There is a lot that I could say about Bob Ross. I could tell you about his past in the U.S. Army, the origins of his "wet-on-wet" painting technique, or the Alaskan inspiration behind his roughly 30,000 landscapes. However, you can find all those things on his wikipedia page, and what I want to discuss here is sincerity. Sincerity in general, and Mr. Ross' peculiar brand of earnestness in particular. Sincerity is not cool. Not only is it uncool, but it also leaves the speaker vulnerable, a double-whammy in a society in which the citizens constantly feel weighed, measured, and found wanting. When you speak something true and it is ridiculed, there is often no way out. So instead we hedge our bets; we make declarations we half-believe so that we can agree with whatever response they garner. Alternatively, we employ irony and sarcasm to make sure no one can really be sure of the intention behind our statements in the first place. Not so with Bob. When Bob Ross wishes you "happy painting, and God bless" at the end of every episode, he could not be more earnest. There is no inkling that a generation after the shows were taped, Millennials would be laughing at him. This - I believe - is what protects him. As I mentioned earlier, there are a few people whom I have already forced into The Joy of Painting-watching sessions, and the reactions are almost invariably the same: 1. Amusement at this odd man's afro. 2. Jokes made at the expense of some aspect of Mr. Ross' character, or his painting technique. (2a. Squeaks at the adorable-ness of the baby squirrels/other wildlife the Rosses are taking care of - not every episode.) 3. Confusion. 4. Silenced awe at the magical universe Bob is conjuring. After this, the show ends with Bob's encouragement to join him next time and reminder that everyone - yes, even you - can paint. Then Youtube or Netflix lines up the next episode and no one stops it. The only exception to this response was my own mother, another creature with the beautiful quality of being free from irony, who was enthralled for the full 27 minutes. As much as something within us wants to laugh at Bob Ross (he is the face of one of my all-time favourite memes, after all), he is seemingly protected from humiliation by this undeniably open-hearted earnestness he is cloaked in. We want to curse him for being so completely lacking in self-awareness, but in video this quality is translated to perfect self- contentment. Perhaps this is what is so magical about The Joy of Painting, a show that should not work at all, but does. It is mesmerising for people - especially in my generation - to watch an afro’d white man do something so simple, and so unimaginably difficult to us; smile un- ironically and paint his “happy little clouds”. And why it's the wrong thing to strive for. You're walking a mile, and it's a long one. The scenery is unfamiliar and the shoes you're wearing are too small, or too big. Either way, they are chafing in all the most sensitive spots and you know you're going to be popping blisters three days from now. Just to top it all off, the weather's bad. Maybe it's hot and sticky, maybe hot and dry and you're getting a nose bleed. Or maybe it's raining. I don't know - whatever you don't want it to be, it's that.
You're not sure where you're going - or even if you're going anywhere in particular. You just know that people keep telling you to try walking a mile in their shoes. Well, you're trying it, and it sucks. The heels are high and the streets are filled with predators, and now you finally understand why raping women is wrong/why killing gay people is wrong/why expelling undocumented immigrants is wrong. Good job, you got there. All it took was you to experience a moment of discomfort yourself. But sometimes, that's not good enough. Sometime's there's a monster out there attacking people whose shoes you'll never get to walk around in. And it's not fast enough to wait until that monster comes after someone you love to stop him. This brings two things to mind for me - one is Trevor Noah's response to Republican outrage over Ivanka's Dad's sexual assault comments. To paraphrase The Daily Show's host, "you shouldn't be offended for the women in your lives, you should be offended as a human." The other is a powerful poem by Martin Neilmoller, "First They Came", about German complicity in the Holocaust. Niemoller was a Christian pastor with a nasty streak (later repented) anti-Semitism. After staying quiet while more and more groups were being taken, the Nazis eventually took him, and he found there was no one left to speak out for him. It was impossible for Niemoller to have real empathy for the Socialists, and the trade unionists, and the Jews, because he was not one of them. What may have been possible - and what is still possible for us - is to acknowledge that taking people from their homes, or denying people access to basic resources, or sexually assaulting people, is not ok. It is not ok to grab peoples' pussies, regardless of whether or not you are the one with the pussy. It is not ok to deny people access to a bathroom, regardless of whether or not those people are different from you. On Wednesday morning, like most mornings, I woke up and took my phone off of airplane mode. At this moment, on a good day, I get a message from a friend (read: my mum) and maybe a snapchat from someone I don't really talk to, but nevertheless enjoy watching the life of. This morning I woke up to a few messages about stressful money things, and a notification from the NY Times that there had been a terror attack in Istanbul. Usually if I see anything about the city, I have a quiet reminisce about a city that I made friends in, fell in love in, and saw some really weird puppet theatre in. But today the man I loved was flying to Israel and had mentioned his million connections.
