Skip to main content

The New York Fraud

In for my second round with Gotham, with 13 years and counting, I feel like I may be slightly qualified to write about this point: The costume of attitude, and of course clothes, that we New Yorkers don to stress our exalted status in the cosmos.

Like me, Susan Sawyers, a great blogger on The Huffington Post, has recently made the flip from Cali to Gotham, and wrote about her experience for the past nine months. And I have to say, we Manhattanites did not fare so badly, but not so well.

But even those of us who aren't exactly native, but aren't exactly newbies, still feel the sting, and often, when we step out of line. Like the woman with the Parents League, who after I called to find out nursery school options for The Rabbit, informed me I had missed all the deadlines for any "good" school and asked, "What were you thinking?" In my stressed out state, having spent the past 4 months buying our new place in the Lower East Side, I told her, "Moving." She seemed to think that meant to Gotham, rather than between its zip codes, and softened her stance.

I remember the night we arrived back in New York. Mine for a second tour of duty, The Prince for his first. We were holed up in a midtown hotel, a semi-luxurious place with sweeping views of aggressive Times Square, and had arrived an hour earlier from London where we had lived for the past year. I remember staring out at the street below, and knowing, as The Prince did not, the city armor I would have to painfully grow back.

New York is an incredible place. And as Susan writes, there has been much already penned about it. And yes, we have extraordinary art, music, the best in the world of much. But really, when you come home after work, after school, does it matter if the view from your living room window is the Empire State Building or twin birch trees?

I know what I think.

I also know that I can't ever completely shed my New York skin until, or if, I leave this place if I don't want to feel battered and bruised each day. But I can try and make it a softer landing for those who arrive like I did the first time, launched into a city that felt like a crowded 6 train during rush hour — no one, please god, wants you to try and squeeze in. Somehow, though, they always, albeit begrudgingly, make room.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Oh, my golly gosh. It's the armor that I so fear will reappear. Who needs it... But you articulate this so beautifully. Somehow, perhaps together, we'll take Manhattan, Mama.

Popular posts from this blog

Apologies for being incommunicado this week and hope none of you out there are too distraught not to be receiving the usual almost-daily MotV missives. The reason for the silence is that I'm up to my neck, metaphorically-speaking, in research papers for my first grad course assessment. This experience has made me realise how rigorously un-academic I am in my thinking. It has also illuminated how reliant I am on red wine in order to get through endless evenings typing furiously on my laptop, not to mention the fueling of increasingly colorful curses that I feel obliged to aim at the University's online library system which consistently refuses to spit out any of the journals I'm desperate for (I refuse to believe this is 100% due to my technical incompetence...) Oh well, if this is the price one has to pay in order to realize a long-cherished dream then it's not all that bad... No one ever said a mid-life career change would be easy. Wish me luck!

Environment

Being an expat, a favorite topic of conversation is 'where I/you want to go next?' or 'When do you plan to go home?' It's a good question. I'm not sure I want to stay in Dubai for ever, but I'm also not sure about how long I want to be here for or where else I would like to live. For almost the first time ever, I have no fixed plans apart from keeping my eyes and mind open to interesting opportunities. And as to going 'home', I have no idea where that is. Constantly moving around as a child left me with the feeling that 'home' is wherever I am right now, so in effect 'home' could be anywhere. The longest I've ever lived in one fixed place was 18 years in London, on and off, but that doesn't feel like 'home' either - I love going back to see family and friends, and it's a great place to shop, but that's about it. I have a great love for California, which is where my extended family is from (and where most of the