Day 56: Sandy-Inspired Rambling

DISCLAIMER: I'm actually writing this on November 1 after several days of thinking too much, but I'm posting it for this day because this is where the thoughts took hold and still haven't let go.

ADDITIONAL DISCLAIMER:  this was written from a very self-indulgent place. Know that going in, especially if you're a Tri-Stater

City Hall 

New Orleans, LA

City Hall

New York, NY

In the last few weeks, I have been doing a lot of thinking about why I moved down here. 3 months ago, I would have told you that I was over New York, that living in a cheap but off the beaten path neighborhood in Queens had drained my will to be social, that I wanted to meet new people, have new enriching experiences personally and professionally,  try something new after having lived in the same city for 2/3 of my life.

The homesickness has hit and it's been killing me slowly. 

Major issues have included, but are not limited to:

• I miss my people, my happy hours, my food adventures, Study Sundays, bitching about my crap day to a roommate perched on the kitchen counter like the sympathetic version of the raven...
• I miss my job, the feeling of pulling out a semantic victory against my nemesis and the huge societal ills that put us in business in the first place, the high-fives, the camaraderie of people who get it and hatch big ideas...
• People cannot pronounce my name down here. In fact, they don't even try. And yet, I'm the obnoxious one for mispronouncing "boudin" and 
  "Tchoupitoulas"
  ...   
• There is no freaking Knicks bar here. How is that possible when 50% of the people I meet here are from New York?
• I am early or late for everything! 
• That's super important because YOU CANT MAKE LEFT TURNS 90% OF THE TIME! Just install a left turn arrow and maybe there will be less accidents. Or how about a damn street sign that isn't embossed into the sidewalk.

I'm not the only one living in Weird and Unjustified Driving Frustration Land

Add to this list my professional state of ennui and an annoying buddy-dude situation (both the buddy-dude and the situation itself were maddeningly annoying) and I've been moaning about wanting to go home for a couple weeks now. I tried making deals with myself. "If it doesn't get better in 6 months, I'll go home." "I have to put in at least a year in order to feel like I didn't fail at life planning." I am a bummer to be around. Ironic since one of the reasons I left NYC is that I felt like I was a misery to be around, like I didn't belong in the place where I was born.

Sandy, can't you see, I'm in misery, We made a start, now we're apart

Then the superstorm hit. I tracked the storm all day with a rubberneck level of curiosity but when the rain started coming down and the pictures of the Lower East Side underwater showed up, and the explosion of the Con Ed plant, and the lack of power spread, my heart broke in a million pieces. I was an impotent mess, unable to manage the feeling of helplessness while furiously and selfishly texting friends to see if they were OK. If I wasn't living off of a consultant retainer, I would have started driving home immediately. I wasn't sure I could do anything useful, but I wanted to be around to try.

Instead, I pulled myself from the laptop and went to the bar where I eavesdropped on New Orleanians trading their own power outage stories from Isaac and how NYers needed to stop invoking the "K"word about their situation. While I struggled to not pass judgement for or against their statements, I still wanted to pop them for saying negative things about my hometown, or at least sassily counter about how stabilizing and comforting Bloomberg's brand of "ruthless efficiency" is. But I didn't do that. Rather I sat alone at the far corner of the bar, eyes glued to my phone as the "I'm OK" texts started to come in, drinking away the guilt for wanting to leave NYC, the guilt of wanting to give up on NOLA already, and the guilt of panicking about if (or really when) a big storm hits down here, I'm screwed.