There was no particular reason to think that Tomer flying through Turkey, but when I checked with a mutual friend, it was confirmed that he was connecting in Istanbul. It was at this moment that my low-level crying turned into full-on sobbing that felt like I was trying to vomit up my small intestines. He was fine - still in the air, and about to turn around and go back to Singapore to wait until the airport was cleared for receiving landings. As I got the messages telling me that this man was safe, I kept thanking God. Thanking God he wasn't there yet when the bombs went off, thanking God that he was unharmed, thanking God that He had spared the one I loved. But at the same time, the awful irony was all too apparent. What did it mean to thank a God for sparing some within a Creation that allowed such suffering to others? The question hung above my grateful sobs. There are too many good books on the problem that evil presents to belief in a good creator-God (see C. S. Lewis' The Problem of Pain) for this to challenge my beliefs, but this did not help me synthesise any information at that moment. Nor does it now, when I read about the recent attack in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Because this week, the world has got me beat. The hatred and fear that is fuelling political movements both in the UK and USA, the violence that has no sign of slowing down - they scare me both in their character and their apparent unanswerability. There are no rational conversations to be had because no objective good is the goal here. There is no appeal to emotion because hatred is easier to hold onto than love, especially when it comes to the 'enemy'. When I finally got to talk to Tomer on the phone hours later in Istanbul, he asked me what we could do to stop terrorism. A big question, I know, but Tomer's a bit like that - every problem has a solution, and if we don't know it yet, it's just because we haven't been thinking about it long enough. I didn't have anything to tell him about IS or the indoctrination of young minds, but I did have one other thing to tell him. Which was that, despite living on opposite sides of the globe and having shied away from it due to fear of the end, I wanted to be in a relationship with him. The life where I live in fear of losing someone I loved wasn't good enough. Even if people whose goal is to create terror indiscriminately can make me worried about being in airports and going out to bakeries and dancing at nightclubs, I truly believe that those of us who feel they can't do anything can still put love in front of fear and hatred. Maybe I'm wrong, or right but it won't make a difference, or so naively idealistic that I betray my years, but I think I'd still rather live this way. A recent debate with a friend about the ethics of prostitution ended with him accusing me of intellectual arrogance, and me accusing him of making up fictional statistics to support his moralising. My assertions that the conceptions of "prostitution" that most people take up issue with are in fact misrepresented as such, and are actually paying for rape, fell on deaf ears. Meanwhile, his depiction of the prostitute as an "eighteen-year-old girl who got mixed up and doesn't know what she wants" ground my gears with its primitive conception. However, it was clear that we were both arguing from prejudiced intellectualised points of view that may have very little to do with the actual experience of selling sex. So I decided to talk to my friend Darius, a former escort about what that experience was for him. Indigo: How long did you spend in the sex industry?
