Over the initial shock. The building will have money that it has long needed. I won’t go broke and if I do sell, something that I have been struggling with for two years, it will probably be worth more.

Please don’t ever tell me that I’m a great New Yorker. My maintenance is going up in January, and for two years I will be paying $270 extra dollars in a monthly assessment. I have a small cut up apartment but they don’t charge according to square feet but rooms. Once a building obtains a certificate of occupancy for each apartment, it is impossible to change that.

I don’t pay that much less in maintenance than my neighbor who has a real kitchen, dining room and view of the Hudson. Her apartment is worth way over a million because the maintenance is fair, mine is worth much much less than that because the maintenance is excesive. When I bought the apartment it wasn’t cheap but wasn’t pricey. Nine years later and an increase each year it’s “why do I live here?”

I was considered financially over qualified. I thought that I was doing the right thing in not buying an apartment that I would have to work for, but one that could work for me. The jury is still out on that one.

I think coop things are similar to therapy or writing class and what goes in, stays in, but I honestly don’t see the need for secrecy. I am a therapist who takes a writing class, because I need the stimulation class provides. i understand the need for confidentiality in both cases. But a Manhattan coop? We’re not better than everybody else.

If we hadn’t had the fabled 500K lobby renovation, we could have put that money in a capital improvement fund as we are doing now. When I had the audacity to suggest, in 1999, that the great times weren’t going to last forever, I was literally laughed at. The renovation is a joke. Much of the money ended in pockets. Our old lobby was warm and inviting. It was deco through the decades. Now it’s ugly. The doorman’s station is a black pine crate looking thinking. Everybody thought it was an interim solution.

However it’s a full service building and ever since the super stopped coming into my apartment without notice, I have enjoyed the staff. Oh gawd, when you read this post you might think the wrong thing.

Living in a coop is similar to being directly ruled by Bush. A stupid dictatorship. The people who own the large apartments especially combined ones have all the power as they have the most shares in the corporation. Living in a very large apartment is not equal to being smart.

They don’t make decisions that benefit the most but ones who own the most. This goes against everything the word “coop” used to stand for. It’s archaic and I dream of owning a condo, preferably a townhouse near the beach.

I have it totally designed in my head. It’s an end unit with a 180% view of the beach, three storied, glass you can see out of but people can’t see in, a large kichen that takes up the first floor but has comfortable chairs and a city love seat, a library on the second floor with a study, and a giant bedroom, dressing room, room sized closet on the third. Since I love bathrooms there are at least four, two with huge showers. I waffle on what I want the soaking tub to be made out. The sinks are all bowls, two made of glass and two of stone.

I have been refining this for years but would be willing to move somewhere that entrances me and is nothing like my fantasy. A beach has to be nearby. Just has to be a condo.

When the radical right ruled the blogosphere they would have come to tell me this is decadent. What’s wrong with that?

Sex is natural. Sex rules the world. Sex between two consenting adults is wonderful. I have only had one affair in my life with a Senate candidate’s bodyguard. That was in the 70’s so I was ahead of the bodyguard craze.

Monika is this weeks guest at My Music Highway Project. She picked a great song. I feel strongly about this project for two reasons: I adore Shayna, and dare anybody not to, and I love music. It can unite us.

This week is action packed and filled with very exciting events that aren’t worth mentioning here. I have been taking pictures. Don’t expect any of Christmas trees as I would rather take pictures of holiday things found in unexpected places. I was at Penn Station today. The first train I saw mentioned was The Silver Meter that goes to Miami. I first took a train with that name when I was eighteen months old, and my mother and I were going to winter in Miami Beach. We never did that again, but it sounds so grand. We stayed in a very cheap hotel in South Beach called The Waves. I was too big a distraction for my father and it was tax season.

I had a deep desire to get on that train. Then I saw a train to Boston, then one to DC, then….I almost bought a ticket for any destination. But I did the responsible thing and took the train to the train to Newark airport to pick somebody up.

I realized that I’m suffering from wanderlust or a deep desire to be irresponsible and to travel anywhere. For a few minutes I dreamed of taking trains everywhere in America. At the airport I wanted to get onto a plane to London. Then Zurich. When Warsaw seemed exciting, I realized that I have an insatiable desire to go anywhere.

This post doesn’t mean that I’m leaving. New York worked its magic on me many years ago. It takes me a long long time to make a decision like this since I do have to sell my apartment, and the majority of my close friends and family are here.

I feel very at home in New York in a way that I know I will never feel anywhere else. However there are quality of life issues, and New York’s a hard place to be in 24/7. Had I bought a summer home when I bought my apartment–couldn’t have, the coop board doesn’t allow you to buy another home the first year-in the two years to five years after that I might feel very different.

