Brooklyn recycling, Spanish garbage

I have lived in a studio apartment on Sterling Place in Crown Heights for two years, almost to the day.

Two blocks away is a relatively new, empty building and a Union Market is going to open there. The big, beautifully designed window coverings with 3 feet tall peaches told me this.

It's been "going to open" there for some amount of time greater than two years almost to the day.

Now logically, I know there isn't going to be a Union Market. If I'm being honest with myself, I knew there was never going to be one. I'm not sure Union Market was even involved in the manufacturing of the very nicely artworked window wraps. One of the slicker real estate brokers in Brooklyn must have done a inspired cost vs benefit analysis and had them printed special order from a Kinkos. It turns out you don't actually have to produce the grocery store, it's enough to promise it for multiple years to the car-less, knee-pain-having prospective apartment hunters looking at the grocery store situation around an affordable apartment and sadly realizing they were in one of the fabled voids in between proper options in the outer boroughs. In the end, it's a bodega life for us, and this is, of course, totally fine. At this point my conscious brain realizes it will never appear, this oasis in desert. But a tiny part of me holds out hope.

Having a good grocery store nearby is pretty ideal if you cook, like actually cook, the kind with frozen leftovers in Tupperware labeled with the date in dry erase markers. The kind of cooking that you end up doing because you stopped getting your $5/month allowance the moment you were old enough to get a job. I'm not saying that all people who's parents randomly gave them money into their 20s are bad but I have not met one single person in the city whose parents didn't financially support them who wasn't fucking awesome. It's something I'm proud of, especially now that I'm more or less on the other end. I can't wait to not give my future kids money, even if I have it. Especially if I have it. I’m gonna be real mean about it.

I've been watching a pretty terrible Spanish show called Valeria that's like a slightly updated Sex and the City with the most unlikeable characters I've ever come across. They are all selfish, irrational, and annoying. I can't stop watching it. I've just been enjoying popping open a seltzer and absolutely hating these women. I don't like what it might be saying about me, that I apparently derive some amount of pleasure from hate(rat)ing. Hatred has always been so clear to me, rare, but extremely clear when it happens. I don't know of any other emotion that I feel I can reliably identify. Most of the time I can't assign a name to an emotional state on the spot. I have answered the question "how are you" with "meh" at least 80% of the times I've been asked.

Last week I tried two new things. Not a record by any means, but I’d be lying if I said I averaged more than a quarter of a new experience a month since March 2020.

One was Equinox. It is the most beautiful location for the most beautiful people in the world to pay to stay that way. It was a delicately floral-scented yuppie labyrinth, meticulously cleaned rooms in which people move their bodies in weird ways to not get fat, and if their heart is a little healthier afterwards too then that’s fine. I don't belong to Equinox, financially or otherwise, but I toootally get it. It's like if our cave man ancestors are gonna be horrified by the fact that we do HIIT workouts just so our asses look slightly more awesome why not do them in a place with Kiehl's products in the bathroom? Oh, the cost is why not? Huh. Equinox, as I suspected, is just a broker for the devil.

I do have a friend who's been trying it on for size. We met for a class, which I thoroughly enjoyed, mostly because the instructor's name was Clayton or Braydon or Blaxton or something and he was… not enthusiastic to excess. That's a rarity, finding someone to lead a workout class and not make you want to slam your head into a wall for all the affirmations screamed into your poor red sweaty face. I like when they limit their instructions to how to do the exercises. I happen to believe in myself most days, but even if I didn't, do you think that yelling at me that I should over a club remix of Lizzo would be the thing that sealed it?

The other thing I tried was nonalcoholic beer. We posted up (I will never be able to hear the phrase "posted up" and not think of Dennis Reynolds)(frankly I  will never be able to hear anything without thinking about a scene from Always Sunny, The Office, Gilmore Girls or 30 Rock. It's a goddamn first world affliction and I’m yes, I’m properly ashamed) on her Upper West Side stoop after our pilgrimage and cracked open a bunch of different cans of start-up brewed Beer Taste Without The Beer Feeling. It's having a moment right now and we wanted to see what the big deal was.

The prospect caused me a little anxiety to be honest. I haven't missed drinking for more than 14 seconds at a time since I had my last drink the night before my 29th birthday. It has been one of the easiest hard things I've done in my life, and I'm very grateful for that fact. Drinking a beer again of any kind could feasibly jog my memory and, I dunno, make it more difficult? Set me off on a bender? I'm honestly not sure why it made me nervous, I wasn’t prone to benders before, but the truth is, I love the taste of beer. I love it. It was a big hobby for me for a while, I brewed my own and everything. Of course the beer I brewed was gross, but I did it. Then I uncharacteristically abandoned it as a hobby because sometimes you gotta leave your cloudy, disgusting beer behind and move forward, ya know?

But I loved it this new generation of 0% ABV beer. My mind was wholly blown by the hipster virgin beer that we sampled on a stoop. It tasted like beer, like actual beer. It looked like beer too, all yellow and fizzy. I know making the liquid yellow is not the hard part of brewing beer but still. They didn't cut corners.

I'm excited to add it to my mocktail bar shelf which, I'm ashamed to say, exists. Right now it has La Croix, Bloody Mary mix, small batch kombucha, cans of pineapple juice and coconut milk and a single ginger beer. I also have this purple bottle of lavender soda that was in the basket of stuff my old job gave me when I left. Not the one I left two months ago, the one before that- it's been sitting there for a year and a half. It's sat there untouched for this long because while I love its beautiful violet color, I can't think of anything that sounds grosser than lavender soda.

I inexplicably have 1/3 of a huge bottle of rum there too. Genuinely have no idea where it came from, or why so much is missing. The amount of rum I ever drank was directly proportionate to how much time I spent hanging out on a beach, and I live in the middle of mid-gentrification Brooklyn. I don’t wear flip-flops outside my house for fear of stepping on broken glass and involuntarily sacrificing a toe to the family of rats who hangs out beyond our recycling bin.

The third thing I’ve done recently, though not in the last couple of weeks, is start a new job- not just a new company but a brand new, shiny set of expectations and deliverables, and a never-before-used title, though as I get deeper and deeper into it it feels blissfully like a mashup of the interesting parts of multiple jobs I’ve had before. It helps that team I’ve joined is only four months old itself. All (three) of us are in similar positions, if not within the power structure of the workplace, then in the inevitable social, let’s all get to know each other part of being employed.