Moving to New York at age 51—what was I thinking?
Well, I didn't do much thinking about it. I was offered a good and exciting job in New York and I could no longer afford my apartment in Boston anyway. I would have hesitated to leave a significant other behind, but there wasn't one, and the prospects for finding someone are a bit better in a bigger city. Here I can claim some dignity by telling people here that I had a boyfriend in Boston, and people won't necessarily doubt me. (Not that anyone has yet asked.)
After being here almost a month, the thing I miss most about Boston are the bathrooms. The bathrooms in New York are disgusting even when they're clean. I guess there is no incentive for commercial or residential landlords to upgrade bathroom fixtures every 60 years or so; prospective tenants just sigh and tell themselves that a missing faucet is worth being a block from the subway.
Customer service is far better in New York. On one of my first days, I went to Starbucks to get a lunch I could eat at my desk. (I thought such a practice was barbarous until I worked in Midtown Manhattan.) I didn't realize that I was supposed to take my food from the display case and hand it to the cashier. So when I asked for a chicken pesto sandwich, the cashier ran from her post to the other end of the store, made her way around the snaking line of customers, grabbed a sandwich in its wrapper, and ran back to the cash register before telling me with a smile that next time I could select the food myself. This would never happen in Boston, where the customer is always an idiot. The best-case scenario would have been a cashier who didn't use the f-word when telling me to go back and get the sandwich, moron.
People do hold doors for those behind them in Boston, but they don't make eye contact like they do here, and say "Good morning!" like they mean it. In my apartment building, people bid adieu to anyone getting off an elevator as if they're waving goodbye to someone about to board the Titanic. ("Take care! [We might never see each other again!] " "You too! [I'm pretty sure we'll both be alive and on this same elevator tomorrow.]"
I'm sorry, New York, but you don't move any faster than Bostonians. You have even more people getting to the tops of staircases and coming to a dead stop to look at smartphones, oblivious of everyone behind them. And they're not tourists.
New Yorker are friendlier, but that hasn't made it a breeze to meet people. At bars and social gatherings, I get the impression, more than ever, that people can't look away fast enough if I'm brave enough to make eye contact with them. (This includes people close to my own age.) There's a logic behind this, in that there are so many more people to look at in New York, and you don't want to waste time on the wrong ones. I might do better meeting people in a small, closed-off population, but I don't think I can make a living as a proofreader in Antarctica.
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