Love/Hate
August 16, 2004
Like a lot of people, the girl with the big brown eyes has a love/hate relationship with New York. She was supposed to move to LA several weeks ago, but she got a last-minute reprieve and decided to stay here instead. I had no idea that she was still in town, so when she revealed this to me in a recent e-mail, I was surprised.
She told me she received two job offers just minutes before her scheduled going-away party. I think she still went through with the party, but I can't be sure. I wasn't invited.
Anyway, she said that, as soon as she was sure she was moving to LA, she began to love New York again. Not that she thought LA would be a bad place to live. "They have cars and yards," she said. "I like those things." And so do I.
“Living in the Brooklyn hinterlands makes it easy for me to have a car, but a yard? I'm starting to forget what that is, exactly."
I explained that one of the things I miss the most from the outside world -- the one that exists beyond the New York bubble -- is plantlife. Flowers and trees, and various funny-looking Dr. Suess-type plants that I never know the names of. I told her about my friend Richard and how he just bought a gazillion-dollar house in Mill Valley. He'll be moving there with his family in another month or two. When I saw the pictures online and looked at the photograph of the deck built on a hillside, surrounded by lush plants and overlooking the green valley, all I could think was, "I'm doing something wrong."
Richard tried to convince me that although the grass in the picture was green, the grass is always greener, and that he was jealous of my life -- of my "freedom" -- but I didn't buy it. Somehow, I don't think that, as he sits on his deck in the mornings, in the shade of the trees, drinking coffee and enjoying the view, that he's going to be thinking about my freedom all that much.
The girl with the big brown eyes described her love/hate relationship with New York as seasonal. She likes it during the summer, but not during the harsh winters. I guess it made her decision to stay that much more difficult. If the opportunity to move to LA came in the middle of a New York snow storm, I'm sure she'd have moved as planned.
"I have a love/hate relationship with New York, too," I told her, "but my love/hate relationship is daily. In other words, I love it every other day. Kind of like alternate side of the street parking."
I decided that it might have something to do with the fact that all of my closest friends are leaving New York for bigger and better things. As I've written, my friend Brian is planning a year-long trip around the world. Europe, Israel, India, Thailand, Tibet, et cetera. I'm jealous of such a trip, but more than that, I'll miss him. I told the girl with the big brown eyes that Brian's first stop will be at his family's vacation house in Ireland. "I'm hoping to meet him over there, and possibly stay in Ireland for a few weeks. Maybe a month. My birthday is this October, and I can't think of anything I'd rather do than lie low in the green folds of farmland and tell my life story to the sheep. But I'll have to see how my finances play out, since I've been more-or-less jobless the entire summer."
I realized that, as usual, all I'd done was blab about myself, so I was sure to ask her about the job offers that kept her in New York. "Which one did you take?" I asked, "Are you a glamorous full-time hand model now?" It's possible. She has beautiful hands.
