(no subject)

[skygiants]

For the 29th, aquamirage asked me to write some feelings and thoughts of my choice about the great city of New York.

As Meredith knows all too well, I have a LOT of feelings and thoughts about the city of New York. Right now, New York City is home. That's not surprising; I've lived here for five years. Five years is long enough to not only know where all the neighborhoods are but really know a good chunk of them, long enough that if I ever moved away there would be at least two dozen places I needed to eat one last time, and long enough that when I get off the bus at 34th Street after being away for the weekend, I look at the grimy sidewalk and the hordes of people hurrying into the subway and think "wow, it feels good to be back!"

But, I mean, I didn't grow up in New York. I didn't even spend a lot of time here growing up. I came to New York with my parents as a kid, to see Broadway shows; when I was little, New York was theater and glamor. So that's part of it.

I spent a month at Columbia University for a summer program when I was in high school. I took creative writing classes, wrote bad poetry, paid for my own laundry, went to Battery Park on July 4th to see the fireworks, met my first boyfriend (well, second, but given that the first one lasted for three weeks, I feel okay not counting him). A year later, I spent three weeks interning for Asimov magazine in New York for my high school senior project. I took the spare bed in a family friend's apartment, took myself to the movies, and didn't worry about how much time I spent alone. New York was the first city in which I learned how to live by myself. So that's part of it, too.

I don't know -- what it boils down to, really, is that I've always known that I would live in New York, and I don't know why. I'm not particularly fast-paced or ambitious or in need of constant stimulation. There's no reason that the most overpriced, overblown, overdetermined city in the United States is the city that's always felt like home to me, but that's the way it is, folks. I love the hidden bits of history that New York never seems to value the way Boston and Philadelphia do; I love that every time you take a new route, you're bound to stumble over some weird store or piece of graffiti or bizarre performance art you've never seen before. I love the rats in the subway. (THEY ADD CHARACTER.) I love the incredibly dense mythology of the city, which encompasses the Newsies strike and 42nd Street and Mrs. Astor's Four Hundred and vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley and Harlem and Ellis Island and Riot Grrl and the 2nd Avenue Deli. I love Brooklyn, and I love Manhattan, and I'm even learning to properly appreciate Queens.

Someday -- maybe even someday soon, maybe even within the next year -- I may have to move away from New York, but I don't think the city's going to ever stop feeling like home, because in a weird way it always has felt like home.

New York is the only city I don't get lost in. I guess that about sums it up.

Comments

[aquamirage]

This made me kind of emotional.

[skygiants]

<33333333

[bookblather]

That last line, urgh. Right in the feels.

What's Mrs. Astor's Four Hundred?

[skygiants]

Mrs. Astor's Four Hundred! They were the Old Money Haut Ton of late nineteenth-century New York; the (apocryphal) story goes Mrs. Astor's ballroom fit four hundred people, so four hundred people got invites to Mrs. Astor's parties, hence the Four Hundred. Everybody else, no matter how incredibly and ridiculously rich, was Not Our Sort, according to the Astors etc.

[bookblather]

Oh, so like the upper ten thousand in England? Makes sense. And also sounds hilarious. OH SNOBBERY