It's crowded, but at least I'm not on the street...

I've been meaning to keep the Chronicle up to date ever since I moved out of my old 12th Street apartment, but it's been a little difficult to do it for a couple of reasons - first, the initial week or two afterward was so hectic and chaotic that I could barely think straight. Then, of course, there's the issue of privacy in a large studio apartment with three people and two cats living in it... and a computer that's been quirky about when it allows us to connect to the internet (how many of you are stuck dealing with Windows Vista and loathe it as much as I do? I can't be the only one who thinks it's the worst operating system on the market - so many gremlins and bugs it's beyond belief and almost makes me wish we could just go back to the old DOS system where if you hit a problem and were patient enough, you could tweak the code a bit or simply backup your data, reformat and wipe the disk, and reinstall DOS and be on your merry way - yeah, it was slow, and I recall several LONG weekends spent doing that, but at least you could be assured that once completed, it would be quite a while before you'd need to do it again and you might actually gain some space afterwards).

I've spent several weeks now living with my soon-to-be-ex and son in a studio. The cats seem to be totally thrilled with the arrangement; they have free access to all sorts of meat products now that I rarely had in my house, and they've come to expect fragments of kielbasa as a supplement to the usual cans of cat food. The tomcat has started to hang out ON the table, which was never permitted in my house - he knew better. Although my ex howls about fur and paws that have been in the litter box in close proximity to food, I have to say I doubt the tomcat would be so bold if somehow he didn't sense that the rules around here are something along the lines of Wild West Saloon style. The ex and the son are the gunslingers dealing cards and ordering sarsaparilla and whiskey near the bar, and I'm the piano player hiding in the back trying to stay out of the main line of action. He may also sense that critters with a y chromosome are in the dominant majority here. Who knows.

Both of them have had a running cold for weeks now. I'm the germaphobe in the family, especially since I'm the one who had an incredibly bad winter two years ago when I caught bronchitis from my son, who was in first grade at the time (a particularly germ-ridden year for most kids) that I couldn't shake for 8 or 9 months. It drove me to seek assistance from a particularly horrendous pulmonary specialist, whose prescriptions and diagnoses were almost worse than the bug itself - I had every side effect known, and ended up spending countless hours in the emergency room at Methodist Hospital (not a place you want to go unless you're doing research on first-hand experiences of Dante's Inferno). When I had the nice, large apartment of my own, it became customary at the first signs of a particularly bad bug to set my son up in his room with massive quantities of orange juice, drawing materials, a giant box of tissues, and kids' stories on tape from the library until he seemed like he was out of the woods, and cross my fingers. There's no room to do that here; the kid and the ex have been running at the nose and coughing like tuberculars for weeks, and yesterday, I collapsed for a three hour nap at around noon - also difficult in a small space, but I just couldn't shake the awful sinking feeling of being in the grip of a nasty flu. I woke up dizzy and spaced out this morning, realizing also that my doctor in the Slope was a good 30 minute bus trip away should I decide to brave the elements and beg for a walk-in appointment - and there was a half hour panic attack this morning after the ex and the kid left for school and work when I realized that I was really on my own for the duration of the day - far from my doctor, completely out-of-the-question too far from any of my old friends and neighbors to ask for help should I continue to feel dizzy and out of it - and I'm the designated picker-upper of the kid at the end of the day, and the trip from Kensington to Red Hook and back seemed especially brutal in sub-freezing weather and a nasty batch of crud sitting in my chest and sinuses. The trip takes an hour each way, barring any unforeseen hangups like I encountered a week and a half ago on a Friday night, when there were signal problems on the F that knocked it completely out of service northbound at Church Avenue. Fortunately, when I got up to street level, I discovered that the 67 bus now runs substantially further south than I thought it did, and I was able to get a shop keeper in a local corner store to let me use his phone to call my son's after school program to let them know about the delay and jump on a very crowded bus.

It's bleak down here in Kensington. I hate the longer walk to the F train to the point that I often find myself paying an extra fare to take the 68 bus along Coney Island Avenue up to Bartel Pritchard Square, then transferring to the F at 15th Street and continuing on from there. The streets are dead quiet all day and all night; there are only a few signs of life here for hours, and run more to local squirrels and birds than humans. I'm not used to this; it's what I left Queens years ago to get away from - even Flatbush has more life. I feel isolated and cut off, and every time I come through Park Slope on my way to retrieve my son from his after school program, I find myself missing Park Slope and my old life even more painfully than I ever thought I would. I walk down familiar streets there now feeling like an outsider rather than a member of the community and a part of its lively fabric.