Apron Anxiety by Alyssa Shelasky Read Free Book Online Page B

wearing an Hermès tie, dancing to the tunes of a homeless man on the trombone. New York, it’s good to be back.
    Over the past year, I left the West Coast, disassociated myself from the
Glamour
dating blog, turned thirty, and after six intense interviews, got a full-time job that I’m really proud of. I’m a staff writer at
People
magazine, with a good salary, a private office, and interesting assignments involving film, music, television, health, human interest, and a lot more than celebrity news. My editors all know that I accepted the job under the condition that I won’t have to go clubbing, stalking, or slithering into places where I don’t belong, and that I’m a
reformed
party girl with an early bedtime.
    Living in California completely reset my body. It took the
mani-pedi, buy-the-shoes, blow-the-doorman
right out of me. Ultimately, I had to go all the way across the country just to come back down to earth.
    When I’m not reporting, I spend a lot of time with my forever sweet and easy sister, who’s working at
Real Simple
magazine, just a few floors down from
People
. Or I’m having long talksover a few drinks with my closest New York girlfriends, Beth and Jill (Shelley, who I talk to ten times a day, and who is gradually mellowing out herself, never came back from L.A.). Beth is from Western Massachusetts like me. She’s strikingly pretty and reminds me, in her unpretentiousness, of the girls from home. (When Jean died, Beth and I had just started working together at a PR firm, and I remember feeling like she was the only person who understood how the tragedy rocked my tiny town.) And then there’s the smokin’ hot Jill, who’s as devoted as she is difficult. She works in fashion and dates only fancy men whom I describe as “camera ready.” She’s the one I count on every time there’s a party or a plus-one; I just love her company.
    As always, I’m enjoying a lot of alone time, too—hunkering down at poetry readings, jazz clubs, and other weird and wonderful gatherings, befriending singletons with short bangs and Buddhists with perfect posture, and conversing with total strangers on everything from capitalism to colonics. In this city, you can meet more great people while buying a stick of gum than most do in a lifetime elsewhere. Everyone has a story, mind-bending or blood-racing, on this island of provocateurs. On my favorite nights, I just putter around aimlessly, vacillating between culture and curiosity. There’s nothing I’d rather do than roam the streets without watching the clock.
    Not that life has been uneventful.
    After L.A., I invested my life savings in an apartment in an almost-happening neighborhood of Brooklyn called Ditmas Park. I lived there for a few months, but when a meth-head mooned me in the building’s elevator, I realized I wasn’t as edgy as I thought. Soon thereafter, I rented the place to two librarian pescatarians on a budget, while I waited for the property to appreciate and the neighborhood to become a little less sketchy and a bit more Starbucks.
    I then moved in with my parents, who just bought a luxury loft in a more enviable Brooklyn enclave called DUMBO (which stands for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass). Now, I listlessly inhabit a spare, windowless, prison-white room meant to be an office (the only option besides bunking up in my parents’ bedroom, which, disturbingly, they probably would have loved). On one hand, living at home was a smart, economical decision so I could figure out the next steps in my housing situation. On the other hand, I’m about to turn thirty-one, and I feel a little foolish being a single, stay-at-home daughter with all her money tied up in an apartment that other people live in and that most taxi drivers can’t find.
    I’m still meeting guys everywhere I go—at Citibank, before a Shakespeare in the Park play, while doing crosswords on the subway—and even though many men have that
je ne sais quoi
, no one has been