New Place, Same Old Me

Deciding what to write about can be difficult.  There are endless possibilities: past, present, future, or imagined situations past, present, and future.  You can sit outside and watch people and write about what you see, like Harriet the Spy, or you can sit with your eyes closed and write about what you think.  My mind is worrying me at the moment, so I prefer to escape by writing about the outside world.  But in times when the outside world is, say, monotonous (like working at a grocery store) or horrifying (being in the hospital or in worse situations, like war), people can escape by being introspective.  Or they can turn something horrifying into art, creating a beautiful version of an ugly reality.

What has this paragraph been?  Introspection, of course.  Enough of that.

I am starting a master's program in science journalism at New York University this fall.  I had my orientation on Thursday, and classes start on Tuesday, after Labor Day. I'm staying in a Brooklyn brownstone with parents of a childhood friend.  My room is on the third floor, and the kitchen is on the first floor, and the intervening stairs are narrow, creaky, steep, and dark unless I bother to turn on a light.  The first floor consists of an austere living room, music room, and dining room with ornate dark wooden molding everywhere.  There are sliding doors separating these rooms, but some of them don't slide.  When the doors are recessed into the wall, there's a little button you push that forces out a hook used for pulling open the door.  So intricate!  Update:  it is possible to close off the stairwell from the living room and kitchen to keep sounds from carrying upstairs.  At the back of the first floor, the kitchen window overlooking the garden is a beacon of light.  I am writing in the kitchen now.   The second floor has the master bedroom, a study, and a bathroom.  The third floor has three bedrooms (for three children, now grown), a bathroom, and a laundry room.  In order to get to the third floor, I have to walk up the creaky stairs, down a creaky hallway adjacent to the parents' bedroom, and either be in the dark or turn on a light in the hall, then up another flight to the third floor, where I'll be the only inhabitant.  As my friend's parents said, we'll hear everyone's comings and goings.

I don't mind the stairs, but it interests me that the layout of this house makes simple things seem worth describing.  For example, no bathroom on the first floor.  If I come down early in the morning before others are awake, I risk waking people up by going to the bathroom.  I can either go to the bathroom next to the bedroom of sleeping parents (fewer stairs, less noise walking to and from the bathroom, more noise in the bathroom) or walk down the creaky hallway to the third floor to use my own bathroom (more noise commuting, less noise tooting, or whatever).

The bathrooms have old, spacious bathtubs/showers.  There are four knobs, two faucets, and one shower head.  The bathroom sinks are unusual in that the faucets don't extend much beyond the back of the sink so that you almost brush your hands against the sink to wash them, and it is hard to drink from the faucet. 

That's about it for introspection and inspection of this house from the inside.  Did I mention the old dumbwaiter, which is now just a closet with its own working doorbell?  I'll let you know when I meet the ghosts.