I spent my final winter-break as an NYU undergraduate in Scranton, Pennsylvania, celebrating Christmas at my family’s raucous annual holiday party. It was the closing days of 2019, and with graduation approaching, I had to decide what my next move was. Do I immediately go back to school? Do I take a gap year? Do I even have the money for that?
Money or no, I decided that my best bet was a gap year. All I knew was school, and I felt I owed it to myself to see more of the world than I had ever allowed myself to. Excited at the prospect of traveling, being able to say “Yeah, I’ve been there!” more often, I felt that the next year would do well to prepare me for graduate school and help me decide what it really was that I wanted to do. Home base was to be my apartment in Queens, just off of the Astoria Boulevard subway station. I loved Astoria’s laid-back atmosphere, and shared an intimate relationship with New York, walking alone through its streets, letting it help me figure out whatever issue was hampering me at any given time, and so a grand home base it would have been.
I fled the city in the middle of the semester, moving back home to Scranton. NYU had gone remote by March, and, after my roommate moved out, I was afraid of living alone during the pandemic. Within weeks, Queens would become a global epicenter.
As they say, once you live in New York, nowhere else can compare. After a few months of living in my childhood bedroom, I met a girl who agreed to spontaneously move with me to Brooklyn for a few months until a bout of bad health sent us back to Pennsylvania. We began dating the day after I graduated, celebrating in our pajamas on my couch while watching the taped Zoom presentation they had prepared in place of the traditional ceremony held at Yankee Stadium.
In this clip, Leaat asks me about why I moved to Astoria during the pandemic, and I reflect on all of the past two years’ upheavals and my return to the neighborhood:
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While attending Columbia, classes had mostly returned to in-person until we transferred to hybrid, some in-person, some online, due to a dispute between the school and it’s striking graduate students. While the return to normality did not last long, the cohort decided that the best thing to do was support the strike by holding class off-campus or on Zoom, and cancelling scheduled events until the strike concluded. Once it did, classes resumed. After the omicron variant started to weaken and the numbers dwindled, masks became optional.Paul asked me about what going to school was like during the pandemic. Here, I explain initially finding out about COVID, and the immediate impact it had on my education:
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While back at school, my income depended on monthly SSDI checks, and my side hustle: UberEATS delivery. I had delivered during college, but knew that I needed a ride upgrade. The electric scooter I had used previously had faulty brakes after a tire replacement, and rather than go through another months-long repair process, I decided to go big and, through a loan from an uncle, bought a Segway scooter; the type that cities across the country have been making available for rental periods and are now known to block sidewalks and parking spots.
Being visually impaired, I know it’s not safe to deliver food. I’ve fallen many times, fortunately most of them before I pick up or after I drop off an order, and worry often about whether or not I’m able to detect traffic as it approaches from behind. The cap on my income, less than a thousand dollars a month, has made it difficult for me to find a job that I feel would be accepting of how limited my availability would be, and one that I feel would allow me the ability to focus on school. Despite the danger, the flexible schedule that delivery offers, and the unforeseen advantage it gives me in limiting my own pay, makes it my “best” option.
In this clip George reminds me of the fall I took on my first day back to delivering after moving in, and I reflect on how my visual impairment impacts my job.
TranscriptWhen my partner and I lived in Brooklyn, we didn’t know whether it was safe to go anywhere, let alone take the subway. After we moved back to Scranton and I recovered from my illness, she began working at a restaurant, while I sat home and prepared college applications or played video games. Unable to drive, I spent all of my time in the house; she was often the only person I’d see as family and friends would have to come to me for any social occasion. We sparingly went out; we were both home bodies and COVID was still raging.
The safe approach we took continued once we moved to Astoria. I went to school while my partner took online college courses and got another restaurant job.We spent four months living in the third story unit with a beautiful view of the Manhattan skyline. I would point it out to her at night in constant awe, the lights illuminating the sky; she did not share the same love for New York as I do. Unhappy living here, and amidst a growing disconnect between us, she moved out in January 2022.
In this clip, Jo asks me about how COVID impacted my relationship, and I look back on the time my partner and I spent together. We then reflect on the end of our relationships, and the positive impact that they had on us.
TranscriptNow that I'm on my own, I know that I will not be able to continue living in Astoria. For the third time since COVID began, I will be moving from my New York City apartment to one in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Ironically, I will be moving two doors down from the apartment that my partner and I shared after leaving Brooklyn. It’s just off of Lake Scranton, and has a beautiful scenic overwatch just a few hundred yards from the development. At night during the winter, you can look through the branches of the leafless trees and see the lights of downtown Scranton, while the mountain on the opposite end of the valley is dotted with tiny specks, each representing someone’s home.
Despite not being my ideal outcome, I'm excited for what the future has in store for me in Scranton. I plan on freelancing as a journalist and becoming more well read, perhaps taking an occasional trip. All the while, I’ll be working to secure yet another return to Astoria.