Darius: From end of my senior year until 2013, so three years - 2010 to 2013. I: And how did you start? D: Ahm (laughs) I was - I had moved to Palm Desert, California, halfway through my senior year and uh I was just like bored all the time, there's really nothing to do over the summer and I got into the world of online dating, and just like hooking up with guys but the area that I lived in there were a lot of rich old men who were widowed or married or single and they wanted some company, they were willing to pay for it and the first time someone offered me money to take me out I thought "ok. cool", and it was so easy (laughs). I: So would you say that a lot of your customers were married to women, or had been in relationships with women? D: Yes. Most of them. Especially in California I: Was California the only place where you worked as an escort? D: No, I also did - I moved to New York at the end of the year, and I did it here for a while, and the following year I moved to Ohio for a few months and did it out there. Um, Ohio was similar to California in that I got old - people were older and married or had been married. I: Was there a specific racial demographic that you worked for? D: Honestly I've never had a black client. They've been all white or hispanic men. I: There seems to be this conception of the prostitute as a young, naive, probably white, woman. How do you relate to that stereotype, when it obviously doesn't describe you? Can you talk a little bit on this? D: I feel like it's a - I don't know glorified image of prostitution where I feel that the reality that I know, all the sex workers I've know in my life time, most of them have been one - in the LgBTQ community, young, and usually people of colour. Just because of I wouldn't say that we fave that many more challenges in our life time, but I will say that being an LGBTQ person of colour . . . it's kind of makes it a little tougher. I: As a prostitute in a state in which prostitution is a misdemeanour with a penalty of up to three months in jail and $500 fine, how would describe your relationship with law enforcement? D: Ahm, it's something that I always think about, but it's something that never directly affected me because I've never been caught. And I don't know anyone who has and I'm not sure that it's something the police department really cares about anymore. I'm not sure if they're aware of it, because it's not as in you face as it was twenty, thirty years ago. I: Just because it's moved to online transactions? D: Yeah, it used to be that you could walk down Eighth Avenue and you definitely know which ones are them, and now - I mean to the trained eye you can still walk down Eighth Avenue and point them out, but it's not as easy to see. Law enforcement is . . . not as scary. I: So what would you say the scariest thing about being a prostitute is? There are obviously a lot of hazards associated with the job. D: Um, making sure that you get home (laughs) um, you never know who you're going to meet, what kind of person they are, what their history is, whether they'll be alone when you get there, what their intentions are. So I always had this thing where I would always send a friend the address and phone number of where I was going, and if I had the name, whatever name they gave me, just so someone knows where I am. I: So you would say the Johns are the biggest risk factor? More so than STDs? D: Stds if you are careful, um I mean they're a big thing because people love a good blow job and I don't know any people who enjoy it using flavoured condoms. Um, but the options for that are getting better and better as time goes on. We've got PrEP, and we've got all this publicity and advertising about how and why t's impotant to havesafe sex and talking to your partners about how important it is to get tested. I: So, it's been two and a half years since you stopped working as an escort- D: Something like that (laughs) I: On-and-off? (laughing) Since you stopped full-time - you retired? D: Yeah. I: And why did you make that choice, to stop your main stream of income? D: Because um I started to define myself by what I did and my whole life I've been an object of sex for older men ever since I can remember and when I sat down and started to think about who I am, that was a huge part of it and I didn't want it to be that way. I wanted to learn to define myself without using that. Outside of it - yeah, I'm an animal, I'm a sexual being by nature, but