Growing up, or something like it

This month, I celebrate my two year anniversary in NYC. When I first moved here, the 2 year mark was my arbitrary goal. If I made it for 2 whole years, I'd consider the experiment a success. Well, here I am almost 25, employed at the Cadillac of publishing companies and fully supporting myself. I'd say that's pretty damn good.

Something strange has happened though. Call it age, call it hormones...call it scary. The idea of doing certain 'grown up' things that used to, for lack of a better phrase, freak me out, now seems normal. When I walk around my neighborhood and see a little brick house, I think, hey I might like to have one of those. The idea of living with someone of the partner variety doesn't send me running for the hills either. Don't get me wrong, I still loathe children or at least the idea of them coming out of me, so that may never happen, but something has changed.

So. Two years in New York...I went from a cardboard box dresser to wanting to buy a house (presumably not made of cardboard). Maybe someday I will really be all grown up.



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Emily and Katie made me do it

Tourist for Life

This morning I had the distinct privilege of riding the B express train from Park Slope to Midtown. Aside from being an express train (the only way to fly), the B travels up and over the Manhattan Bridge, rising out of its tunnel like the sun rising over the East River. To the left is a close up view of the Brooklyn Bridge, its cables suspended over the water, dangerously assembled in a day before cars, let alone trains, were imagined to cross bridges.

While I craned my neck, shifting it into abstract arrangements in order to see this bridge out the window, I couldn't help but look at my other passengers, so calm and self-contained. There were readers, sleepers and daydreamers. They were so wrapped up in their own lives, schedules and thoughts (or working hard to escape them through novels), they didn't even SEE the Brooklyn Bridge, the sunlight dancing on the river or the captivating contrast of sprawling Chinatown graffiti pushed up against the perfectly polished financial district. I've been in NYC for almost two years and these scenes still grip me, still fill me with the kind of awe only an outsider can experience.

If it means I'll never be a New Yorker, so be it.
I don't want to miss this.


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To Be or Not to NYC

One truth I've discovered over the last year and a half: living in NY is a constant battle. The struggle, however, is no longer over resources, space, housing. It's over a dilemma. The dilemma. To be or not to NYC?

On any given day or night you can have anything you want: art, music, theater or socializing, dancing, sex. This city is the bona fide buffet which dictates guilt and remorse the times you opt out of the 'all you can eat'. At least this is what it looks like to an outsider. Yes NY boasts more options than you can shake a fork at, but for those of us who actually live here, the city is more than a free-for-all playground.

Sometimes it's 50 hour weeks in midtown, 20 degree walks to the laundromat on a Sunday morning and hour long subway rides because a cab just costs too damn much. Other times it's pure exhaustion, emotional damage or regret from poor decisions. Grocery shopping, lunch making, snow shoveling, bill paying. Just like anyone else, anywhere else, real life runs right along side all we have and do here.

Because of this, I've recently struggled with my decision on the nights I choose to stay home. Do I deserve my peace and quiet? Yes. Is it good to have some down time? Of course! But, even after rationalizing it here before god and all my (3) readers, I'm going to defy myself and start hitting the town. This bastion of culture and commerce is worth a little fatigue.

We may be running ourselves into the ground, but at least we're running the world.


Andy Sachs:
"But what if this isn't what I want? I mean what if I don't wanna live the way you live?"
Miranda Priestly:
"Oh, don't be ridiculous. Andrea. Everybody wants this. Everybody wants to be us. "

--The Devil Wears Prada (2006)



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Brooklyn, baby

Friday night I sped out of Manhattan, into unexplored territory: Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I'd heard enough about the scene to expect a latte foam frenzy of hipster hipness, but all the chatter in the world couldn't have prepared me for what I was to find: Williamsburg is exactly like Eugene, Oregon, but with money.

It boasts the same mix of gender-bending grungy prep that makes you want to throw a Banana Republic skirt over a pair of ripped up no name jeans. Williamsburg also forced my hand up to my forehead to frantically try and reshape my Manhattan side sweep to the Brooklyn emo bang: straight down and hanging in your eyes just enough to make them constantly water. You suffer for the cause.

I went to a tiny bar overflowing like a cookie jar, spilling mixed nuts into the street. I danced/wedged my way to the back where, after 3 glasses of my signature elixer (vodka/tonic, extra lime) and enough pumk/emo/rock bopping to put BK to shame, I started to settle in. The funny thing about the boroughs is they each work so hard to define themselves as individuals no normal individual could ever really fit into just one of them. When I'm in Manhattan, I'm too poor. In Brooklyn I'm not quite smart enough (no I cannot discuss Nietzsche with you). In the Bronx I'm too white and Staten Island, well, like most New Yorkers, I have no reason to be there.

In NYC you find, due to these literal little islands, neighborhoods and even streets, you either struggle to fit in everywhere or decide to fit in nowhere and glean what you can while you're there.

I'm going to live it up.



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The Pod People

I bought an iPod right before moving to New York with the intention of using it the way you might turn a fan on to soothe a baby to sleep (ok...so I still sleep with a fan, but whatever). I considered it a valid expense because I needed something to help me transition from a pastoral aural landscape to grinding, squealing and whining. Well, transition it did, but the iPod also did something else that I couldn't put my finger on. It made the lights brighter, the cabs faster and the romance stronger. Finally, the other afternoon, my colleague called it: "When I have my headphones in, walking through New York City, it's like I'm the star of a movie".

The pod is not just a place to escape or dampen the bad noises; it's my own personal soundtrack.

Happy Halloweiner

Halloween, New York City, Greenwich Village. You'll have to see it to believe it. And you can see it. All of it. Any of it that you want, because Halloween is All Sluts Eve. Drag queens with no pants, straight women playing out the risque version of every fairytale, woodland or otherwise affiliated creature known to man (or she-man) come out of the brickwork and literally parade up Sixth Avenue.

I had to think though, while watching the exhibition, that it wasn't that far off from the everyday. It seems that each of us in NY, including me, is a bigger-than-life version of what we want to be or who we think we are. The village has its year-round parade of the out and proud, midtown has it's stilettos & Prada and the "starving artists" in Brooklyn want to starve just a little bit more than the artists in, say, Seattle. The 'greatest city on earth' seems to inspire us all to be greater or lesser, richer or poorer, straighter or gayer than the rest of the world. We all want to shroud ourselves in the label of what we want to be, regardless of where we came from or what's underneath. Each of us has something to prove, sometimes to our parents, our bosses, our siblings, but always, always to ourselves.

One of the float emcees last night, in sequins and headdress, screamed out "If you're not in costume, you don't belong in New York City!"

How true.


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