you can't take it with you

Back when I left London I kept meaning to do a post like this, but in my mind it had so many items in it that it went on and on AND ON for days endlessly and it just seemed to me that no one wanted to read me blurbling on endlessly about how much of an Anglophile I am.

This list, however, will be decidedly more brief.

Things I'll Miss About New York, In No Particular Order

Public Transportation
I love to drive. Love. To. Drive. In fact, there are few things I find more therapeutic than being behind the wheel of a car and blasting my music at a volume that should have damaged my hearing permanently by now. But when you live in a city that provides efficient public transportation, you get to do things like fall asleep on the way home from work, stumble home drunk without killing yourself or anyone else and get caught up on the book you're reading while someone else hauls you in to the city every morning. You also get to opt out of some of life's little annoyances like, say, paying a car note and worrying about insurance rates. And since most train stations require a little walking to and from, you're forced to get up off your ass a tad more than you are in suburban America.

General Abundance of Just About Everything
In most cities, even the bigger ones, you can name the neighborhoods that have the good stuff. Like this neighborhood has good shopping, that neighborhood has good restaurants, etc., etc., so forth and so on. In New York, everywhere has everything. There is a good restaurant on every block. There is a fancy boutique or a great thrift store within spitting distance of everywhere. No matter where you are, uptown, downtown, East side, West side, you can find a fun little dive bar and a place to get homemade ice cream and even a Kosher pizza joint that serves Halal kebabs at 3 in the morning. You want it? We got it. It's like the slogan of A.A. Schwaab's, a famous store full of random crap on Beale Street in Memphis: if you can't find it here, you don't need it.

You Want Fendi, You Want Gucci, You Want Prada?
Don't overthink it. One of the best things about New York is stolen designer handbags, and half the fun is being dragged underneath the Canal Street subway station by a frightening looking Asian man and through a tunnel of underground rooms to barter for them.

Bagels, Pizza and Cheesecake
Do I need to elaborate? I think we've discussed this before.

Being At The Center of Everything
This one's kind of a double-edged sword. I will miss it, sure. But for the past eight or nine months, I've been so poor and so hard up to find a job and so lacking any means to do much of anything that I haven't even been able to experience this intangible quality of the Big Apple. I haven't been able to experience much at all. It's sad to leave, knowing that I do love this city so much, but on the ever-present other hand is my desire to make the center of everything be wherever I am at that moment. I'm tired of feeling like I failed at life because I decided I didn't want to live in New York, the "greatest city on Earth." Maybe the greatest city on Earth isn't so easy to pin down. Maybe it's wherever I am, having adventures, discovering new things and living. Really living. That's my greatest city, that's my center of everything. So maybe I'm not really leaving this one behind, so much as I'm departing to discover it.

It's been real, New York. Don't miss me too much now, you hear?


cheers,
elizabeth