I'm also a human being and being a human being means that I get other choices than to just be sexual. SO I wanted to explore those other choices. I: Do you have any thoughts on legislation around laws that you want to share? D: Ahm, not particualtly I mean like , there are things I've been hearing about laws in certain places - sodomy is banned in this state, or whatever, and it's stupid as fuck, it's just stupid. That's as far as my thoughts on that go. It's stupid, whatever. I: Do you have a community of other escorts that you know? D: Ahm yeah, I call them my Village Gays. They're gays you see walking around in large groups in the Village. Usually just a few of them are pulling dates - you pull a date, taking the stroll is a term that's still used today. Except for the stroll is no longer a specific street. Now it's posting an ad and walking around with Grindr app open. I: What is it that attracts you back when you do it occasionally since you kind of retired from being full-time? D: The money! (laughs) the money! Um, it's hard. And I work hard, since I stopped doing that I decided that I was going to work my ass off to get where I needed to get, and I have been. I've been working my ass off, but it's still hard. And that's so easy. So easy. Especially like experiencing that, and living that, and knowing how easy it it, there are times when I sit on that rooftop and I go "Why am I choosing to make it hard? Why I am I choosing the hard way when the easy way is just a click away?" I: And what's the answer? D: Because I now know that I'm worth more than that. I: Do you see prostitution as something that devalued you? D: Personally, yes. I don't - I don't judge at all. I think people gotta do what they gotta do, and I don't think there's anything wrong with it to be perfectly honest. What was wrong was the way that it made me see myself. And that's what I don't want to go back to. I couldn't care less about what people say about me, or what they thought, or whatever. But it's what I said and what I thought about myself that I think really mattered. It just . . . didn't make me feel good. I: Do you think that you came from a plan before you started where you already felt devalued? D: Yeah, definitely. Um, I just- my whole life, I've been raped my whole life from a young age, so it was like already, it was already how I saw myself, so that was just a perfect job opportunity for someone who I mean exists for that reason anyways. Yeah. I: Do you think that people like myself who are very pro-legalisation of sex work - both for the benefits to sex workers in that you don't have to fear law enforcement - but also because I think tat someone can be happy and healthy doing sex work - D: Absoultely. I: Do you think that's a myth we made up? D: That people can be healthy doing sex work? I: That it can come from a totally psychologically healthy place, and you do it because you enjoy it? D: I don't think that's a myth at all. I completely agree with that. I mean my reasons for not doing it are completely selfish and personal and have nothing to do with the way I feel that sex work makes me look, or I don't believe that sex work devalues me as a person, it's strictly among my self-worth and that I don't feel like I'm quite a strong enough person to get back into the game yet. But once I am, I feel that I'm there and I feel the confidence and know my self-worth, hell-yeah, I would jump back in the game in a heartbeat. It's easy, sex is fun, it's amazing it makes us feel good, money is fun, it's amazing, it makes us feel good. It's easy! I: Say that again about NY vs Ohio? D: In New York, there was so much sex involved. And in Ohio, there was hardly any, because most of these lonely old men just wanted some company. Someone to take to breakfast or there was Glenn, he was a pilot and there was this little small airport in Finlay that we would just go to and he would take me flying. We'd fly around, just for a few minutes, it was just - we had so much fun! Or take me to the movies, or anything, and you'd get paid hourly. Though charge by the half-hour because most men can't last an hour, hardly a half-hour. So you'd charge by the half-hour. Treat yo'self with a little bit of self-harm today! For a blog named in part after my favourite way to consume a poison, there has been shockingly little talk of the inspiring object and its act here. For this reason, I figured it was time that I honour the pipa part of El Té Y La Pipa.
