If you can make it Here?

Earlier this week there was a taxi cab parked in my back yard. Every Friday a siren goes off throughout the neighborhood at 8pm sharp and lasts for about a minute to 2 minutes. I looked up to see a star the other day but all I could make out was a satellite. Sometimes I get very worn out on the concept of New York .

A lot of the time I look at it like a challenge to live in NYC. I think its a fascinating place with tons of people from all over and tons of opportunity to experience whatever it is you want to experience, but more often than not I'm tired of getting cat calls in my neighborhood, I'm tired of getting jostled on busy streets and actively avoiding certain streets because they are so riddled with tourists stopping and staring upward, making it so that you can't get through. I'm exhausted by the filth that deposits itself on my windows and my lungs, I'm tired of being in steamy smelly subway stations and smelling urine on any given street corner.

So what is it that keeps me here? Maybe its a desire to prove myself, maybe its stubbornness in not wanting to move yet again, and not being sure where I'd want to go anyway, but beyond all this, sometimes I think part of me looks at it this way: If I can find peace in NYC then maybe I can find peace wherever it is I decide to go. Maybe if I can meet this challenge everything else will be a lot easier to handle and a lot less scary for me. Or maybe its something else...

I had a client this evening tell me that he was sure I grew up with rose bushes and little puppy dogs and a nice house. He said he felt like I couldn't understand him becuase while I grew up like that, he grew up in 1970's New York with broken bottles and pit bulls. Maybe in a way thats what I'm trying to understand about this place. New York has become such a mockery of itself, such a Disney Land for grown-ups that maybe I'm trying to stay here to figure out what it means to have grown up that way, to be born in a place that has seen such opposing sides of the spectrum, and to understand that pull that New York has on so many people, residents and tourists alike- myself included. New York, if nothing else, is a fascinating social experiment for the simple fact that you have the uber rich and the utterly poor all within the same city and you have so many different and oftentimes opposing cultures living in such close proximity, yet they all somehow manage to coexist. What I want to know is how and why.

I don't think anywhere else on the planet is quite like NYC and I think that That- regardless of all the sexual harassment, garbage, extravagance, and over the top capitalism- is what keeps me here. At least until I have a somewhat satisfying answer to my how and why...or grow tired of trying to figure it all out.