City Living

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.

I wanted to work in the games industry, so I picked Seattle. I was quickly disabused of any notion of being qualified for the games industry, and instead picked up a job a family member was kind of enough to share knowledge of, and did that instead for four years. It paid the bills very well, was only moderately destructive of my mental health (bleh), and made it so I didn’t have to think super hard about where I was living. I was able to move into my own apartment in a trendy neighborhood, and later into a nice quiet place near the biggest pieces of nature in the city limits, where I am now. It hasn’t been too bad, but I also haven’t found a lot of the things I was looking for. And now I’m working a new job, that I’m grateful for after two long stints of unemployment in the last year and a half, but that pays a lot less. That makes my rent almost 50% of my estimated take-home pay. That makes me think about if the city is right for me.

Back to last night. The thing I like about my place is that I can open a window and hear nature, that I can walk two blocks down the street, enter Discovery park, and be in nature so dense it doesn’t seem like there’s a city nearby in some spots. But I’m not particularly close to anything. The one coffee shop in easy walking distance closes at 3pm. The nearest grocery store is staffed by wonderful people, but has bougie prices for most things. To get anywhere else, I’m biking or driving. And I’m surrounded by families and retirees whenever I go to the community spaces. Yesterday I waded into the neighborhood’s business district to mail my rent at the post office (last minute woo) during the farmer’s market. I felt out of place and in the way as I dodged around nuclear families with young kids, walked past slow-walking old couples, and saw grandparents greeting their grandkids. There was one couple that seemed to be about my age, without kids, in the group of 50-odd people I saw clearly, and they were probably straight/cis.

One of the benefits of the city is supposed to be the density of people. You can always find people who are like you in ways you consider important, but are also different enough to expand your worldview. Seattle’s lived up to that particular promise decently, but making those connections into close friendships has mostly evaded me. Everyone’s busy hustling to make ends meet, or burned out on other people and need introvert time, or too tired to go out (me included). Or it’s too expensive. In a modern city, there’s no public square, no community center, no cheap bar. You have to pay to socialize, unless you do it at the residences of other people you already know, and that doesn’t lend itself well to meeting new people and learning new things.

In case you haven’t guessed, I’m not exactly sure where I’m going with all of this. I guess it’s just that, the city is lonely, the city is expensive, and I’m not sure I’m getting out of the city enough for me to pay to live in it. But I don’t know if moving elsewhere would be any better. Things might be cheaper, but jobs in my field would be fewer, not that I can get any here anyway. It would be difficult to meet new people when there’s fewer of them to meet. The politics would shift, and I might feel just as lonely.

But I could probably live alone in a house, surrounded by trees. I could put my computer setup in a room that isn’t my bedroom. I could afford, potentially, to go out to places and try to meet people the old-fashioned way. Maybe form a bond with them stronger than the infamous Seattle “we should hang out sometime,” where sometime never comes. I could watch nature encroach on humanity, instead of being constrained to boxes set down in cement. I might even be able to stop feeling overloaded every other hour. I could hear the rain on the roof. And that sounds pretty nice, some days. Especially when I’m laying in the not-quite dark, alone with my thoughts.