But I had an elderly mother, and my attention was focused on her and other family matters. Then after my Mom died, I was totally screwed up. I realize now that my reaction was healthy. That to mourn for my own mother was more important for me than to mourn for strangers who died in the attacks.

Thanks to bloggers I have been able to work through my grief, and don’t even remember how it feels anymore as I don’t remember how horrible pain feels afterward.

There are no people in the world like real New Yorker’s. Opinionated, brash, funny and caring. But so many have moved.

There’s a statute of Jackie Gleason as Ralph Kramden at The Port Authority. I decided yesterday that there should be a statue of Larry David on the center mall on Broadway. Most of his lines are so brilliantly New York, my uh very smart friend Lucia assumed that they had been in the lexicon forever. He lives in California but is a very real New Yorker.

I guess most people would want a statue of Jerry Seinfeld who does live in The Beresford on Central Park West where I rejected an apartment that was much larger than this one, cheaper, and in need of much more work. I didn’t look at real estate strictly as an investment but as a place that I wanted to live in.

It’s probably worth twice as much as mine now, but it didn’t have the light or the views and that is priceless to me. Oh, I don’t think Seinfeld should be the statute because David wrote the words, but maybe Seinfeld in the puffy white shirt…..

The info in the following articles does make leaving harder rather than easier because if I don’t sell my apartment, I would have to find a tenant willing to go through the board and to pay at least $2,500 a month for a small apartment. If I sold it, I don’t know if I could ever afford to move back if I wanted to.

The New York Times had several interesting articles about New York this weekend. Actually they were very depressing.

Our city used to be a multi-industry town. Now our economy is all Wall Street all the time. And while the average salary is $8,300 a week, it’s about to layoff employees.

But yes I said “average $8,300 a week, and they all seem to live in my building, or in da hood. Obviously “average” isn’t a precise term, and most people on Wall Street make considerably less because a gilded few make so much, but Wall Street is about to lay off employees.

So the job growth is in non-lucrative service industries, and where are people supposed to live? Though coop and condo prices are falling, the average apartment though not mine, goes for over a mil.

I bought my apartment nine years ago, when there were only seven condo’s on The Upper West Side, and I disliked them all. Last night I thought about the nine references my coop board required: three career; three professional, I used my accountant and two brokers, three personal; fortunately I have many friends in da hood. Lucia’s made me cry it was so beautiful. But nine references to show that I’m not dead wood. Even then I was amazed that I could get the references.

I would never buy a coop or shares in the coop’s corporation again. Living with a coop’s rules is like living in a very luxe dorm.

I was in the fortunate position of being able to pay cash as I bought my apartment just before the country went real estate crazy. While many people would have gotten a mortgage, I didn’t trust the stock market and wanted to ensure that I would always have a home. My ohmigod I’m going to be bag lady scenario. I know that I’m not alone in that fantasy.

I put a post agreeing with Bill O’Reilly, Murdoch and whatever Fox, and disagreeing with some woman at The Huffington Post who thought Murdoch had made the Simpson/Regan fiasco into a First Amendment issue up at a large liberal blog. As it’s not a First Amendment issue and is a woman’s issue I was right, but still…I accomplished nothing that I had meant to do all day. It was truly a day where I lost track of time to blogging.

First, I was a young woman who lived with a man who became verbally abusive, broke a window in my apartment, over turned a table with many plants that broke apart, and then stalked me for a year. He was only physically abusive once, in the first year, as we got ready to host a New Years Eve party. I chalked that off to anxiety and I was being a bitch.

By the time he broke the window and plant table, I understood that any man who could do this to my stuff, could do worse to me. It was 1981. When I went to the 19th Precinct for a restraining order, I was told that I needed witnesses, and I was told this problem didn’t exist in my part of the city as this was the 19th–my zip code was 10021, then the richest in the city.

When you’re abused it shapes the rest of your life. I went through everything from “maybe I deserved this to I hate men,” to feeling my way back into relationships with a kind sweet brilliant man eight years my junior who also was broken.

I have long loved, respected, and pitied Dominic Dunne who had a daughter Dominique who was killed by her boyfriend. He advocated for his daughter in death as he couldn’t do in life. Dunne was the single person who made the world aware that White Girls who lived in Good Zip Codes and had a pretty good self-image could be abused.

My Dad did advocate for me once he realized it wasn’t Pia being the bitch, and Zachary’s so nice. Having such strong parental advocation seemed silly at the time. I was 30. While my Dad and I had always been close, including the years we spoke through my Mom, it was Zachary who made us adult friends. My Mom realized that he was obsessed with me. It was the first time we used the word “obsessed,” in that context. My Dad pretended never to listen to my Mom who he called “the drill Sargent ” or “the psychologist,” but he secretly always listened to her. Continue Reading »

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