Let's Bring This Back to Livejournal With Some Whining

So I'm listening to Mike Doughty sing about walking along the Williamsburg Bridge, leaning over and thinking 'Hey man, this is Babylon.' I've never walked along the Williamsburg Bridge, for the record. Never walked over any of the Brooklyn-Manhattan bridges, actually. I don't even think calling something 'Babylon' is a compliment. And yet here I am, totally fucking nostalgic and bummed about how my immediate future is not in New York City, a place I spent a solid five years of my life absolutely trashing. I even wrote in some entry on Oh Em Gee that NYC is, and here I quote myself (fun!), "huge, loud, rude, dirty, ugly, and dehumanizing," none of which is exactly untrue (although calling it ugly is unfair; it's really only ugly compared to Montreal. It's better-looking than Philly or Chicago, for sure), but which is definitely a way to hide that I miss that fucking place. I've lived in five cities in the past three years, and NYC was the only place where I quite literally got punched in the face. But NYC was also the last place I lived that really felt like home, felt like me--it's partly a geographic thing, I guess, since the city is only a couple hours from where I grew up, but it's also a cultural thing. I felt like the people I met there, the people I knew there, the things I did there, the work I did there, that's who I am.

Maybe it's also because NYC was the last place I lived while I really felt like my life was going somewhere. I was doing my internship at Gizmodo at the time, just out of school, and things were happening very, very quickly. One day I was smoking pot at noon on a Wednesday while a Montreal blizzard raged outside, and the next I was writing my first feature, working with my first editor, making a difference in the first job I've ever really cared about. And then my internship finished, the world economy collapsed, the publishing industry imploded (selfish bastards), and I moved back to Montreal, dispirited and discouraged. Ever since, I've been employed, but never full time; I've been occupied, but never busy; and everything just felt kind of stagnant. So maybe I'm just longing for that feeling, the feeling of doing exactly what I'm supposed to be doing, exactly when and where I'm supposed to be doing it. Maybe I'll get that feeling in San Francisco, too. I mean, I'll be working full time there, with more responsibility than I've ever had before, doing things I've never done before. But I can't seem to shake the feeling, especially after a couple months in Chicago (where I never even began to feel comfortable, not that it's fair to expect such a thing in two months), that goddammit, NYC is where I should be.

This is a whole lot of fucking whining. I really hope nobody remembers this blog exists. In case anybody does actually read this (and I'll be checking StatCounter, just in case), I'm fully aware that I'm being silly. It's a really nasty recession, and I've been offered an awful lot of money to move to California and write, from home, in my undies, pretty much whatever I want, at age 23. It might not be 100% perfect, but I feel like it's way closer than any other job I could get. Other jobs have pants requirements. Other jobs wouldn't let a snotty writer call Steve Jobs a white supremacist because he, and probably nobody else, thinks it's funny. Other jobs don't let employees call in "sick" with a hangover. And more than a few of my friends, people brighter and more ambitious than I, have gotten absolutely fucked over in the last year. Some haven't been employed in months, some since school finished, and others have had to take jobs they hate. I haven't. I've been lucky. I'm a whiner, what can I say.

I'll have fun in California, I'm sure, even if I may have to live in Oakland to avoid the hippies that bothered me so much the last time I was there. I've even possibly lined up an NYC-expat roommate. I hope this comes off as more introspective musing than insufferable whining. It's a fine line with me sometimes, I think. But I'm interested that I'm having such a strong reaction to seeing NYC removed as a possibility, even just for a year. Anyway, I'm going to post this, and check it in the morning. If I'm embarrassed tomorrow, which I kind of think I will be, I'm pulling it.

Is Babylon a compliment? Wikipedia says it means "Gateway of the Gods" but that my people use it to mean "confusing." Mike Doughty probably meant the latter, even though he's a more vocal New Yorker than anyone I know.