The great pumpkin and city living

I've become citified again. No longer do I cross the street with mouth agape, staring in wonder at buildings more than four stories high. Already I sneer at those people, and know that stories is spelled storeys in this neck of the woods.

Living in a huge city is like having a big, fat scab. When I first arrived, I was like a raw nerve, the twitching whiskers of a mouse waiting to get trapped. (Incidentally, I know a lot about mice after living on Piccadilly Circus for the last few weeks.) The only way you can survive in a large city is with a substantial layer of scar tissue and a heavy set of blinders. If you ever stopped for even a second and thought about how you practically have your head in someone's armpit on your morning tube commute, you'd grow hysterical. If you admitted to yourself that a man less than 7 inches from you was picking his nose at 8:15 in the morning, or that you just stepped over a bloody pigeon carcass, or that you spend $10 a day to take the subway, or that your housing crisis has left you living in a room with no windows, you might just have to die in response.

By keeping quiet and not acknowledging that there's anything wrong, you become a member of the secret society of city dwellers. This gives you access to pissing away 40% of your pay on rent, but also a plethora of delivery food options. I think it's worth it.

"What are we all doing here?" my friend Jenn would ask dramatically when we lived in New York City. "Why are we doing this to ourselves?" It was her theory that living in New York was a form of masochism--we only did it because we felt that on some level, we deserved to be punished. Combined with a healthy dose of something to prove, and that's half of New York summed up. Otherwise, why would we have moved from our great suburbs, our roomy, new homes with affordable groceries and warehouse stores?