So I have this rental upright piano in my living room. It was the first piece of furniture that I accumulated on moving here, and a testament to my priorities-- I will sleep on the FLOOR and live out of a SUITCASE for an inordinately long time, but by GOD there will be music! (Don't worry, since those initial days I have made a nice little nest of this apartment courtesy of Craigslist and the Ikea across the river in Blurzy. I even got a down comforter, a luxury that I had never allowed myself before but somehow could not resist on my last acquisitional spree. A few weeks ago I was complaining to my roommate that the comforter was maybe in fact a miscalculated investment, since its delicious properties of insulation were making it extremely difficult for me to get out of bed in the morning. From a space of such heavenly warmth and lightness, my quality of life could only go DOWNhill in the course of the day. [See what I did there?] At the same time, I wept for all those years that I had been deprived of downy pleasures without even knowing what I was missing. To this my roommate said, "Oh yeah, once you go down, you never go back," and then we dissolved into giggles because we weren't sure if we were talking about goose feathers anymore or what).
Ahem. Anyway, back to the piano. The instrument itself was delivered in a timely fashion, but the requisite tuning that was supposed to happen shortly after its arrival kept not happening. As in, the tuner (Vladimir) was supposed to contact me but didn't, and then I contacted the company for his number and called him, and then he said, "Hey I call you back in half hour when I am knowing better the schedule," but then he DIDN'T call me back and I forgot to follow up and then we repeated the same scenario about four times over the next few weeks and then I just kept going about my glamorous, bustling life as a grad student and before I knew it, several months had passed and the piano had gone from "needs a little work" to "officially janky."
Then, as if the Gods of Timbre and Intonation could bear this situation no longer, a Hungarian dude-- not the unreachable Vladimir-- called me and very efficiently set up a tuning. At long last! On the prescribed evening, he came up to my apartment with an arsenal of tools and got to work. He was a chatty guy; in the course of the session, I learned from him that Mozart had been poisoned to death over several months by Salieri and this was clearly evidenced by the quality of Salieri's compositional output, which was "terrible and black, does not reflect any light, shows the soul of a murderer." (Hey, that would actually make a good movie plot, come to think of it). I also learned that my tuner was on his second marriage, because "as they say, we keep repeat same mistakes!"
But the most revelatory insight that the man had for me was this: "You know, your floors are verrry uneven."
Whoa. Yes, of course I knew that. I had noticed that all the time when I'd first moved in, how the crack of light under my bedroom door did not make a parallel strip but a long skinny triangle where the floor slanted down, how all of the kitchen cabinets were just slightly askew, how walking from the living room to the bathroom felt like having sea legs because here the wood bulged up a little, there it dipped, always throwing off my center of gravity. I loved it, the quirk, the old soul. My previous apartments in Schmindiana had all been '70s-era Soviet-block shoebox affairs with perfect right angles; while they had a certain charm borne of crappiness and collective student despair, they had not been around long enough to list, to sink, to become uniquely wonky through the erosion of time. I could not get over the wonk factor at first, and gushed about my crooked little Schmanhattan apartment to anyone who would listen.
Fast forward a few months to my Hungarian piano tuner pointing out the unevenness of the floors, whereupon I was shocked to realize that I NO LONGER NOTICED the unevenness of the floors, had not noticed it for quite some time, had at some point internalized the subtle geographies of my dwelling place and could navigate its idiosyncrasies on autopilot.
And with a start I began to catalog all of the aspects of This New Life that had seemed insurmountably foreign at one point but had quickly, or slowly, become routinized, ingrained. Little basic everyday things crept in first, like which key to use in which lock, which elevator button to push, how to swipe a metro card, which subway entrance to take to get to what platform. Then came the school things, like flashing my student ID to get into the library, remembering to carry cash because the first floor cafeteria doesn't do credit cards, typing my PUNY username and password into school computers-- ohhhh, I messed this one up so many times at first, my fingers deeply conditioned to input my Bleep U information, but then my typographical errors grew less frequent, old habits dying gently, until one day I did the unthinkable and inadvertently typed my PUNY info into my Bleep U account. OH SNAP. Cue the symbolism. And then one day I gave directions to a stranger off the top of my head because, well, I knew the lay of the hood. And at some juncture I started to have homicidal urges toward the molasses-y throngs of tourists that would envelop me on the three blocks between the train and school. Yes, people, I KNOW that this is a shopping district; yes, I KNOW that the Schlumpire State Building is right there and that it's tall and you're looking at it, which is why you keep bumping into me and taking up the whole sidewalk and oh great now you're posing for photos and making PEACE SIGNS and pardon me while I fucking murder you all because I need to get to the library right now and transcribe an anonymous 15th-century chanson, ok? Never mind that I had essentially been one of those hapless wide-eyed lemmings a few weeks prior.
I never thought that I would move to You Dork, let alone adjust to it. Popular opinion had, to me, depicted this city as the biggest, the happeningest, the everything-est, but also somewhat inhospitable to human life-- only the toughest could tough it out, like those strains of bacteria that can live in incredibly toxic conditions because their genetic structure is based on arsenic rather than carbon. You could get lost, become a sad anonymous bacterium in that roiling sea. This was my fear. But it turned out that the opposite was true, and that all I wanted was to be dropped into a shared space with every specimen of humanity imaginable. I wanted to look around and see impossibly beautiful people, sad broken people, people thinking brilliant crazy thoughts, people from backgrounds so drastically different from mine that I would have to scrap all prefabricated monologues about myself or the world were we ever to interact.
It was overwhelming at first, like the new set of keys and the new public transit system and the new email account, but then like those things it gradually became the fabric of my reality-- the teeming masses, the postmodern pastiche. In this pan-people stew there was no reason to be self-conscious anymore, because I fit somewhere on the people-spectrum just like everyone else. Probably not even too far from the center of the spectrum, nowhere near the whackjobbiest of the whackjobs. You have to understand that I'd always felt at odds with my surroundings before. Mismatched. An outlier, too energetic, too non-linear and heady, not enough of a diligent worker bee or a social Darwinist to hack it. But here half the population beat me at my own game of oddities and intensities and mercurial passions. And with this knowledge came a letting out of the proverbial corset that had always constricted my ribcage before, came a slowly regained ease of breathing, an acclimatization process that was almost imperceptible until one day I realized that I hadn't had a crying jag or an anxiety attack in a shockingly long time and it was maybe because the all-inclusive environment had seeped into my being and told me, "Hey, it's okay, you're not an alien on this planet, so no need to waste time feeling choked and misunderstood and why don't you just get out there and be a million percent you because nobody will notice or care otherwise?"
Doubtless the Hungarian piano tuner had not meant to kick off an elliptical self-reflective journey in me by pointing out the wobbliness of the floors in my apartment. He had only broached the subject for practical reasons, because over time, he explained, my instrument would be slightly compromised by the uneven surface. "Hokay," he said, "next time I come, I bring wood blocks to put under some of the legs. You remind me, okay?" I told him I would indeed remind him, and then our session was done so I thanked him and showed him out of the building. Then I came back to sit at the piano, which was now fully itself and ready for business.
