In the spirit of Labor Day, I present a rant about New York and why it is, indeed, a horrible place to live. Cameos by Snooki, LiLo, and Cyndi Lauper. And lots of belligerent cursing. Fun!
So The Onion had a cute little diddy this week about how much living in New York City sucks. Most of it was, incidentally, not untrue! And while most of the people who shared it on their Facebook walls, etc. took the tone of, “Haha! LOLZ!” I found it less funny and more, um, uncomfortably accurate.Especially this part (emphasis mine):
“I always had this perverted sense of pride because I was managing to scrape by here,” said Brooklyn resident Andrew McQuade, who, after watching two subway rats gnawing on a third bloody rat carcass, finally determined that New York City was a giant sprawling cancer. “Well, fuck that. I don’t need to pay $2,000 a month to share a doghouse-sized apartment with some random Craigslist dipshit to prove my worth. I want to live like a goddamn human being.”“You see this?” added McQuade, pointing at a real estate listing for a duplex in Hagerstown, MD. “Two bedrooms, two baths, a den—a fucking den—and a patio. Twelve hundred a month. That’s total, not per person.”
One of the funny — and by funny, I mean frustrating — things about New York (and, I imagine, most other major American cities, although I wouldn’t know firsthand. Except LA, which like New York is expensive and full of horrible people, plus it’s also hot and you have to drive everywhere) is the sickening wealth gap and perversely inflated living costs.
Another thing that is not actually “funny,” but, in fact, disgusting, is how Jersey Shore’s Snooki makes $30,000 per episode or watching Lindsay Lohan hit babies in a Maserati. That doesn’t make me laugh or even shake my head in shame. It just makes me want to kill everyone around me (and then myself) out of bitterness and spite and the maddening realization that while I spend the next 10 years underemployed and paying down a mountain of student loan debt, these girls will be squandering whatever’s left of their fortunes on tanning salon memberships and cocaine. (Also upsetting? Reading about how Cyndi Lauper once sued her landlord at the Apthorp to roll back her rent from $3,250 to $508. Look, I know nobody likes or deserves to get ripped off, but you’re fucking Cyndi Lauper, you bitch. Those units now sell for $54,000 a month, which is probably still less you spend on make-up and peroxide in a given week, anyway.)
I know, it’s my own fault for going to an expensive school to study the very lucrative field of — guffaw! — journalism. What a joke! I should have studied economics! Or transferred to Stern and sold my soul to some Wall Street investment firm for a six-figure entry-level salary and 80-hour work week. Because you know what? I really wouldn’t mind slaving away at some mind-numbing job I hate if it means coming home to my own apartment, with a bedroom that’s actually large enough open the door into and still accommodate furniture. Like a bed.
“But it’s New York! The capital of the world! Everything is here!”
Fuck that.
Yeah, New York has great restaurants, and entertainment, and shopping, and that means jack shit when you’re spend each night working some miserable restaurant job feeding barbecue to fat, entitled Madison Avenue jerkoffs (i.e., sophomore year when I worked the take-out counter at Blue Smoke) or holding together your last pair of Converse with strips of cardboard and tape because rent and Sallie Mae gobbled up your whole paycheck and you can’t spare $60 for new shoes (i.e., now).
And when 90% of your time is split between mooching off the free Wi-Fi at Starbucks for an excuse to escape your windowless room, treating the local Barnes & Noble like your personal library, killing time by sneaking into movies at the local AMC — surprise! You can do this, and more, at pretty much any shopping mall in the country. Also, that Barnes & Noble is being replaced with a Century 21. And at this rate, Danny Meyer will be running a Shake Shack in every major city across the globe by 2012, anyway. New York: -10 points.
I don’t even know anyone who’s come to New York on their own to seek their fame or fortune and actually succeeded, either. Do you? Don’t most people just get hitched, or have kids, and realize, “Fuck, this place sucks,” and move away? Or get better job offers somewhere else? Or get stuck in some other job or career they never planned for or wanted and maybe don’t even like? What are the rest of us single, socially maladaptive people who can’t split the rent on a one bedroom with someone else’s income supposed to do?
My roommate, for instance — whom I’m subletting my room from — is in her early 30s. If I was in my early 30s, living in a 9’ x 9’ room, and still had to sublet my extra bedroom and converted living room to pay the rent I would fucking kill myself. Likewise if I spent seven years freelancing and eating “soup” made from hot water, crushed up multivitamins, and garlic salt, I’m fairly sure that I would not look back on those experiences as points of pride or examples of my resilience or determination or perseverance. I admire people who can stick it out like that, I really do, but I also wonder (and am asking myself now): “Jesus Christ, that’s no way to live. What are you thinking?”
They (and by “they,” I mean Frank Sinatra, so if you feel a cliché coming on… you’re right!) say if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere. That’s probably true, but it’s a pretty retarded barometer to go by because nobody, realistically, can “make it” in New York (unless your idea of “making it” is sharing a fifth-floor walk-up with three roommates in Bushwick) when the lunatics here expect people to make 70 times their monthly rent just to qualify for a roof (for non-New Yorkers, that means an annual salary of roughly $98,000 for a lower-end studio in Manhattan).
I mean, God, we can’t all be Snooki.
ETA: But seriously. While this is obviously and unapologetically an exercise in whiney self-indulgence, I am actually genuinely curious: Anyone who’s lived in New York probably knows it can be a backbreaking (and often soul-crushing) struggle just to scrape by. So I ask you, fellow New Yorkers, what’s so great about this city, anyway?
