Before I moved here, when I spent many free hours devouring all the NYC information I could find, I often came across articles discussing how long you had to live here to actually count as a real New Yorker, or just what had to happen to you as a sort of christening before you could claim the title. Obviously, all these opinions are subjective, but ever a fan of lists, I have my own theories- my own sort of mental…
Hello fellow citizens of this planet, and greetings from cold and snowy Queens. How have you been? Are the winter blues hitting you now that it’s February, which is arguably the longest month of the year? I sit amid my piles of slushy snow, looking at pictures of my friends in Florida, and toasting my feet on my radiator as I sift through bankruptcy claims for errors day after day. The toasting is necessary, because I’ve discovered recently that I…
A couple weeks I sat in a coffee shop feeling particularly homesick and forlorn and in need of adventure and decided to see what it would cost to go somewhere for the weekend, anywhere cheap. So I began browsing inexpensive flights and lo and behold, there was one for that very weekend to Charlotte. On a whim I snatched it up and spent the next few days of work just barely able to contain my excitement as I waited for…
…your bag never weighs less than about fifty-three pounds. It is liable to contain any or all of the following items at any time: a pair of shoes, two full meals, an umbrella, a banana, a five pound bag of flour, a book or maybe two, enough chargers and headphone cords to tie up a prisoner, pepper spray, an actual pepper, keys for all the twenty-three locks in your life, a hat, a sweater, a large box of cookies for…
Contrary to appearances, I am alive and not dead. When I planned to move here, I thought, I’ll have so many adventures and stories to tell, and since I won’t have any friends, I’ll have all the time in the world to write them! I planned to write voraciously, and perhaps I’d even be so bold as to write a book! Well. How the mighty have fallen. It is true that I have so many adventures worth writing about here….
Do you ever get these little ditties stuck in your head that won’t leave for years and years? I do. There’s a line I heard once that runs through my head with shocking frequency, “Love is patient, love is kind. Love means slowly losing your mind.” Why it has stuck is anyone’s guess, but it pops in at the most random and inopportune moments to say hello. There’s another one that’s slightly less morbid that often comes to mind as…
I don’t spend a lot of time being scared of my surroundings in the city. Perhaps I’m naive, but I carry my pepper spray (when I remember it) and watch my surroundings and usually I feel pretty safe. That said, there are a certain number of things that I deal with here that are just downright scary. Would you like to hear about them? One. I get so nervous in turnstiles. Am I alone in this fear? I don’t too…