Hating New York

Maybe it's not true that I hate New York. I don't like it, certainly. It bores me, definitely. Frustrating? Annoying? Dull? Absolutely. But hateful? I'm not sure. Mostly it puts me to sleep. Maybe it's the weather. Maybe it's the people. Maybe it's the fact that, to New Yorkers, a Westerner like me has nothing to add to their worldview. In their minds, I should be grateful to be here. That makes me hate it.

I hate Boston, its snobbish, introverted self-interest and obsession with inherited blueblood money. It's like a wealthy old great-aunt who's always reminding you that your hippie mother from Seattle was never accepted as "one of the family," and you never will be either. New York seems so childish by comparison, some little toddler boy fascinated with the action of its own penis. It's hard to hate a baby that's always so gleefully impressed with its own accomplishments.

"I'll move anywhere with you," I told my travel-loving husband almost ten years ago. I wanted to see the world, too. "Anywhere, except the East Coast of the U.S." I meant it. The one place I'd loathed and dreaded since my childhood, the one place I held a grudge against. I hated the East Coasters' assumption that the middle didn't matter, that those of us in rural places, hiding in the mountains or on the plains, were just dying to get out. I hated the New Yorker magazine's grip on the throat of American literary culture.

Then six years ago his company transferred us to my own personal hell. We spent two years in Boston, two dull, despised years among the most provincial people I have ever met. I daydreamed of the Rockies where I grew up and gritted my teeth at the tolerant smiles given by people who assumed that I was grateful to be somewhere cultural--somewhere that meant something. I felt like I was constantly hammering on a glass wall, waiting for the people on the other side to notice me. What I really wanted was for them to admit that my reality--my Western life--was just as valid and important and meaningful as theirs, or more so. Which they never did.

Now I've been sixty miles outside of New York City for four years, another four long, boring years. My neighbors are all natives of Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. They're fat. They're stupid. They're ugly--god, they're ugly. And they're loud. God, they're loud.

Then there's the other group, the urbane New York City-dwellers who come up here on the weekends to their tiny unheated cabins. They're nice, in general, fairly intelligent, self-absorbed, and boring. Between these two groups, I've never met people so uninterested in the world outside their home, or in the world at large.

The truth is, New York is too boring to hate. I go into Manhatten fairly often. I see plays, go to bars, walk around a whole lot, and find the whole city incredibly tedious. Why? Because it's completely turned inward on itself. Its residents think they have the entire world at their fingertips. Its art--music, theater, literature--feeds upon itself, regurgitating never-ending variations on the same "Isn't New York endlessly fascinating" theme.

Like a toddler, New York doesn't see itself as part of the wider world. Anything that matters begins and ends with the limit of its limbs. You can tickle a toddler, or feed it, or watch its antics, but you can't hold a conversation with it. And you can't expect it to grow up and take its place among entities that matter.