Leaving New York tomorrow.
The entire ecology of the city seems to depend on people getting fed up with the high rent and leaving. People seem to be so obsessed with "real" things (Where are you from? What's your name? No, where are you "really" from and what's your "real" name) yet everyone's orgasming over the giant colorful Jeff Koons aluminum-balloon animals (not that those are fake). Everything's made to be easily digestible and chewing is an antiquated gesture, with $12 fresh-pressed 20oz juices and bite-sized you-name-it-food-truck-'thing.' 'Cheapest parts of town' (um, but Zosia Mamet lives in Bushwick and Vogue says it's among the top 7 hippest place in the world) have the most expensive beer, because that's hip, and the 'expensive parts of town' have expensive beer, because because. And yes, too much is too important so nothing becomes important anymore, and all you are compelled to do (or tell your friends you have enough time to do) is to spew out platitudes, just like what I'm doing now! But you go on, even though the city seems to punish you for not being ambitious enough, no matter how much you're winning in this race of how much unpaid, long hours of work you can do. Knowing and fully embracing that you aren't headed toward some grand American Dream destination at the end (*insert metaphor of light*) but perhaps you could save up enough to take a weekend Airbnb trip to the Hamptons at a certain point, or at least take a cab from Uptown all the way to Bushwick for momentary feeling of luxury even though it will actually take much longer. Maybe it's not sadistic at all that you're choosing to sit at Starbucks so that you can charge your phone to use Google Maps instead of exploring freely and wandering into some quaint cafe, and certainly what's the point of whining about how technology has changed the contemporary human condition ya-dih-ya-dah etc. It's a blessing and a curse and everything between that every experience that the city offers is meticulously curated, but isn't that what 'locations' do in general? This place lacks but also offers everything possibly imaginable in concentrated espresso shots in the form of 'neighborhoods.' It's too zoned and not zoned enough. I feel too hip and not hip enough. Nothing, especially in terms of the correct entrance into Williamsburg oyster bars, seems obvious to the naked eye, but then why am I calling everything "heavy-handed" and rolling my eyes? Why do I feel like with all of this I am just going back and forth to my same deli and getting my same basket of food and abandoning it in my subletted kitchen because I feel too awkward and I just order in anyway (I should have done that in the first place & *insert narrative of guilt cycle regarding wasting time and money*)? In this very definition of the 'melting pot,' I feel exotified even (especially) when I'm buying fried chicken in Koreatown, and is it true that somehow made me feel safe and so I had more Korean food here than I ever did in Korea? Even as I write I feel that I am late for something, there has to be something I was supposed to attend to but forgot, and the RSVP said there is strictly no late admittance but the event will start half hour late anyway. We are all millennial tropes wanting to/unable to escape, mocking but making art about Millenarianism so that must have something to do with our 'right' to have deep, profound, philosophical, thoughts, thoughts thoughts. So, much ado for nothing, and I should hope that I'm not more twisted than I hoped to be, but why am I already trying to book the next plane ticket back to New York?
