The apartment is packed up and empty and I'm leaving New York for Durham this Saturday. Just short of my 9th full year here.
People, visitors mostly I guess, seem to associate New York with skyscrapers and traffic and concrete. To me New York is the water. Looking out from Astoria Park, Brooklyn Bridge Park, Fort Totten Park, Orchard Beach, the parks on both sides of the Hudson, (JFK) Boulevard East, Shore Road Park, and the Belt Parkway looking out at Jamaica Bay. Looking out from the ferries and the bridges. I love the waves and the breeze. The herons and egrets and cormorants and mergansers and red-tailed hawks and red-bellied woodpeckers. Whales and dolphins and seals just a few miles out on a boat from south Brooklyn.
And New York is food. Taiwanese in Williamsburg. Thai and Malaysian in Elmhurst. Indian and Nepali in Jackson Heights. Korean in Bayside and Palisades Park. Central Asian cuisines I couldn't name by memory in Sheepshead Bay. What's expensive is usually not good. What's cheapest is also not often good. You just have to explore and see. But that is the case everywhere.
It's a big city and it takes a while to get everywhere. Anything you can reach within a 40 minute subway is perfect, anything longer I have a hard time talking myself into. It's nice when things are accessible by bus or subway. To read or sleep or do nothing on the subway. The only civilized way to commute, if I must. But many nice things are not easily accessible by public transportation, particularly when crossing boroughs and honorary boroughs. It's freeing to have a car (I had one for a four year stint), but it's expensive and tedious.
I was married when I came here. Since that came to an end a few years ago, even on friendly terms, I've had a hard time shaking the feeling of huge personal failure. I eventually met a number of kind and intelligent women on the dating apps. Far from the horror the internet leads one to believe; I don't know why. Yet I ended up leaving here in a good relationship with an old friend of mine from high school. She got me into running. Running's the worst. But it's good for me and I'm on board with that.
I got mildly popular on social media since I moved here. From a respectable 1,000 or so followers on Twitter to over 30,000 today. I think mostly I learned not to wait around for other people to do the stuff I thought was obvious to do. Which can be especially scary in New York since there are so many people so much smarter and farther along than you. It turns out there's just very few people, experienced or not, who want to write or organize. And the smarter and more experienced people are often happy enough that someone else roped them in to speak, or that someone wrote about something they just haven't yet gotten to. Whatever the case, I've always shown up as "here to learn" and I think it resonated with folks both more and less experienced than me.
I'm sad to leave New York. It's scary to do what feels like ending a chapter of life. But almost all growth in the US is happening in the South and I'm curious to explore down there. And most of all I'm glad that lower costs will make it all the more feasible to keep growing The Consensus.
If you know folks down South please introduce me. I'm looking forward to starting Banh Mi on Me back up for folks doing their PhD, which I put on pause during the move. I also want to get back into speaking, and I'd be happy to travel around to speak. Cheers, Phil.