This has been the first time in weeks that I haven’t needed to give my time and energy over to moving boxes or houseguests or column deadlines or IKEA pilgrimages or I Love The 70s or grotesque, soul-withering heat. For the next three hundred words or so I’m devoting myself to YOU, the people.

Hello! How are you? How are your walls? Do you have stuff hanging on them? Do you have stuff on your shelves, too? How did that happen? How did you do that? Did you ever know that you’re my hero? And everything I would like to be? We’re definitely making progress, but it’s taking awhile. Right now, we’re at the point where almost everything with a power cord is plugged in where it needs to be, and all the electronic displays are sentient and unblinking. However we keep buying power strips, which baffles me. I mean, X is the number of things we need to plug in and Y is the number of available wall outlets, and in the course of changing apartments, X remains constant, at least for now, and Y, thank God, has increased, AND YET, this means that Z, the number of power strips we need, somehow increases as well. I mean, first the logic was: if X > Y, then Z, right? So why is it now X ≤ Y+Z = EVEN MORE FUCKING Z?

But of course, I’m glad we moved. Here is a list of totally mundane things we have in our new place that I did not have the pleasure of experiencing in my old building, and, in a few cases, my entire adult life thus far:

• Garage space.
• A bathroom exhaust fan.
• An open-air back porch.
• One of those sprayer thingies in the kitchen sink.
• Three-prong receptacles in every outlet.
• Water pressure. No, really.
• Enough room to comfortably walk around the bed.
• Basement storage that is clean and dry and well-lit and does not appear to have been dug out by Jame Gumb.
• A laundry room that can be reached without having to go outside and through the alley.
• Lights in the (get this!) CLOSETS.

See how easy to please I am? I know this might sound totally absurd to those of you who live in suburban areas and/or newer buildings, where everyone has central air, and remote-control windows, and wet bars in every cathedral-ceilinged walk-in-closet. But for the city, and for an older building, what we have is pretty good.

I didn’t have a chance to link to it before now, but I have to agree with Mr. Walter’s letter in response to my NY Times piece about the Eno Incident (the news of which also somehow managed to reach The Guardian, as well, so you really ought to be pleased with yourself, O Unknown Rossi’s Jukebox Prankster). I feel I should add that while “Thursday Afternoon” is best experienced in a quiet environment with a quality sound system, Here Come The Warm Jets is best listened to in a new apartment, while cooking dinner, on the quality sound system your boyfriend somehow managed to set up and get all plugged in.  Or so I learned last night.