I always end up watching Sex & The City episodes on airplanes. I caught the first one yesterday on the plane to NYC. Which is where I am now. I’ve been eating Tasti-D-Lite and watching some of the classic episodes from Season 2 to remind me that the show used to have redeeming features. Also, the show makes SO MUCH MORE sense to me now that I have spent time in NYC. Actually, it makes more sense now that I’m in my thirties, period.
I’m in NYC today for work. It’s COLD here. I have a nice warm coat, and insulated gloves, and suede boots with wool socks, so it isn’t too bad for me. There were snowflakes today though. Yet I still loved walking through Midtown today, from my office at 52nd and 5th, all the way down to my hotel at 39th and 8th. I absolutely love walking in New York. I love seeing all the people and feeling how electric it is here. I couldn’t understand NYC before I started coming here for work, and I couldn’t understand why so many people would choose to live in such a small area. Now, I get it. L.A. loses something by being so spread out…and even before freeways, L.A. was a colony of New York. Being in Manhattan, I understand why people choose to live here, despite the financial cost, despite the cold.
I wish I had had the chance to live here when I was younger…but I don’t think I could have managed to do so. I needed the last six years of learning Los Angeles to handle NYC, and even so, the first time I came here, I still felt like I was fresh off the ferryboat from the Island. Now, I’m old, and married, and have a baby, and I don’t think I could manage to fit learning and exploring a whole city with quite the enthusiasm I would have five years ago. But I still love walking here and looking at everything. I love the exploring I do have the chance to do. I love experiencing the city as a non-tourist: because I’m here for work, I don’t feel like I’m in the same category as the visitors at Rockefeller Center.
I also realize I’ve gone from LDN to LA to NYC inside of two weeks. When I was a little girl on the Island, dreaming of the big world out beyond the water, I wanted nothing more than to experience the sophistication I imagined was in those cities. I wanted to acquire that layer of sophistication, to have a high-gloss city finish. I never wanted to necessarily be glamourous or beautiful, but I wanted to soak in the knowledge available in those cities beyond the Island. Now, I get to do that – albeit on limited time here and there – and I love it. I love being in these big cities, in these centers of knowledge and power and art and music and excitement, and I feel so lucky that I did grow up to have these kind of opportunities.
And I feel even luckier that, at the end of a day in NYC, I will get on a plane back to my husband and son in L.A. Could life really be any more awesome than this? I am able to go out into the world, and be a career woman in a big city for a few days, and then come back to my extra-ordinary life in L.A., with Paul and Ben and my friends and my family coming to visit soon…and it’s actually a really good thing to be me.
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