Ich bin...ein New Yorker?

I spent much of the last year trying to resist New York's charms. The City (as those of us who are unlucky enough to live tantalizingly close to New York, but not close enough to visit regularly, are doomed to call it) intrigues, fascinates, seduces, despite one's most valid and persistent reasons to hate it.

My decision to move to The City was made on such a whim that it took me a long time to realize that it takes a certain type to sign up to live in Manhattan. 90% of the Midwestern friends and family members who came to visit me in New York (and they were numerous) took one good look at the city and said, "It's nice to visit, but I could never live here." And so they don't try to. In my humble opinion, an attempt to live in New York can lead to one of only two outcomes: either you hate it so much that you leave soon after your arrival, or you're hooked. You may not know you're hooked, you may not really want to be hooked - but once New York has gotten under your skin, there is absolutely nothing you can do to change it.

For the last month, I feel like I have done very little besides pine for New York. Believe me, this mindset came as much to my surprise as it did to my housemates' annoyance - there are, after all, few things more insufferable than a sulky New Yorker.

...wait...did I just call myself a New Yorker? In many ways, I'm decidedly not - living in Manhattan for one year hardly qualifies as an ontological identity shift. Native New Yorkers would certainly never mistake me for one of their own. Besides, I'm a proud Sconnie, and will be til the day I die! But somehow, without my being aware of it, I made it to the point where my non-New Yorker friends tell me I've become a New Yorker. And that's more than a little disconcerting.

I think it took leaving the city to make me realize how badly I want to go back. The good news is that, after I finish this internship in New Haven, I can! And I probably will. If for no other reason that I'm nowhere close to done analyzing the microsociological dynamics of the subway system (you don't think I'm serious? I miss the subway so much that a compassionate New Yorker friend of mine took pity on me and mailed me a subway map to sustain me through this year-long public transportation fast.). I'm glad I'm here for the year. I'm glad I have this opportunity to experience a different kind of East Coast life (and I promise to blog about it one of these days - it's definitely not boring!). But I don't want to be a New Havenite. I don't want to be a Nutmegger. To my very great surprise, I want to be a New Yorker. At least enough to try living there again for another few years. By that time I should have the interpersonal subway dynamics figured out, right?