Only Strangers in the Building

 Finishing up Season 3 of "Only Murders in the Building" on Hulu and just embracing the feel-good nature of the murder mystery TV show: I guess I'm just a sucker for well-decorated gardens, baseball facts and figures, Szechwan-style tofu/fish/any food, and a good ol' who-dunnit mystery. With all the options out there in TV, movie, and entertainment land nowadays and the ubiquitous usage of the skip button (see previous blog entry), it's sometimes nice just to sit back and let a TV series entertain you for awhile, and that's what Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez have been doing for 3 seasons now (more of the writing crew really who insert the little jokes, puns, and witticims), but the show definitely made me crave living in a building like the Arconia, a fictional-but-based-on-a-real-apartment-building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I'm guessing MJ would love living somewhere like that, near Central Park, in a stylish neighborhood of coffeshops and Levain cookies, within walking or subway distance of Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, and some of the best entertainment venues in the world, just a Central Park (the short way) trot away from the Metropolian Art Museum.....and only $4000 a month in rent for 700 sq.  glorious feet (just making up a number, but the real number might be higher). What charms me about the Arconia, though, is the different characters who make up the residents of the building: they all seem not necessarily nice, but with character: there's the guy with the cat who always wears sweaters that are stuck full of cat hears, the old lady who blames our heroes for messing up the Arconia, the doorman, the former actors and actresses....everyone seems to have a story. Oh and don't forget the secret passageways that make the building seem legendary! 

My condo building pales in comparison to the Arconia, but at least it has 2 elevators! (Very necessary when people are moving in or out, and when there's an emergency in one of them like someone spilling yogurt everywhere without cleaning up,which happens more often than one would think). I've been living here for 2 years, but since I moved in during the pandemic, haven't really gotten to know anybody. There's always an awkward 30-second elevator conversation when sharing with someone, but sometimes I don't know how to break the ice, and the other resident just looks down at the phone, the easy way out and the universal symbol for "I'm not talking to you buddy." There's the 2 blind ladies who live down the hall from me whom I want to get to know their stories better, but never seem to be able to bump into them......one of them takes the train to work every day back and forth and walks back from the train station. Amazing! There's the old dude who likes hockey and I always make a hockey comment if I run into him, the lady on the second floor who goes to trivia nights on Wednesday nights, the head of the condo association who organized a nice outing for everyone but only a minority of residents came in and out of, and the older couple of which the man walks back and forth in halls of the building as part of his daily exercise ritual. It's a pretty quiet, anti-social building; MJ and I have never really been able to make friends in new buildings we move into, as much as I fantasize about having a Seinfield-like relationship or something equivalent with neighbors. It'd be much easier to actually meet up, as opposed to my hometown friends who live in a different city. I guess I may have been scarred from law school when my 21-year-old self in search of friends knocked door-to-door at the "law school dorm" 1L year and tried to befriend people, and some people seemed rather standoffish and not willing to engage. Then again, some of my best friends from law school came from our law school building, so I take that back, that was the epitome of my "friends living cozily in the same building phase," now I'm just in a building without much connection to any of the other residents, very much a "only strangers in the building" experience. Alas. 

Apparently my iron level has been rather low lately affecting my ability to donate blood; kinda weird that I'm changing my lifestyle and eating habits just so someone can stick a needle in my arm and take one of the body's life forces away from me, but yup I'm taking iron supplements to give an artificial boost to iron. Never thought I'd be starting to get iron deficiency at such a young age! Darn!