New York Maybe not My State of Mind

Though all the streets are crowded
There’s somethin’ strange about it
I lived there ’bout a year and I never once felt at home
I thought I’d make the bigtime
I learned a lot of lessons ’bout the quick
And now I’m tellin’ you that they were not the nice kind

-Jim Croce, “New York’s Not My Home”

(thanks to Arthur for referring me to that song).

Excuse the Simpsons-like digressions of the following post:

When I came back into my dark, sparsely-furnished apartment after photographing a church street fair in Greenpoint a couple of weekends ago on a grey, drizzly early evening, I was tired and a bit lonely.
I had just talked to people who lived on the same block their whole lives, and, as I often do when I’m reporting in neighborhoods in Brooklyn, felt like an interloper, one who had no block of familiar people to go home to myself.

When evening comes in New York, you, as a transplant in the most exciting city in the world, feel like you should be doing something.  There are bars to be drinking in, comedy clubs to be laughing in, concert halls to be dancing in (or standing and bopping your head cautiously too, if you’re a hipster—sorry, I couldn’t resist ☺ ).  And you are home, in your little unfurnished apartment, making dinner and listening to Marvin Gaye.

And yet, if you have a good book or a reliable group of friends in your neighborhood, like those people I met in Greenpoint, all of those things you could be doing out in the East Village, Williamsburg, or the Upper West Side seem like a lot of wasted time, money, and potential sleep.
That weekend, I had neither a good book nor the group of reliable friends, so I felt the anxiety bred by New York’s promise and threat that there is always something better you could be doing.
This impulse is why, I believe, the attentions of people in this city are always elsewhere, and I am guilty of it as anyone.  I don’t own a Blackberry or iPhone, but I have carried on conversations on the phone while on gchat, while reading an article, while working on a story.  The wandering attention span is the ethic of this city more even than anywhere else in this relentlessly forward-looking country.
I encountered it many times in my first couple of months here: at the end of the summer, when I saw Elliot Spitzer walking alone and unnoticed around 59th Street and Lexington; on the New York Post headline about Puff Daddy stepping in dog poo on a day when the treasury was sending Congress proposals of its bailout; in the compulsive minute-by-minute reports on the stock market over the last couple of weeks.  And in emails from the new media segment of the journalism school about the launch of yet another new website.

It is my disinterest in being a part of these dizzy, breathless worlds of the next big website or band or dessert or scandal, that make me think I am not cut out for a journalism career in this town.  In reporting, the stories I have spent the most time on, and in life, the people I have spent the most time on, are what satisfies me.

And the place I have spent the most time in, Chicago and that area, is calling to me.

I live in a strata of people who are excited by going to the next big place. We are told that we should be watching China and India, because they will be “big” whatever that means.  What it means on a daily level, which is what really matters, is that the cities there will be more crowded, polluted, and hectic than ever.  And the places that are “emptying out,” the Detroits and Youngstowns, are in turn shunned.
But, I hope that my generation will look inward a little, because there is a lot we could change in this country to make our lives more satisfying, less stressful, and more healthy if we step back from the whirlwind every once in a while.
It has taken me some time to learn this and some satisfying of my own curiosity—by studying abroad in Paris, moving to D.C., to New York—and I don’t regret any of these periods.  And I am thankful I have had the opportunities.  So I can’t get down on people who are called by the lights, because sometimes you have to live somewhere to know it is not what you want.