Last week I moved to the apartment Ian and I will share in…65 days. Moving is odd, because afterward I feel exhausted and stressed and just want to go home and veg on my own couch. And I technically can, but then I realize that my house doesn’t feel like home, and I don’t know where anything is, and there is nowhere in the whole world I can go right now that feels quite homey. Of course, the feeling wears…
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…
When you mention New York City, several reactions tend to come up. First, you have the cynics who shudder at the thought of stepping foot in such a grimy concrete jungle and think it is where the worst of humanity collects to poison this fair country. On the other hand you have the romantics who have played tourist here and whose eyes sparkle with Rockefeller lights and stoplights; whose memories are threaded with thin crust pizza and yellow taxi cabs,…
I wasn’t sure what to call you at first. Fellow exile? No, that makes it sound like we’re being persecuted. Fellow displaced person? But we aren’t refugees. This extraordinary season we are living in makes me incapable of even addressing you properly, but regardless, I wanted to write to you.
…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…
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…
Here’s the thing. I knew church in the city would be cool. There are several well known options I had visited and loved before I even moved here, options such as The Brooklyn Tabernacle and Redeemer Presbyterian. The trouble isn’t so much not having a church to attend, but rather, having too many options to make a choice! Do I attend the one that’s closer by, or the one with more comfortable pews (come on, you think about that too),…
I sit at the table in the food court in Flushing, unfamiliar yet comforting smells and sounds swirling around me. Directly across from me sits a pretty young woman, earbuds in, absorbed in her reading as she deftly makes her way through her bowl of slippery noodles with her chopsticks. My own deftness is lacking, and I wince internally whenever I drop a particularly large noodle back into my soup, and glance at her surreptitiously to make sure I haven’t…
So there’s something you should know… …In case you didn’t know already. It’s true- this pineapple is gonna go find some New York City stripes. And yes, I’m as surprised as you are. The whole thing is a massive series of surprising events for me. I’ve been dreaming about living in the city for so long that I’m pretty sure I won’t think it’s real until several weeks in when I’m sitting on my lumpy bed eating cabbage and nothing…
Dear New York City, I first encountered you when I was a wee child, on my way to JFK to pick up my big brother from his endless stint in Ghana, Africa. It was only six weeks that he had been gone, but to my mind it may as well have been years. There was perhaps a fleeting and distant glimpse of Lady Liberty as we passed by, but my most vivid memory is sitting in the airport terminal, watching…