It was 8.17 on a Tuesday evening, and I was sitting in my chair with a glass of bourbon and a briar pipe full of black cavendish tobacco. I imagined the ethanol seeping into my blood and finding a home in my liver, and the nicotine being absorbed through the roof of my mouth and into my brain. Despite the mind-addling chemicals, I could still think clearly enough to reject the notion that I was self-medicating. We know all too well that lungs full of tar and drunken stomachs are ailments, not antidotes, yet most of us continue to poison ourselves every Friday - or, in my case, Tuesday - night. What makes this behaviour so intoxicatingly attractive (see what I did there) is not the attempt to remedy something about our lives - this lie of "self-medication". Rather, it is the enjoyment of indulging in the act of doing something so counter to our biological imperatives that makes intoxication appealing. There are few other species (see koalas and eucalyptus) that will consume toxic substances as readily and regularly as we will crack open a beer at the end of a long day. Furthermore, it is not only the long-term effects of toxins in these drugs that are harmful and possibly counter-intuitive when we assume that the basic imperative for humans is to survive long enough to rear children. The immediate effects, too, can have dangerous and lethal consequences, most obviously in cases of drunk driving. So what is it about the light-headed buzz I get from smoking tobacco, and easy laughter my friend Maddi experiences after a glass (or bottle) of her favourite Marlborough sauvignon blanc that raises its priority level above mere survival? Perhaps it is the fact that humans have now come to a place in our development in which we are conscious of death and its inevitability. Why spend your limited years trying to run from the inescapable when you could spend them just a wee bit tipsy? Or perhaps it is the idea of "mere" survival that does it. As terrified as we are of the unavoidable, a life of prolonging its arrival is just not enough for us. I remember very clearly one of my uncles ranting about how we could all live so much longer if only we would stop eating sugar and replace it with apricot kernels like the Hunza tribe. I must only have been about ten, but my immediate reaction was to wonder why I would want an extra decade if I wasn't allowed sweets in it. I'd like to think that my views have since matured a little - they are certainly less focussed on the importance of candy - but the theme is the same: a good life trumps a long one every time. Now, I don't claim to know what a good life comprises for all people, or even fully for myself, but I am reasonably certain that the occasional pipe smoke on a Tuesday evening and glass of red with a friend is part of it. There is a luxury in the act of poisoning oneself for pleasure that looks death in the eye and says "you'll have me either way, but you won't stop me from living while I can." Note: This is in no way an endorsement of self-harmful behaviour or a negation of the risks associated with smoking and drinking, especially within the context of addiction which is an entirely different beast. What it is, is an exploration into why we continue to engage with these behaviours. (Well, actually neither - just me on the compatibility of stoicism and social justice warrior-ing).There is this man called Jeremiah Tall, who sings Folk/Americana songs while playing various instruments, including a kick-drum that doubles as a suitcase the rest of the time. There is this other man, Epictetus, who was born almost two thousand years ago as a slave and became of the most well-known proponents of stoicism. You, the reader, may at this point be thinking "Yeah, so?", and you have a good point. But here's the thing - the former has a song with some lyrics that I really like, but also think the latter might have had something to say about. The song is Working For, and the lyrics are "Sorry if I find it hard / To wake up impressed . . . To work someone else's fields / Until my hands fall off", and Epictetus' complaint may have been that the only way to live the Good Life is to calmly accept whatever fate delivers, not to complain about your situation. To Epictetus, Mr. Tall may be focussing on the wrong thing with his unimpressed-ness.
But this essay really isn't about a long-dead philosopher, or a well-bearded folk musician. It is about how one might reconcile stoic beliefs and practises with a desire for social justice. One of the major complaints about stoicism (other than how weird it is that you're supposed to whisper "tomorrow you will die" to your child every night before they go to sleep) is the appearance that individuals are not enabled to cause human progress as we should avoid any sense of dissatisfaction with the current situation. As someone with stoic inclinations on top of newly Christian beliefs and love of pursuing social justice, this is clearly rather problematic. How is it possible to value both an unswerving acceptance of all that comes before us, and the passionate fight for what we believe to be right? The first, an attitude that has the old adage about crying over spilt milk tattooed on its forearm, allows the stoic sage to live rationally irrespective of circumstances. Whether you were born into slavery like