Perfect Pizza Storm.

On Thursdays I get to spend most of the day working on stuff for school (I have class tonight at 7pm) and so I spend a majority of Thursday's sitting here at my kitchen table where I do most of my writing and most of my schoolwork. These are relatively peaceful days and I open the blinds on my big window that looks out into the courtyard of my apartment building. The window faces north and the quality of light is usually quite nice. I also get to see all the comings and goings off all the randoms who live in my building. There is a weird mix of other college students, 20-somethings who are probably living on their own for the first time, some families, but also pensioners, and some straight up burn-outs. This ain’t exactly a middle class haven or anything, the rent is fairly low and so that attracts a certain type of renter. I love it here. I have never felt uncomfortable and while the building is old, the place has never felt dumpy to me, though my expectations are probably someone different. A couple months ago I was at a Christmas party thrown by some friends-of-friends and those friends-of-friends had just moved into a beautiful and GIANT house with like 5 bedrooms, they’d put in new tile and redone the kitchen and bathroom. It was a beautiful home in the style of a Pottery Barn catalogue and I couldn’t help but think, “It is a good thing these people don’t come visit me ever because my apartment has wine-stained carpet and some visible water damage. I don’t mind those things, but clearly what I value is different. My friends-of-friends don’t even have kids yet, but their house throbbed gently with the anticipation. That place was too big and I can’t even imagine the size of the mortgage. The place was big in that way that vastly exceeds need. And while we all get to choose how to live our lives, I shook my head a little bit while trying to locate a bathroom amongst the thicket of doors and bedrooms and garages and offices and hall closets. Who needs all this? I was asking myself.

I do not, but then I left a decent career to go back to school, to write, to learn how to teach and thereby guarantee a life of debt and poverty. But I’m happy and no amount of empty bedrooms can ever add up to that.

So I am having a nice and peaceful Thursday sitting here at my little table and watching the cast of the play “My Apartment Building” going about their lives. One thing that I’ve observed and which you might find interesting if you are a sociologist or cultural anthropologist (and aren’t we all, in a way, amateur sociologists or cultural anthropologists?) there is almost constantly a pizza deliveryman showing up. The socioeconomic mix of tenants here seems to have created a perfect storm of pizza. It is not yet noon and I have seen 3 different pizza guys show up. Who orders pizza in the morning? I think this is worthy of study.

Speaking of study, I need to get back to mine. All these fancy books aren’t going to read themselves.

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