meeting necessity, I’m in California through early next week.

Even three thousand miles from home, though, there seems to be no escape: last night, at Palo Alto’s Rose & Crown pub, I struck up a conversation with the people at the next table, only to discover that they, too, were New Yorkers on a brief Thanksgiving jaunt west, and that they, too, live in Hell’s Kitchen, literally just around the corner from my apartment.

Clearly, I’m much less original than I’d previously thought.

Despite normally being a quick and confident decision maker, when it comes to certain purchases, I am exceedingly over-careful. I blame this on my parents, who, before buying nearly anything, extensively research, unflinchingly field-test and compulsively over-analyze every single possible choice. To wit, they’re currently replacing their bed – what should, traditionally, be a half-afternoon excursion – though something on which they’ve managed to spend the majority of the last few weeks. Having gone so far as to buy and return mattress candidates and to stock up on a vast array of bed-top paddings, by now, they’re doubtless well enough versed to pen a collection of volumes on the particulars of pallet purchasing.

I bring this up in the context of my apartment search, which has so far taken me to look at nearly every single one bedroom in all of New York City. That’s only slightly hyperbolic, as my viewing has taken me to nearly fifty potential replacements. After over-extended consideration, though, I finally managed to suck it up, make up my mind and sign a lease. A veritable bluebird of happiness, the new digs are just around the corner from where I live now. And I couldn’t be more thrilled with them.

Except for one minor problem: my lease here ends, unextendably, December 1st. My lease there begins, inflexibly, December 15th. And while my attempts at negotiating that date forward did yield a free year’s membership in the building’s gym, it didn’t budge the move-in date, by even a few minutes. So, for two weeks, I’ll officially be homeless.

Wary of Franklin’s admonition (that fish and house-guests stink in three days), I’m planning out those two weeks using as many friends’ and family members’ couches as possible, to spread the infliction of myself as thinly as possible. Even then, I’ll doubtless chafe under the peculiarities of jumping into other people’s lives and daily rhythms. My grandmother, for example, who lives down at 1st and 20th, has kindly volunteered her house for as long as necessary; due to her 5:00am wake-up time, however, I suspect my relatively nocturnal ways might literally kill me if I took her up on the extended offer.

So, with suitcase in hand, I’ll be jumping from place to place, convincing myself that I don’t really need the rest of my (soon-to-be) boxed and stored stuff. Which, I’m pretty sure I actually don’t. And, even if I do, there’s nothing like a stretch of urban nomadism to make me appreciate it all (sink-side suction-cup sponge holder! How I’ve missed you!) once I have it back.

After two years of excellent parties and disastrous house-cleaning, my Sugar Shack roommates and I are headed our separate ways, leaving me, once again, on the apartment hunt. Having fallen increasingly in love with the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood, I’m not likely to move far. And, fortunately, there seem to be endless no-fee one-bedrooms recently vacated within just a few blocks of my current 51st and 9th corner.

Less fortunately, it’s clear why most of the former tenants moved out – for one reason or another, each apartment leaves more than a bit to be desired. But, if I learned anything from my two prior moves, it’s that apartment hunting, like so many other things in life, is a numbers game. As I saw literally dozens of places before signing either of my last two leases, I’ve disallowed even fleeting moments of refrigerator-box-in-Central-Park despair until I’ve scoured at least thirty potential apartments this time through.

So, over the next few weeks, during all the spare spaces in my day, I’ll be dropping by pre-war walk-ups and modern elevator buildings, buzzing supers and phoning in management companies. And, in the end, I’m fairly certain the pavement pounding will pay off. I don’t mind the time spent at all, so long as it garners me the sort of apartment every New Yorker’s looking for: one that inspires at least a little bit of hatred in anyone who finds out how little I’m paying for so very much.