Past Life

Recently, I met with my old college roommates up near Columbia University. I say college roommates.. but we stayed roommates long after college ended as the apartment was in Manhattan and rent controlled. So we stayed. And stayed. Long past our college days.

But still.. we all left. In my case, it was 15 years after graduation, when I met my future wife who ultimately was the one who pulled me from my Manhattan world and landed me in New Jersey where I had a dog, house, and a marriage that lasted roughly a decade before it became a divorce.

Now I live and work in New Jersey and walking in the old neighborhood felt like a dream. The desk clerk at my old building was still Ali and George still ran the building and the Hungarian Pastry Shop still had the same owner as well, if different waitresses. I recognized some of the patrons as well. An older man who was a bit older was in his same spot. He never said hello to me then so it felt right that he never acknowledged me now.

I miss the energy. The NJ town that comes the closest is Montclair but Montclair isn't Manhattan. No place I've been has that dynamism where every block has every kind of human imaginable. But I don't feel part of it now, not even as an observer. There was a time when I worked in Manhattan but now I'm a complete and total New Jerseysan and a New Jerseysan is not a foreigner, not even an out of towner really, just New Jersey.

I could tell that I was a New Jerseyan from the relief I felt seeing my car again. I am glad I saw my dear friends and I am glad I got back.

2009 RIP

The economy was bad and getting worse one year ago so I knew it was going to be a trying year. As it turned out, I still have the same job I had one year ago and seem relatively secure in my employment. But I don't feel it. We've lost roughly half the number of people at my small satellite office. One year ago, we were 60. Now we're 30. We once were 90.

This week we're all moving our offices to be closer together, emptying large sections. We're part of a huge multi-national (I don't actually work with the people at my office) and the huge multi-national hopes to rent out the emptied space, but the building is full of offices ready to be filled, all with company logos of companies that no longer are. So there isn't much hope, now anyway, that the space will be subleased.

I work long hours these days, exchanging emails with people I will never meet. Some of these people are on facebook. So I can attach photos of a person to the person with whom I interact, but then they disappear and are replaced and I look at their facebook page and wonder how this person I never really knew is doing.