By now it's well established that your intrepid author has left New York after six good years, is spending the summer in Los Angeles (with a couple side trips), and come August will be a resident of the Roman-founded settlement of Londinium.
As much as it prides itself on its colorful die-hard born-and-raised natives and permanently transplanted loyalists, New York hosts, as it always has, a large transient population (embraced as all newcomers are with arms that then snake down to extract the wallets out of back pockets). Legions come and go within every city circle as pieds-à-terre are bought or sold, acting careers are attempted or abandoned, and couch-surfers tap or exhaust their supply of hosts. In my New York - a white-collar professional playground where people operate mostly as their counterparts do elsewhere, though with fewer BBQs and less fear of a DUI - I have watched friends and acquaintances join and leave since the day I myself showed up. Academic, professional, familial, and social forces tend to pull 20-somethings in many directions; sometimes this is towards New York and sometimes away from it (and most often of all with NYC not entering the picture whatsoever).
Of the departed, a small faction went bitterly and begrudgingly while another, probably smaller, jumped for joy and never looked back. The majority, the ranks of which I have now joined, have a healthy mix of emotions, at least that is my perception. The logorrhea of New York's benefits and detriments to its citizenry is a well-understood cliché by this point, and I have little original to add, but I will say this: life anywhere involves compromise, and living on modest means in New York demands extreme compromise along a few dimensions in exchange for a reprieve along others. Facing that extremity every day reminds you that continuing to live there is a deliberate and conscious choice with little room for complacency or lingering for inertia's sake. It is mostly a good reminder, and aids many a transient in deciding when the time to leave has come. Onward, then.
It is no secret, and a source of a little personal shame, that over the past two years I have contributed little to this online nook. The reasons are myriad... but this is not an apology.
Fortunately the next two years will provide fodder for more output in this space, though I will refrain from making promises that an unknown lifestyle might make untenable. Suffice it to say that I have found through the course of this venture that a staid routine tends to deprive me of source material, and as the next 24 months will be more strayed than staid I am hopeful.
For the next two out of the twenty-four I will be in LA and London, with a couple weekday trips up to the Bay Area and a weekend excursion to Vermont. If you are planning to be in any of those places within this time frame you are obligated by a strict and binding social contract to contact me.
