My first few months in New York were filled with long nights on friends’ couches, anxious phone calls to shady realty agents, and an uncertainty about the viability of finding a place to live. It was also filled with a handful of blog posts.
Five months have passed between this post and the last. I can imagine readers of this blog could have only come to one conclusion: my apartment-hunting venture was a failure, my friends kicked me out, and I’ve wound up sleeping in subway stations using a powerless laptop as a pillow. Despite how many interesting stories that turn of events would have produced, I can assure you that that is not the case. Jenn and I are living comfortably in a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, just south of Prospect Park. That fact alone is somewhat of an anecdote.
For some time, Jenn and I were subleasing a bedroom in an apartment in Queens while trading progressively less-courteous e-mails with a realty agent about a certain place that was possibly definitely ours. Then, out of the blue, Jenn received a message from a college friend of hers. That friend had been living in Brooklyn with her boyfriend, but they were moving to Rwanda and–familiar with our situation–offered that we take over her lease. The unusual fact that they were gallivanting off to Africa was overshadowed by the surprising fact that they were offering a better place than we were hoping for, at the exact time we needed it, for less than we thought we had to pay. With much gratitude, we had arranged to move in the day before Halloween. Hurricane Sandy pushed that back another day, interrupting our holiday plans, though a costume cruise didn’t seem like such a good idea anymore.
A miraculous offer. An end to a search. A historic hurricane. How could I not motivate myself to write for five months?
Simply, I thought I had peaked. My last post–a psuedo-sociological observation inspired by my girlfriend in style and subject matter–was a home run. It was deeply personal and broadly relevant. It also made everything came before it look like trash. Any time I had a slight inclination to write a follow-up post, I quickly dismissed it on the idea that it would be nothing more than a glorified status update. As I settled into my new abode, I grew comfortable not writing.
Eventually I admitted to myself that I can’t just sit around and wait for another awe-inspiring idea. They don’t just appear. I have to throw a few mediocre posts out, I have to just keep working it, until, one day I’ll find myself writing another home run. That’s why they call it creativity, because you actually have to work at creating something.
I could probably expand this idea of working hard and whatnot into a broadly-relevant life lesson, but I’m still easing my way out of my lazy phase and this looks long enough already.
More than that, I’ve already decided that this will be one of those mediocre posts I need to just throw out.
This is what else I “create” when I’m not busy writing.
Young Man Went East 