[belated] Report from NYC
Is this a blog now?
I’m sitting in the Mulberry Street Library on where else, Mulberry Street, in the Lower East Side, New York, January the 13th, this year 2025.
It’s a Monday, and it’s a full moon in Cancer. I’ve just gotten finished with an hour-long yoga class for $35. I left New York in Spring of 2017, just after Trump was inaugurated. I lived there for 3 years. When I left, that class was $20.
It’s now eight years later and I’m experiencing somewhat of a horseshoe effect where I’ve stepped into a parallel world where things are the same, but bigger, and somehow worse. One thing they don’t tell you about getting older is that you don’t ever really feel time passing, so it feels sort of like you’ve teleported into an alternate reality where everyone has aged. I used to tell people living in Berlin is like being on the moon, because time passes very slowly, and then when you come back to New York everyone is ten years older, famous, and/or successful.
During my trip, I met up with a young American (dear moselle) who is studying in Switzerland. She said: “I admire how much time you’ve been able to hang on in Germany.” 81 months. I think about it. It is a lot of time, isn’t it? And I can’t blame it on grad school, which only took up 3 semesters, 1 ½ years, or 18 months of it. So that means only 20% of it was spent in “grad school,” and by grad school I mean the unaccredited Master’s program in Germany I attended which, while considered elite by some, is unknown to most in the U.S. And the rest of the time I was just doing me.
How to explain my addiction to Europe, and my insistence on living in Germany, despite my resistance to many of its cultural norms?
Living in Germany is hard work. You have to speak German, which is first of all, a very stilted, guttural, and unflattering language to the ear. It sounds a little like a pig honking, combined with a gag. Spoken English with a German accent can be nice (think Werner Herzog), but the language itself is harsh, literal, and unforgiving. And living there is a literal bureaucratic nightmare.
For instance, now that I have eeked out a meagre living, the government requires that I file quarterly VAT (value-added tax, different from income tax) by counting up and reporting the VAT from all my purchases into a spreadsheet and submit it quarterly, and charge my freelance clients VAT, taxed differently depending on the service (19 or 7%). For my EU permanent visa application, I need 3 years of bank statements, 3 months showing that I’ve paid rent to the same person, a current lease, my certificate of registration, 3 years of tax returns, 5 years of pension payments, press clippings, invoices from the past 5 years, and so on. I had a very comical moment a few months ago when I was trying to change my address with the artist union I belong to, and it had a provision that required for me to inform them on the occasion of my own death.
And how the New York has changed: I see little pockets which remind me of something, like a lego brick in a larger build. It flashes like yellow paint in a video game, where you’re supposed to be directed towards an object that gives you health or you can craft in combination to something else. The rest has been built up and built over, is much more colorful, louder, more crowded, and has people filming Tiktoks over it. I find myself missing the Dean and Deluca that’s now an Aritzia on the corner of Prince and Broadway.
It’s like New York has Disneyfied. Veselka, before a neighborhood place that people always talked about and sometimes went to, has turned into a full-fledged tourist trap, complete with a $15 minimum per person. I’d never heard of such a thing. But I went there with friends around 10 p.m., when there were many open tables. My friend Marisa ordered a tea and I ordered a hot cider. The waiter came and told us we had to each spend $15—and get food. I refused and finally ordered a piece of cheesecake which was, fine, really good.
I spent most of my time during my trip to New York in the bathroom in the student dorm I was living in working on my hair loss regimen—since some mysterious elixir of stress, of high testosterone, and genetics has ransacked my hairline and hair density so it looks like a woman’s thirty years my senior—and playing free iOS game Infinity Nikki, where you play as a pink-haired anime stylist and her cat companion making outfits in a world full of wish-granting creatures. Arranging my bottles and pills everywhere I stay has become a private ritual, like setting up my little campsite. It’s one way to maintain control in the unpredictable artist lifestyle. For whatever reason, I insist on dressing like a ten-year-old boy.
It’s hard to reconnect with people who haven’t seen you for close to a decade. Some might eye you from across the room, squinting to see if they’re who you remember. Some do remember you and prefer to ignore you. It’s awkward to think of things to say to people who haven’t seen you for a long time. But actually, in most cases for me it wasn’t. People in New York care mostly about themselves so they see you just assume you’re back from wherever you languished for all that time.
Many New Yorkers had weird impressions of my life in Europe: “You guys have really cheap rent, right? And no one has a job because like everyone gets grants?” But they’re not jealous. After a few cocktails, one woman, a professional connection, admitted that she hated living in New York and felt like she was on a hamster wheel where she couldn’t build towards anything, save, or go on vacation. I told her she could go on vacation very well in Europe or buy a house or live there part-time. (As an aside, I’ve developed a horrid “expat” accent where my sentences go up at the end like a question. Ja, und du kannst einem nettem Urlaub haben, oder?)
Being in New York requires confidence, like either lying that your life is fucked up or being confident enough to own it. I rode a square line of “things are good, but I’m moving on from Europe.” Let’s see if it sticks this time. (Reader; it didn’t).