Saturday, June 28, 2008

New York Love Letter, pt. 1

Since I plan on leaving New York in mid-August for a colder and smaller (and overall sub-par) version of a city for school, I have attempted to create lists of things that I wanted to do before I left.

It is now nearly July and I have checked off nothing. one item.
However, in so doing, I have also realized what it is that I value so much about the city.

I think what one of the things I will miss the most about New York City is the normalcy of it. After having spent my entire adult life in one city, even its oddest characters approach conventionality - from the near naked bum perpetually sleeping in the synagogue portico to the overwrought asshole who pushes you out of the way to pack into the subway car (like really, will 5 minutes kill you?)

Do people in Boston look at you askance if you use verbal niceties? In the stench-ridden bowels of the NYC subway, people are so unused to politesse, that just one 'excuse me' induces nearly everyone to jump out of the way.

Do they expend as much energy into developing innovative insults as to elevate it to an art form? (I can't even tell you what my cab driver yelled to some guy who cut him off, suffice it to say, it was truly marvelous)

Can Boston possibly have more dog poo on their streets? Or hipsters in skinnier jeans? Or more chicks in day glo leggings and chuck taylors? Can it even compare in the juxtaposition of the most disgustingly wealthy (houses replete with glass from Murano and marble from Belize, and a staff larger than the population of Iowa) and the most unwashed of the unwashed masses?(the bum pissing on said house's side stoop)

Do clubs in Boston have overly self-important thugs with clipboards determining with two withering glances whether or not your boyfriend is just a geek or a fabulously wealthy investment banker (thereby determining whether he can enter a dark room which looks exactly the same as every other dark room with a velvet rope in the city)? Can they charge more than $20 for a drink? (Of course they can't, since apparently places in Boston close at 2. 2!! Places here don't even get crowded until 2!! That is so lame.)

New York is so unabashedly unlivable, so terribly rude, so horrifically superficial that it becomes..... delightful. The combination of unpleasant idiosyncrasies that can only be found here is so unique that one will pay a half million dollars for a 200 square foot studio, just to own their own little spot in the dirtiest western city in the world.

Just like I would....

2 comments:

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