Epictetus, or whether your hands are falling off, like the narrator in Mr. Tall's song, stoicism says you can live the Good Life. That seems like a great deal - living wisely wherever you are. The other, the passionate fight, might actually help the world be a better place. Which also seems like a good thing. Reconciling the two, however, looks unlikely. One possible answer is that the rationality advocated by the stoics is the best way to create a more just society. There is no rational reason why women should be paid sixty-six cents to every man's dollar, nor why anyone should care about where a trans person pees other than that person. Perhaps a society full of stoic sages would not be riddled with the injustices that our one is. Therefore, we must all work on out daily Stoic practises, though maybe we'll skip the creepy whispering, and become better citizens. Unfortunately, this still isn't likely to save the world. Leading by example can only ever go so far in achieving justice when unjust laws that need to be address and reformed abound. The alternative may be to simply embrace the contradiction of Epictetus' steadfast acceptance and Mr. Tall's narrator's request for "a holiday". Embracing contradiction was one of the great talents of G K Chesterton, who wrote extensively on the paradoxical nature of Christian faith, and who owned that courage was "almost a contradiction in terms". According to Chesterton, "No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. . . It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die." If it's not too much of an offence to Chesterton, I believe we can apply this definition to the subject at hand. It means a strong desire for change taking the form of readiness to live fully under whatever circumstances we find ourselves in. For those of us who to prefer to grin and bear pain we cannot change, but who are all the same outraged by institutional racism and sexism, perhaps we hold up the proverbial middle finger to Ayn Rand and live with the contradiction. We laugh it off when we miss the flight and shout with all our breath for equality-geared law reform. Jeremiah Tall's narrator would continue to ask "Who am I working for", but make use of all his other limbs when his hands are gone. Today marks the second day of Depression Awareness Week (or - as I prefer to call it out of a sick sense of fun - World Depression Week) and I wanted to write something about my experience. However, as Tim Lott has already taken on the task of describing the sensation of being depressed here much more eloquently than I could hope to, I decided to have a go at looking at it from a different angle. Here I talk about the change in self-definition and identity that occurs in conjunction with mental illness. Or at least, how it occurred for me.
For most of my life, depression (and mental illness more broadly) was one of those really sad things that lot of people who weren't me unfortunately had to deal with. Kind of like having unreasonable parents, or living somewhere really cold, or having acne. Then, around the same time as I took the picture above, I started waking up sad. Every day. The emotional rash had broken out on the oily skin of my psyche, and I had no Clearasil Ultra 5-in-1 Acne Exfoliating Lotion to hand. I'm almost sorry for that metaphor, but hey - it's my blog and I'mma do what I want. Anyway, the transition from a perfectly mentally healthy person to an already imperfect and now somewhat mental person was a rough one. In some ways, that transition was harder for me to deal with than the depression and undefined eating disorders that followed. Having to reinvent your own identity is never an easy thing to do, but undeniably there is an added layer of darkness when the new definition involves words like "victim" and "sufferer". Even the amorphous "survivor", a word many of us who have experienced sexual assault use to describe ourselves, seems harsh. In fact, anything that reminded me how much of a struggle each day had become seemed only to aggravate the pain that these daily exercises like making breakfast had become. Years ago, I went to a few of my sister's first-year psychology classes at Auckland University. Among the memories of unnecessarily cruel experiments on monkeys, I recall one class in which the lecturer spoke about the diagnosis of mental illness. She spoke about the apparently random ways in which definitions of different disorders were tweaked year-to-year in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder, and how patients responded to being diagnosed. Some patients experienced relief in finding that all their terrifying symptoms were, in fact, diagnosable illnesses, while others filled their diagnoses out, collecting new symptoms to fit more neatly into the parameters of their specific illness. Nowadays I am grateful for this definition, but that wasn't the case at the time. I am thankful now to have the language to talk about my experience, and relate to other, yes, sufferers. However, I do still wonder whether there was not something in the act of becoming conscious of my depression that solidified it in my mind, as a part of it. A sort of cogito ergo sum, but for "I feel depressed, therefore I am depressed". Because up until the day I said out loud that I wasn't ok, it was just me being sad and not