Wandering around the Columbia campus this evening was a refreshingly normal experience. It is quite a lovely space, and I would never have expected anything different if my sister had not insisted that it really was bizarre that I was working for their press (even if it is over 50 blocks away, and essentially a separate entity).
Anyway, I was sort of happy to be back there, and to be living so close, as familiar people and places can be quite comforting at a transitional time like this. But it is obviously easier to forestall any ill will toward a place when it is not swarming with overprivileged JAPS and WASPS.
This also makes it harder not to wonder how things would have been had I stayed on for the last three years, and I ask this not out of regret (as I have said before, I am not a regretful person), but curiosity (I am quite a curious person). Such speculation is useless, certainly, but can be quite entertaining.
I have settled in quite nicely to the apartment of Ana Da Luna, a beautiful Brazilian export who has invited me to use her bed, her paper towels, and all of her leftover garlic for the last three months of June, in exchange for a mere five hundred dollars. With wood floors, high ceilings, an absentee roommate, and even a washer/dryer, the only things I have to complain about are the one cockroach I saw skittering across the floor yesterday (it was HUGE), and the lack of cell reception (not that I like talking to people anyway).
Ana is a couchsurfer with the exact skunk spot I desire, except hers is of course au natural.
I have continued my tour of grocery stores of the upper west side, and indeed I think that I have been to the three nearest ones at least once each night this week, with a few others sprinkled in for variety. To anyone tracking my movements (or my bank statement), I would surely look insane, if still less so than the swine-man making frighteningly accurate porcine noses outside of my work on Tuesday.
I frequent these stores not only in search of foods that will service cheap, easy staple meals for my time in the city, but also because I have still yet to figure out the secret to their pricing. At times various products seem on par with what one might find at Giant, and certainly at Harris Teeter, while other seem bizarrely overpriced ($6 for Cherrios?). Furthermore, the inconsistency between stores is shocking, and I am trying to keep track of where things are cheapest, as there is no clear winner amongst the closest ones; $3 for a can of regular old blacks beans at once place, but $2 for a huge bag of lettuce, while next door might charge $0.80 for that same can of beans, but $5 for the same head of lettuce.
In any case, I have begun to worry about my new hobby, and fear for my own perspective now that Whole Foods has begun to look, at least in some respects, like quite a bargain.
