Monday email update

An email I wrote to a friend recently:

My update is that I'm still living on Prospect (obvs), although with the lack of privacy and having to deal with my loser rommates, I don't know if I would call it living. I won't move out of there a minute too soon. Beth and I have pushed back to spring, but I'm going to look casually through the winter in case something good opens up. Thanksgiving was good, I stuffed myself to the gills with food and drink for 48 hrs straight, which took the rest of the weekend to recover from. My job sucks ass, I hate it more each week and, like my current living situation, will also not end a minute too soon. This semester has been easy, but I expect next semester to be a big pain, God willing it will be my last one and I can start to move on from the limbo I've been in the last two years.

I hope I don't sound super negative, all this stuff is par for the course and on a day-to-day basis I feel good. On top of all of that I think my ass is getting bigger and I'm scared it will turn into my mother's and my shopping addiction has made me broke, broke, broke. But I guess it's all about what you choose to focus on and what actions you take. So I like to wrap all of this up in a bundle and focus on the fact that changes are around the bend. I'm sure at some point I will look back on this time as being "simple" when all I had to worry about was fitting in my jeans and the only thing I had to sacrifice to pay my rent was a new dress that I don't need because I already have 35 black dresses.

I'll laud how lucky I was to have such under market rent, how close Beth and I were, how weed was plentiful and so was booze. I'll think of the roommates as "quirky" and "different" rather than half-retarded and hopeless. I might even laugh at the fact that I quit going to my Bodega because the owner creeped me out and wouldn't quit hitting on me. That could be funny someday, right? I'll probably remember him as a kindly father figure who just wanted to talk -- or maybe not. There will be no seedy underbelly to the neighborhood in my memories. Alex will not have killed himself by taking a dive off of the Brooklyn Bridge a week after I saw him last (obviously unaware that it would be the last time we said good-bye), Mikey will not have been such a drug addleded romantic, Robert will be a good guy I let slip through my fingers, and he and Megan will have been happy together. And I'll probably count myself lucky that I had a good, resume building job while I was in school that allowed me a relatively flexible schedule.

I wonder if our sugar coated memories of the past are some sort of primoridal survival technique. If we consciously let all of the fears and disappointmens build up, could we die from them? IDK.