really feeling like life was worth it. Not pleasant, obviously, but actually not as scary as being Someone With Depression. Likewise, when I felt myself dipping back into that pool of emotional tar almost a year later, it was not the waking-up-crying that made me want to run away, it was the thought that I was returning to the Big-D. (Click on that link, I dare you. It's Dumbledore. You'll enjoy it, I promise.) On that note, I'll wish you a happy World Depression Week! I'll also add that there are a million resources out there for people who are going through something and don't think that talking-therapy or drugs are what they want. CBT is one of many options, and anyone can get in touch with me through the contact page if they have any thoughts or questions. Contrary to what the title of this post may lead you to believe, the following words are (unfortunately) not about menstruation, but rather just some thoughts on what it is to be a lady person in the West in 2016. In this year, 2016, I have been propositioned, routinely objectified, sexualised, infantilised, ignored, and a handful of other words that made me feel less like a human person and more like a sex doll, and it's only April second. As a nude model, it is my job to take off my kit in the interest of making art. It is not my job to explain to potential employers the difference between a figure model and a prostitute, which is exactly what I had to do recently. The offensive part of this is not that someone would suggest that I'm willing to "have some fun" for money (yes, he actually wrote that in an email to me) - I don't think there's anything wrong with prostitution. However, the simple fact that a man would assume that because I take my clothes off for money means I could just pop over the line to blow him exemplifies the massive problem of conflation of nudity and eroticism. However, it is hardly surprising when the only times we get to see a lady nipple in this country is in porn, Game of Thrones, and American Apparel ads. One of my favourite things about being in Europe the first time I went was the omnipresence of nudes - seeing women whose tummies looked like mine and whose breasts were just hanging out as if they were made to feed the young rather than be ejaculated on was kind of mind-blowing for early-teens Indie. The saddest part of all this is that, after centuries of women in the West being pushed to conform to a delicate and demure persona, I now feel pressure to swing to the other end of the spectrum simply in order to be seen as human. Every day I try to figure out the balance of a Julie Andrews hair cut, Maggie Thatcher voice, and my Granny's intellect without losing the freedom to giggle and skip if I so choose.
Returning to New York City after being away is like seeing that ex who simultaneously infuriates you and has this irresistible magnetic pull on you.
Having been back in town for over three months now, it has become a daily exercise to remind myself that the rest of the world exists; for one of the most metropolitan cities on the planet, New York is strangely inwardly-focussed, and there is a bizarre sense of constant self-congratulations for living there. The rest of the city will validate you for your choice to move to the Greatest City on Earth, and crucify (or worse, pity) those who left because they "couldn't hack it". It is easily assumed that anyone who leaves, leaves for this reason. I suspect more than a couple of the city's unhappiest people are stuck thinking they can't return to the small town they moved from because they will be failures. Instead, they stick it out in the midst of millions of others struggling for a seat on the subway. Today, Easter Sunday, one of my flatmates returned to the small town in Indiana that he grew up in. He had been here for six months, having moved to be with his girlfriend while she attended acting school. Classic, right? They were high school girlfriend/boyfriend, she eighteen and he twenty when they left, and both sure that they could one day get married. If they believed in that kind of thing, you know. His dad, an absolute caricature of a mid-western cop, came to pick him up and take his tv, x-box, and DVD collection home. As sad as it was to see his heart broken and plans shattered, he was never someone who was going to live in this city. He never seemed to give two shits about anything further than the people he was surrounded by, and while his girlfriend was enough for a while, the more grounded she became in a life she was building here, the more isolated he became. While she made friends, he stayed at home and smoked and waited for her to get home. A life in which friends and family were replaced by passive-aggressive co-workers and basically friendly but busy roommates stopped being worth it when the girlfriend he moved for started meeting her boss late at night. Without a community, this boy had nothing to offer to Bed-Stuy, and Bed-Stuy had nothing to offer to him. I have no idea what his life in Indiana was like, or what it will be like again, but it's gotta be better than waiting for a girl in an apartment you can't pay rent for at your shitty job selling jeans to tourists. However, whatever his life may be, it will keep going in a place that is not New York. |
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