I always knew I identified with Peppermint Patty for a reason.

Continuing to read some other blogs about New York twentysomething life, I have realized that I am disappointed with my own experience so far. It seems like I keep sabotaging myself somehow and setting myself up for that disappointment. Like every time I try to hit one of my goals I miss by a quarter inch. And then I get surly. And then it makes things even worse.

I am disappointed that I live in Prospect Lefferts Gardens. It takes me about 40 minutes to get to midtown from where I live. Late nights on the subway it has taken me over two hours to get home, with crazy transfers and a Q train that recently decided not to go through at Atlantic (instead they make you transfer from the D line, which is one of the most obnoxious transfers I have had to make). The annoying building I live in wouldn't be nearly so bad if it were, say, the first stop in Brooklyn or, say, in Manhattan somewhere. I don't feel safe in my neighborhood late at night. I don't feel like I can walk the ten blocks to the closest Duane Reade if I need to. It's not New York. Not really.

I live in PLG because I was desperate for an apartment. I took the first thing I could get--300 square feet with lots of closet space, a full-but-small kitchen, and a full bath for $900 a month. For $900 a month I should have looked in Washington Heights more.

I was desperate for an apartment because I didn't make an acceptable long term living arrangement that would allow me to sleep on someone's couch for three months...everyone seemed to need their couch for something else once every couple of weeks. My best friend Alecia lives three hours upstate, an hour north of the last stop on the Hudson line of the Metro North Railroad. Her house was the closest place I had to park my boxes and rest my head until I found that apartment I so desperately wanted. I hit a deer with my car during my three hour commute that first month.

I didn't make an acceptable long term living arrangement because I couldn't ask for one from PDF, who I had barely spoken to in years before my visit last July. I couldn't ask for one from cousin Jeannie because she has so much going on all the time that I just feel in her way when I'm around her. The big one though, is that I couldn't ask for one from Aunt J. I can't ask her for anything. I can barely talk to her without getting nervous and frustrated...

When I actually spend time with her it's so nice! She's really funny and relatively easygoing...relatively because everyone on that side of my family, including me and my sister, is typically very high strung and hard to please. So she's relatively easy gong (for one of my relatives), and it's obvious that she cares about me. Her girlfriend R, as is typical of people who marry into that side of my family, is very warm and sweet and incredibly approachable.

I love hanging out with them. I want to do nothing else! I want to tag along with their entire life! When I rented my apartment, a block and a half away from Prospect Park, I imagined their house, a half a block away from Prospect Park on the other side, in trendy and safe Park Slope. I imagined waking up on a Saturday or Sunday morning and putting on my goofy neon green shorts and my ipod and running out through the park, and all of a sudden I see Aunties J and R throwing the frisbee to their sweet little dog. They wave me over and we all have a nice time running around and frisbeeing. And then we go have brunch in Park Slope. What happens to my running shorts in this particular fantasy, I do not know, because I definitely do not wear them to brunch.

I guess I'm afraid of Aunt J because someday I want to grow up and be just like her, a successful filmmaker, a former Manhattanite who abandoned the noise and the grit for the sunny side of Propsect Park, living in a homey 4th floor brownstone apartment with my pets and my girlfriend or whoever, turning 40 and looking back and feeling like I accomplished something.

There's more than that though. My sister and I often wonder if that side of the family sometimes doesn't want us around because we remind them of him, of my dad. For a long time, particularly during my teenaged years after Mom got remarried, we felt like the Aunties were the only people we could talk to about him...so every chance I had, every time I saw one of them, I would press for more information like a squirrel frantically collecting nuts before winter sets in and all the nuts are gone. It may have made me a little one-dimensional in their eyes.

I guess a little of that goes both ways, like when I see Aunt J it's hard not to think of her in terms of her relationship to my father (his youngest sibling). She was thirteen when I was born, and by the time I could really remember stuff she had gone to college, so I don't remember her much from my childhood. From what I do remember of her, she used to tease me, but in the nice way that grownups tease little kids they love. Like in the same way that my dad was funny, but in a way I didn't understand when I was a little kid. I guess in a lot of ways it feels like every time we look at each other or talk to each other my dad is sitting right there in the middle, and a little bit in the way.