Living Everywhere

I was walking around NYC yesterday and I was thinking how I absolutely love and adore New York.  But only part-time.  Or as a tourist.

New York has basically everything and I do love the mood of the city.  It does have its disadvantages, too.  It's so weird how people's attitudes and lifestyles are so contrapuntal when comparing California (like specifically LA, San Diego, and San Francisco) and New York.  Here everyone that is a regular New Yorker is all neuroses and anxiety.  There are so many control freaks it kills me.  And I definitely get a little anxious and neurotic just being around them. But there is a vibrancy and a life to the city that I do really like.  Living here and working twenty hours a week would be great - to be able to enjoy my life and not let all the neuroses infiltrate and to be able to find the time to relax here would be amazing.  As a tourist, too, New York is amazing.  There is just so much to do and you can enjoy it and fall in love with it because it's on your own time that you're absorbed completely into the city until you can't see or feel anything anymore except the lights, noise, and traffic zooming through you.

Most places I have lived in for a time were really nice initially.  Cities and towns can bring you in by what appears to you to be their newness, their foreign-ness, their simultaneous strength and fragility, their malleability, their ambiguity to be whatever you want them to be while at the same time being whatever it is they intrinsically are.  Of course, what to you is new and exciting is to someone else a loathed or boring old town or city they can't wait to leave or a regular place filled with its ghosts and possibilities. 

I've lived in different places and the only place I've ever really wanted to stay was LA. Part of me still does.  But there are lots of great places out there.  It would be nice to live in them all, for a time.