On to better places

            As my time at New York University is coming to a close, I’ve been spending a lot of my time thinking about where I would like to go after I graduate and finally excavate the piles of things that have been sitting in my room at home (mostly untouched) since I graduated from high school four years ago. Over the course of this semester, I have been thinking a great deal about the way in which I have experienced my life in New York over the past four years. While I spent a lot of time thinking about New York before I took this class, the readings that we’ve done over the course of the semester have given me a larger vocabulary to be able to express the thoughts that I’ve been having.
            Ever since I spent the summer in Nebraska in 2009, I’ve been coming to grips with the fact that I don’t enjoy living in the Northeast. Though so many aspects of my life and personality have been shaped from growing up here, and the people I have met throughout my time living in New York City (if the time spent attending New York University can actually be called that) have inspired and helped form the person I am today, I find the basic experience of living in this city (and in this area of the country in general) to be stressful in a way that other places I have lived are not.  While I enjoyed reading Twenty Minutes in Manhattan and agree with a great deal of the material it touched on (or rather, complained about), I also found that the book served as an example of a strange response that many people I know (and that I as well) have had to living in New York: making fun of it relentlessly, but also somehow taking pride in being able to weather the insanity of making a life here. At the root of this humor, it always seem to me that people (myself included) are actually just miserable as a result of their day to day life here. While I’ve taken a great deal of joy in weathering this enigma of a city for four years, my time in New York this semester has cemented that this is not the city for me – at least for now.
            My current plan for this summer is a road-trip across the country spent visiting cities I am thinking of moving to but have never been to. Now, if only I can get Kunstler’s ideas about the suburban sprawl I am bound to see out of my head…

[photo taken by me, driving from colorado to nebraska, june 2009]