Automat, by Edward Hopper, 1927. Source.
Author’s note: This one’s a bit of a ramble. Also Content Warning for some mental health discussion.
Last night, I was having trouble getting to sleep. Well, more trouble than my usual, which is borderline narcoleptic. So probably the average amount, where my brain stayed awake while I was reading the excellent No Time to Spare, a collection of Ursula K LeGuin’s blog posts, and instead I had to lay there with the lights off looking up at my ceiling. Or over at the red-glowing LED clock, or the little green light that lets me know the humidifier is on and making sure Jabberwocky gets to keep her fabulous skin condition.
I eventually shut off the fan, too, because it’s right next to my head and loud and sometimes even white noise is too much noise. I wanted to listen to the wind rustling the leaves outside my window. But I heard a lot of other things, too. Someone revving their engine as they drove past. The sound of a cluster of sirens in the distance. It was more than I wanted to be hearing, but the world does not obey my whims, and it’s one of the tradeoffs of living in the city. You’re always close to everyone else. You hear your neighbor laugh or the TV in some other apartment. Cars are always going to be passing by at odd hours. And the sirens, when you hear them, are probably not meant for you, but you can still feel sad that someone needs urgent help in the middle of the night, and happy that two of the three organizations that use sirens are probably going to give it to them.
I found myself thinking about if I’m cut out to live in the city. By sheer years, I’ve mostly lived in suburbia. Davis, while a fully-functional city in its own right, is not a dense place by any means. It’s quiet, and even the smaller triplex places like my childhood home still look out over farm fields, distant railroad tracks, and lonely county roads, or are within spitting distance of them. Irvine, where I went to college, was a weird pocket in the middle of suburbia, where things were begrudgingly put in walking distance to each other, but as soon as you left the immediate vicinity of the campus it was big residential areas complete with lawns and probably the occasional picket fence, all connected by choked freeways. After that, I wanted to move to the city. To a place where there’s more than one open mic night, where you rarely see the same stranger twice, where things are close and buses exist and there are jobs and and bunches of little coffee shops queers and bars it’s not an anomaly to flirt with said queers in. Continue reading
