tap on the shoulder of somewhere else

Leaving NYC for a weekend makes me a realize a few things that I love and hate about this city.

Love:

1. The tap water. Dear god, the tap water in other cities is gross compared to NYC.

2. The diversity. The first several hours in Boston, all I could think was "this place is crawling with late 20's/30-something white men who all look like they fell out of a bank and are on the way to meet their aging greek brothers in a pub to watch the Sox game." I'm sure NYC is also teeming with sports teamsters, but the apparent population gets watered down by the sheer quantity of other types of people walking around.

3. The public transportation. We were in Boston for the weekend, and things went perfectly fine with their trains and buses, but the stations feel like they're few and far between compared to NYC's ''walk 4 blocks in any direction and get on the train" setup. (I know this isn't as true for the outskirts of the subway lines, but we're fortunate enough to live in the subway glut of brooklyn.)

Hate:

1. Having to jockey for position almost every minute of your day, whether it's on the clogged sidewalks, in the train, on stairwells, in stores. There are people everywhere and it always seems like the world is so busy with their cellphone or their conversations to notice that someone else is trying to navigate this life. The sidewalks of Boston felt deserted compared to the whirlpool of NYC walkways.

2. Along the same vein, the intense feeling of over population that I get when we're on the highway heading back into the city. It feels like every square inch is spoken for, even the designated "wide open spaces" of parks.

3. The go-go-GO pace. This is a source of pride and angst because I feel like I've adapted quickly to the breakneck speed of walking, thinking, and navigating, but I also relish the slowing down that occurs in other places. Granted, the suburban pace is glacial and exasperating, but I could handle the pace of a city like Boston. Too bad it is an actual glacier about 4 months out of the year.

It's clear to me that I am not a New York City (or Brooklyn) lifer. The itch for space and solitude is just too strong. But the balance of my list (it's unintentionally 3 x 3) is a good indicator that we'll stick around for awhile longer.

5 on 5

Today marks the beginning of the first (and only) feature on this blog: 5 on 5. In other words, on the 5th day of the week, I will post 5 things* I'm grateful for. The purpose of this feature is 2 fold:

Fold 1: expressing gratefulness is supposably** linked to an increase in happiness and well, it's probably a good idea for me to stack the deck in this department because I have a tendency to droop like a thirsty shamrock.

Fold 2: it will give me the opportunity to take stock of my photos and share a variety of images with you that you might not otherwise see. Browsing flickr seems to have become too much for our stimulation-addled brains, and I refuse to post every picture I take on Facebook.

Now that I've insulted everyone and indirectly expressed my hatred for Facebook's world domination, let's get started.

#1 Ice Cream. Specifically, a large cone chocolate, from Carl's Ice Cream in Fredericksburg, VA. When you order a cone at Carl's, it doesn't matter how you say it, the person taking the order will yell out to the people manning the huge vats of fresh ice cream, "large cone chocolate!"

#2 A Good Sandwich. (Maybe I shouldn't write this when I'm hungry because all I can think about right now is food). A well crafted sandwich gives me goosebumps. One of the better deli sandwiches I've had was a basic roast beef from the Candler Market (in Atlanta). The day I ate it, I was extremely hung over, and it was just the right combination of salty flavors to keep my stomach from churning (the chips played a key role in this experience).

#3 Picnic Tables in Quiet Places. It's hard to find a quiet place in NYC. One of the things that I found overwhelming when we first moved here was the fact that there are people everywhere at just about any time of day. Yes, you can learn to tune out the rest of the world and sometimes it's possible to feel like you're in a remote place, but it's just not the same. This picnic table is in a park by the Rappahannock River in Fredericksburg. Basically, I want to climb inside the picture and finish reading my library book.

#4 People who say Yes when I ask to take their pictures. I don't generally ask to take pictures. Instead, I attempt to be covert and usually end up with a crappy picture OR I start to take the shot, get spied by my subject and swing the camera in some other random direction, pretending to take a picture of something else. This woman was in a record store in LA and she was very agreeable when I asked to take her picture because of her awesome outfit (sadly, the focus is weird and I didn't stand far enough away to get her whole outfit, but you get the gist).

#5 Being able to run again. I've finally settled into a run/walk routine that seems to be agreeable to my temperamental feet. It's no half marathon training, but it has made a huge difference in my day to day sanity management. (corollary to #5: I'm grateful we're no longer running in the snow)

*things = I'm not sure how this is going to work so we're talking people, places, fuzzy concepts, gastronomic obsessions, etc.

**intentional misspelling