Frivolous Feelings about the Big Apple

DIARY

I've tried writing this post several times, but each time I start to hate the way it begins to sound.

Something I'm dealing with among all the other chaos in my life right now it trying to reconcile the choice to live... the willingness to go to great lengths to live... in a city I've been continually lambasting for the last eight years. I know I'm unfair to New York. I haven't always been. I loved the place when I went for the YPC conference in July 1997, and couldn't help loving it again in December 2000.

There's just something all-too-tangible about the U of C New Yorkers specifically. They seemed to epitomize the sort of smug attitude and condescension, undoubtedly borne of growing up along the East and West eighties and nineties, getting rejected from all of the Ivy league picks and, of course, belovèd Columbia, and forced into an unhappy relocation to the provincial midwest.

I already had my hands full. I was nineteen, puffed full of pride for my own city state. I had my hands full with Chicagoans asking if I ate rabbits. I had no time to deal with being declined a Coke because I refused to call it a 'soda' (the Shoreland snack shop, which subsequently got shut down for illegally selling Indiana purchased cigarettes). This was the foot I started out on. Through the years, I've known New Yorkers to say with only a superficial irony that Chicago was "not even a city," that they liked to slow down when they're in the "country," and to essentially proclaim that their city was the "capital of the world." It bothered me that, in a city so defined by its multinational status, one could be so quick to forget Tokyo, Mexico City, and Seoul, all of which trump the Big Apple for size by a considerable margin. On the whole pop vs. soda debate*, it bothered me that the place responsible for incubating jazz during lean times and birthing hip hop, there could be such a casual contempt for American vernacular (they're both vernacular, by the way). And it bothered me greatly that on account of its population and prominence, New York came to stand for the whole array of social ills: poverty, crime, and so on... when in fact the most troubled of New Yorks burroughs (the Bronx) really doesn't hold a candle to Chicago's South Side, or any part of Detroit.

I think that my response was, in large part, frustration at trying to nurture my own sense of civic pride, where such an effort took all of my honest imagination and initiative, and running up against a wall of people whose civic pride was so expansive that they were out-and-out dismissive about everybody else: "We're the best in everything. You should just go home now."

And Chicagoans, and especially South Siders, are incredibly proud of their home, but part of that pride is a low-keyness about it... they're comfortable in how wonderful their town is (granted, a few have gotten on my nerves now and then... like a woman in medical records three years ago who told me Flint wasn't even a suburb of a suburb.) If you ask about it, they'll open up, and they do hope for recognition. But I see more humility in Chicago's perspective. Conversely, the Los Angeleans often seem to hold that their town is best of all, but their opinions are so inward-directed and obsessive that they rarely contest it with anyone else. For that matter, I've had Detroiters inform me that there's nothing to Flint, that it's a speck, a jealous Detroit Jr. And as Flint has painfully pulled itself out of the poorest, grossest, meanest 1% of cities, it's strange to note that we don't know what to brag about anymore.

In my heart of hearts, I still know that Flint is the greatest city in the world.

But it's a shame if that fact, and my acquaintance with some puffed up New Yorkers would ruin one of the most electric and dynamic settings in the world for me. Especially considering how much time and money and energy I am currently putting into living there.

So I'll try hard to give New York a chance.

I already have to thank several friends (Gemma above them all) for talking reasonably on this subject many times with me, and showing me what I might be missing in my frustration and insecurity.

This has been a rant.

But it's good to get out of the system.

Better to learn to love the place now than as I'm moving away.


* from Dictionary.com on tonic:

Regional Note: Generic terms for carbonated soft drinks vary widely in the United States. Probably the two most common words competing for precedence are soda, used in the northeast United States as well as St. Louis and vicinity, and pop, used from the Midwest westward. In the South any soft drink, regardless of flavor or brand name, is referred to as a Coke, cold drink, or just plain drink. Speakers in Boston and its environs have a term of their own: tonic. Such a variety of regional equivalents is unusual for a product for which advertising is so aggressive and universal; usually advertising has the effect of squeezing out regional variants. On the other hand, there are so many types and flavors of soft drinks that perhaps no single generic word has ever emerged to challenge the regionalisms.