It’s a dreary rainy day here in New York, and I’m looking out the window and looking around my office where 80% of my clothing is packed up in bags, my bike is boxed, and I’m still sifting through things to take with me to LA and things to give to charity, and I’m feeling a little bummed out. I love New York. This is my home.
I’m sure Kristin and I will be able to make a nice home in Santa Monica as well, but … When I was growing up in Mississippi, my family was home (and they still are), but I don’t think I really ever felt at home in Mississippi. It was always too hot and I never felt like I thought the same or fit in with the culture there (although I have felt very Southern ever since I left). I loved London when I lived there, but that was half attributed to my youth romanticizing everything just a tinge.
When I left Normal, Illinois, in January 2000, I was entirely and totally lost. I’d spent 3 and half years in a flat nothing of a place, a college town, with my head in books and, honestly, too much drinking and alcohol after the first serious heartbreak of my life. I already faced a hefty burden of student debts and I was miserable.
When I arrived in New York, I suddenly found a place where I could be as straight talking as I’ve ever been and everyone else was straight back. In Mississippi, I always felt like people were talking behind this sort of veil of what should be said and what shouldn’t be said, whereas I’d always been rather blunt in speaking my mind (many friends over the years have told me that they think I’m lacking whatever filter most people have to prevent them from saying certain things; turns out I’m just honest). New York gave me the feeling of freedom that I’d been lacking in all the other places where I’d lived. I started to speak more freely with my thoughts and really matured as an individual after having lived here for even a short amount of time. I began blogging just before moving here, and here was where my blogging voice flourished and where I succeeded in being published in O’Reilly books, then hooked up with Judith, Barb, Brian, and Jason to begin blogging with Weblogs, Inc., then found the energy and drive to write PSP Hacks while blogging and working full-time at Fordham and pursuing my Doctorate. Here was where I finally learned that I could leave Academentia. I didn’t have to put up with the antiquated out-dated climb from grad student to adjunct professor to tenure track professor. The professional hazing of academy that just keeps on going on because “I had to do it, so you have to do it.” Here is where I realized I didn’t have to be a Professor. I didn’t have to be anything I’d ever steered myself into being simply because I was talented in those areas.
Here was where I met my wonderful wife. Here is where I fell in love. Here is where I married and started to build a life that wasn’t just my own, but someone else’s, as well.
Here was where we launched the new Netscape. Here’s where the world really starts and ends each day, not just because of the stock market and the news, but because there are so many people here in this one place from every culture of the world actively fighting to survive, to live, to succeed, to prosper. New York City, the greatest city in the world, New York, the greatest state.
New York, thank you for letting me be a New Yorker and a person who lived in the Bronx and a suburbanite who lived in Yonkers and Eastchester. Thank you for letting me be both a New Yorker and a Southern boy from Mississippi. Thanks for letting me be whatever I want to be. That’s the lesson you taught me, New York. That’s why I will always take you with me, I will always consider myself part New Yorker, and why I hope that someday I’ll return.
Leave a Reply