To Live

So with the recession and the mid-life career strategizing and everything else, it has become clear that we need better living arrangements in New York or else we are going to end up killing each other out here in Queens in this tiny apartment.

Using the livability calculator, one ends up in Park Slope. Where do you end up?

The Livability Calculator

The calculator was found in this article:

Most Livable Neighborhoods in New York

Of course, all I want is my yellow California bungalow, my swarm of upbeat California friends and my old dog back.

But until that can be arranged, we need to figure this out.

New York is an odd place. Because I grew up very close to the city, it always seems so past tense to me. It is hard to feel like this is the present. Not to mention the strange way that people clump into their old timey groups---socioeconomically, creatively, ethnically, you name it. Just seems so frigging old world to me. Why are people still doing this?

In addition, as I have stated, the idea of having a house in the country in order to get your fix of greenery seems outsized and downright annoying. Though a car is prudent. I never feel more normal than when I am banging over that Triborough Bridge to the mainland of the United States in search of suburbia, woods, streams, small towns, mountains, apples, what-have-you.

The geography of the east coast is simply fantastic---because of all these chunks of crazy shaped landmasses sticking into the Atlantic in all sorts of directions. You cannot get bored looking at the maps, even.

But something sticks in my craw here. It is the old world thing. I am not much for separation-identity-history. I am more of a futurist. And this place feels much attached to the past.

I even experience Paris as being more in than present than this place.

Over time, I will figure out if it is me or if it is the city or, most likely, the combination.

One does want to break through this feeling.