Originally, I moved to New York for job reasons. I'd been living in Philadelphia for like 4 months and I relly liked it there, but my job at a recording studio was falling apart, and it became aparent that the best way to get a good job at a recording studio was to go to New York City. At first a big shock. Philly is a great city. I could get everywhere via bicycle, and asuming it was downtown, I could get there faster than by car, and I was a broke. Philly is a really good city to be broke in. New York is not. But as I got used to the idea, I became excited about New York. The reality was that it took me about 8 months beofre I really liked it here, but once I crossed that hump, I really began to love it. There is a certain romanticized, bohemian coolness about New York. This is where the beat poets got started. This is where Hip Hop got started. This is where the whole avante garde jazz scene in America WAS. And there was so much cool shit going on all the time. Forget that I needed two jobs just to make rent and so never went out because I was either working or sporting serious lint.
This love afair began to wear off slowly but surely. First, my interest in the Recording Industry soured. Working 100 hours a week at $10.70 an hour just wasn't that great. And frankly, most of that time I'd worked for a lot less.Everything was incredibly expensive. After stopping recording, I realized I had no real friends to speak of because I'd been working non-stop. I made frineds quickly, but really close frineds were much harder to come by. And I was just flying through money. The hustle and bustle was tiring at times. Downright exhausting in fact. And then two things happened that sort of sealed the deal. First, I joined a band (more on that at a later date) and I met a woman. Two forces that were in complete opposition to each other as far as my relationship to New York was concerned. The band had to be in New York, the woman lived in Philly. Eventually, the woman moved to New York. But as the band got to be bigger and bigger, cementing itself in it's New York existence, I liked it less and less, and so the possibility of moving back to Philly with the woman, who was now my wife, began to become a reality. We got closer and closer, and New York became more and more irrelevant. In fact, the cost became a downright hinderance. Why work at sucky jobs just to be able to make rent on a dinky little apartment. And the band, while a lot of fun, and getting better and better, was hitting the road more and more, and pulling me away from my wife, instead of letting us grow closer as was the aparent tendency of our relationship.
Now I find myself thirty and married, and I am about to make the decision of where to live that I had pretty much decided on when I was 24. How the f$#@ did that happen?
