These pretzels are making me thirsty

No, seriously---I'm eating pretzels, and they're making me thirsty.

But I am also having trouble organizing this post, and thus I decided to lead with a non-sequitur. I am by no means an experienced blogger, so I have not yet mastered the art of the pointed post.

Anyway, since returning from Thailand three weeks ago, my mind has been buzzing with activity and unfinished business. I had hoped to ease into the chaos that I knew would come in May and June and allow myself some time for reflection and reintegration from the disorientation and bizarre-ness of Southeast Asia. No such luck.

Much of my energy has been focused on finding an apartment, which, finally, we did, and we are signing our lease this week. Both Sarah and I had romanticized what we thought the search would be like; in the end, it was pretty degrading. At times, it even made me hate New York. One day, when I was tired of craigslist and fake apartment listings online, I started going door-to-door, asking doormen about vacancies and management companies. I wandered into the lobby of a building once occupied by an old friend of Sarah's, and approached the doorman confidently.

"Excuse me," I said, "Do you know if there are any vacancies in the building?"

"Coop,gottabuy," he mumbled quickly and almost incoherently, without looking up from his newspaper. Just then a 17-year-old, disheveled kid and his tattooed, heavily pierced girlfriend wandered through the lobby. The doorman immediately stood at attention, and greeted them enthusiastically.

"Good afternoon, sir!" he remarked, before returning to his seat and continuing to ignore me.

That experience neatly sums up what most of this apartment search has been like: I constantly feel as if I am not wealthy enough, not entitled enough, not worthy of being part of the Manhattan in-crowd. It's an ugly side of the reality of New York City life.

BUT, thanks to our lovely, charming and down-to-earth broker, Jay (I wouldn't believe such a person existed, either, if I hadn't met him myself), we found a place that we are quite happy with. A place that, overall, is a good compromise, and has helped me come to terms with the fact that adult life rarely lives up to the fantasies we have for it when we are children.

Yet in so many ways, it dramatically exceeds those fantasies.

Standing in the empty apartment with Sarah, I dreamt of endless possibility: what our apartment will look like, what our friends will think, what our lives will be like together. Some of these thoughts fill me with excitement, others provoke anxiety. The reality of moving in with someone truly sets in when you stand in a bare apartment together and plan the layout of your furniture as someone hands you a scary-looking document and requests your signatures. It isn't romantic, it isn't a fantasy---it's hard work, it's scary, and it can be incredibly stressful. I think I knew to expect this going in, but managed to deny it as the search began. But the process also filled me with an emotion that I didn't anticipate: pride.

Looking at Sarah, looking at our empty apartment full of possibility, knowing that I am starting my first real job, and knowing that we are working for all of this together really makes me proud.

And like I should probably stop eating these pretzels.

Well, here goes...

Last night, during a lovely dinner at Northern Spy Food Co. in Alphabet City, my girlfriend, Sarah, suggested that I start a blog.

I've tried blogging before:

- In college, I had a whiny livejournal that I rarely updated.

- When I moved to New York, I started keeping track of all the restaurants and bars I visited with the intent to start a food blog. Five years later, the interwebs are rather saturated with food blogs, and I now have a comprehensive spreadsheet that includes every one of the over 650 restaurants I've been to. So far, this has proven to be... not at all useful.

- Last year, my roommate and I started a blog with the rather nebulous goal of commenting on all the amusing things around us, but that lasted all of two weeks.

So, why will this be different?

This blog will not be just about food, or cooking, or wine, or my own aimless ramblings, though I plan to include all of those things. Instead, this blog will focus on my time as a psychiatry resident at Bellevue Hospital.

If you're not familiar with Bellevue Hospital, it is the nation's oldest public hospital. Currently affiliated with NYU Medical Center, it has a(n infamous) reputation in the media as a psychiatric institution. Bellevue is so much more than that--it offers world-class care, completely free of charge, in nearly all medical specialties to anyone who walks in the door--but its psychiatric facilities are reputable for good reason: its psychiatric emergency room---its Comprehensive Psychiatric Emergency Program, or CPEP, as it is known---is where some of the most challenging psychiatric patients with the most mysterious, difficult and disturbing psychopathology are sent. In the city of New York. Where there is plenty of psychopathology to go around. Lest I exaggerate or say something unprofessional, I'll leave the description at that, as Bellevue also treats far less severe patients. But, as I hope you will see in the coming months, it is quite a place to work. And I intend to describe it for you, in detail.

This, of course, without violating the amorphous but still very serious guidelines of HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. I will not discuss specific patients, nor will I reveal any potentially objectionable details, such as personal health information. But I will tell you all about what a crazy trip it is to work here, so to speak.

Why did Sarah's idea inspire me more than the blogs I've started--and quickly abandoned--in the past? Well, for one, there have been several books written about Bellevue, but few blogs. I also enjoy writing and sharing my experiences and talking about my life, and I'm hoping that the public introspection will ultimately help me to become a better shrink. But most important, I'm learning that, as applicable to so many things in my life...

Perfection is the enemy of the good.

So this time, I'm just going to write, and see where it goes.

We really hit the ground running with a first post, as Sarah and I are in the middle of a frantic search for a new apartment. We have a lead on the lower east side---far from transportation, but very spacious and beautiful and in a truly fantastic neighborhood. Currently I live in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and my neighborhood and my apartment and my roommates make me unreasonably happy. Deliriously happy. This apartment reminds me of my neighborhood in Brooklyn, but there is something about it---something about how far it is from my comfort zone, something challenging, almost something dangerous---that I find very attractive. And terrifying. But more about this in a future post. This is enough for now.