You know if I had a shred of maturity, the following thoughts would have probably crossed my noodle upon realizing that I have, in fact, been living in Manhattan for 6 whole months: 1) I should probably find a doctor 2) I should probably find a dentist 3) I should totally let the DMV and/or the government know I'm not in CA anymore.
Nope.
Instead, I realized today that this little milestone would be best celebrated with a nice, fat blog post and an accompanying link on my Facebook wall. After all, you're nobody until somebody on Facebook loves you, right?
Anyway, here is how 90% of my conversations have been going since I moved here:
Me: Hi, I'm Danielle. I just moved here.
Stranger: Really? Where from?
Me: California
Stranger: San Francisco? Oh, I'm Blah-Blah by the way.
Me: Nice to meet you Blah-Blah. Los Angeles actually.
Blah-Blah: Oh I hate LA. What brought you here though?
Me: Work. My firm acquired a smaller firm and they didn't have a person that does what I do so I asked and then came.
Blah-Blah: Wow. That was stupid. You know it gets, like, really cold right?
Me: No I didn't know that. Please, tell me more....
My sister came about a month after I did. She was fortunate enough to secure gainful employment rather quickly, which makes me happy because doing this alone would be really hard. Moving here is, in many ways, exactly what you think it will be, but also different that you could possibly imagine.
The other day I saw that one of our execs has a small, decade-old tattoo on his calf of the Flaming Lips lyric, "Somebody please tell this machine I'm not a machine." This is a particularly ironic thing to see on a New Yorker because in contrast, this city is a machine and to survive here, you have to become a machine within it. There's no time to shit your pants with wonder and bewilderment, you just need to get your ass on the subway and get to work. Just start living here. The neat thing though is that's really all there is to it. The little things fill themselves in as you go.
New Yorkers don't necessarily work longer or harder hours (although some certainly do). It's more that they move and work with a sense of purpose that, well, just gets shit done. Once I figured out what I was doing (a process that consists mainly of figuring out how to get around), and invested in a badass pair of headphones (I call them my Quiet Goggles. Don't ask), I found New York can actually be a very calm place to function in. Of course let's not forget that I've had 26 years of 'hella-good' Northern California training on how to stay calm in the face of inconvenience. While I am certainly the most high strung among people I know back home, I am positively Zen-like compared to some of the characters I've come across out here. To these guys (angry bankers, angry Italians), freaking out is an art form. Marbles are lost right before your very eyes on an hourly basis.
Living here is indeed like living on another planet. For starters, everything I visually knew about the world around me was blown to smithereens in a matter of days. Beautiful brownstones with fire escapes line the streets of some areas while highrises seem to grow out of the ground (and out of eachother) in others. There are no parking lots or gas stations anywhere and I haven't seen stucco yet. Of course there is no time to question this madness because again, you sort of just have to trust it and jump right in without hesitation. Transportation, feeding yourself, and doing your laundry all require complete trust that the Machine will operate on schedule. With the exception of businesses in Chinatown closing one day in the middle of the week for no damn reason at all, it pretty much always does.
10 Things I Noticed in the Early Days:
1) New Yorkers' bark is louder than their bite. The big guy behind the pizza counter will tell you to 'move-your-friggin-ass-I-gotta-business-to-run-here!' but then hug you on your way out and thank you for buying a 'pie.'
2) New Yorkers love San Francisco and hate LA. Especially if they've never been to LA, then they really hate it.
3) Everyone wants to know where you 'summer.'This means they're asking you where you go on the weekends when the weather is sweltering and the whole island smells like hot trash. Fire Island, Shelter Island, Hamptons, Jersey Shore, The Roof of Your Apartment with a Bottle of Champagne, etc.
4) Walk-ups blow. 6 stories, no elevator. Horseshit.
5) There are as many people from Michigan in New York as there are in LA. And because I attract Michigan friends like the Europeans once attracted the plague, I've collected a few already. I even know how to hold my hand out like a map and tell you where they're all from.
6) I meet alot of people who have never been to California and it blows my head off everytime.
7) Within a month or so you can start identifying what area people are from by their accent. 6 months in I can spot New Jersey walking up behind me.
8) New York is a bad place to be in a bad mood. When you're ragin'...the whole world rages with you. Not a damn thing gets done and you really don't feel any better.
9) GrubHub is proof that god loves New Yorkers and wants them to go to bed with warm, full bellies.
10) I miss Mexican food more than you know.
I love New York very dearly. My attitude and business style agrees with it here. I find the lack of bullshit refreshing. The thing is though, you imagine a certain ideal during the process of moving here (lest you'd never have the motivation to go). Once you get here, however, you realize it's a massive city just like any other (except, you know, really massive), and its going to take awhile to build a life here and feel at home. In the meantime though, I put myself at the mercy of the machine everyday and hope to sweet baby jesus it turns out alright. So far I have not been disappointed. I am about 15 times stronger and more resourceful than I thought I was, and I have many newfound talents that include but are not limited to knowing the perfect corners on which to best score cabs, instinctively knowing just when the bus comes so I head downstairs at just the right time, and being able to tell just from the location and awning of a place if the food is going to be any good. Moving to a new place that is so far away is unbelievably hard. I still wonder how my sister and I were able to have the good fortune to just up and do this. Now that we have, I'm beginning to find that diving in headfirst really is the best approach. After all, this city and magical and I have really nothing to lose except everything, right?
