after clicking around the World Wide Web for a focused and productive couple of hours today i may have made a decision about moving out of the current domicile of over 13 years. i think i want Sunnyside. it makes all sense to me. it puts me closer to one of my favorite places (the mighty Calvary cemetery) and the cost of the area should allow me to set up shop in a place more or less similar to what i have now. so i wouldn’t have to throw out 2/3 of my belongings to live in a tiny studio virtually anywhere in Manhattan, and of course i wouldn’t have to deal with Manhattan, which i mostly don’t like as a place to live. it’s noisy and there is always somebody in your face. Sunnyside has everything i like and more… including a 24-hour grocery store and enough pubs and eateries to keep me entertained for a few years. it’s also near the Q32 bus, which shuttles me directly to my 181. that in itself is a plus among pluses. the 7 train is a laggard, but i’ve gotten used to using buses and just walking to Manhattan. and i could also keep my storage room, which is in LIC… though i’d like to get rid of it, and save the $80/month… Sunnyside would also put me closer to stuff like the giant malls up on Queens Boulevard. i seem to have absolved myself of the malls-are-lame mentality and returned to my suburban roots of partly growing up at the mall. that Queens Center Mall is scary, though, when it gets overpopulated.
the area also appears to be relatively hipster-free. i have nothing against hipsters, except that i would not want to grow old among them.
Sunnyside the Funny Side.
who knows how long this will take but the idea made sense enough that as i thought about it and imagined the logistics of the move i looked out the window and saw the old familiar sights: apartment buildings across the street, neighbors i’ve seen but never known for over a decade. suddenly, after this bout of what might amount to little more than escapism, the old familiar sights seemed like i hadn’t seen them in years, and they almost looked like memories already.
that’s happened to me before, though. i get inspired by these ideas of moving on, moving out, trying a different lifestyhle, and then i get lazy and drink beers.
this time it feels different, though, even with the beers. it feels necessary. my plan is to go back over there tomorrow or Thursday and look around. i already know the exact area for me, from an area of several square blocks. i am pretty familiar with the area, but i never really looked at it as if i’d want to live there.
…..
in other news from my always interesting life, i guess the adrenaline from feeling like i’d made a real decision about moving on out got me going on other things. i contacted a correspondent from a couple of years ago who told me where a rotary dial payphone still existed in Manhattan. he sent a follow-up email with details on exactly where it was, but i lost it to the server blowout, and had assumed the info was lost as i had no memory of the gentleman’s name. then i remembered that i had forwarded his picture of the rotary dial payphone to a yahoo.com address (because i never download e-mail attachments to my PC) and there it was, his name and email. he quickly replied to my somewhat sheepish e-mail, reminding me of where the phone is or was. it’s up to me now to see if it still survives.
web traffic seems to be resurging somewhat. i have no real control over it so no point sweating the day to day vagaries… i threw in a few more clicktricks, though, and i was surprised at how well they did on the first day. nothing blockbuster, but for the effort expense to ROI it’s a good signal.
and blahblahblah.
i was rambling around the Schubert D Major Sonata today. i’ve been looking at it for weeks now, amazed to have never gotten to know it better. there’s a lot of Beethoviniana about it, but in ways i think he took the Sonata form and made it make more sense as an organic unit than other composers. the knock against sonata form is that it is besically arbitrary, with 3 or 4 separate pieces of music that essentially have nothing in common and no relationship other than opus number.
but with this D Major sonata i sense that Schubert wrote the thing as a continuum, not literally repeating motifs or themes but echoing spirits and textures of sound across the 4 movements. Schubert always seems to be traveling through a continuum. were his Beethovinian allusions intentional? i do not know, but they seem to be in the discussion, in the blood of Schubert.
