Ten Years in New York

Cover Image Credit: Lauren Roth

We arrived at JFK on the evening of November 15^th, 2014, and have been living in New York ever since. We arrived late in the evening, spent the night at a hotel near JFK, and then moved into our apartment in Park Slope on the 16^th. So much has changed over this decade, but we’re still, to our mutual surprise, here.

I’d like to reflect on the major moves of my life:

Austin → South Bay Area
South Bay Area → Austin
Austin → San Francisco
San Francisco → New York City

And how, upon reaching New York, I couldn’t find anything else to opt for and how it felt better to opt against everything else. And so I/we’ve stayed.

Our first day in Brooklyn was overcast and gray as Novembers here (we would come to understand) often are. After we got our keys, we had lunch delivered and then we went out to play in beautiful Prospect Park. Byron ran through crunchy leaves. That afternoon, I took our rental SUV to the Costco and bought enough supplies to get us through: air bed, shower curtain, basics of food, etc. I was surprised when I exited and it was pitch dark (about 5 p.m.) and drizzling cold rain. We had moved to the North.

Ten years later, it was a sunny and beautiful day (as it infrequently is, we have come to understand). Our puppy who was but a mere nine months, is now 10 years and 9 months, a senior. But he still loves to laugh and is damned difficult to photograph owing to his jet black hair.

Also, in that time we added another being to our household: a human!

We also survived a little pandemic that threw everything into a strange other-world for 2 years.

And we also saw the job that I came here for/with get marked down; that saw me change to working for an erstwhile competitor…before the division was restructured such that I would have a funemployed Fall of 2019; and now I’ve been thriving at Bloomberg for 4 years.

The pandemic times were also associated with the pursuit of pregnancy in parallel, by the time the post-lockdown era began, we had a newborn. By the time we started to come into toddlerhood, we were at our 10-year anniversary. Even amid a pandemic or while working a stroller upstairs into our building, I don’t think either of us really entertained the thought of leaving.

While New York will never really feel like “home,” I can’t say that where I’m from feels welcoming anymore. And there’s nothing that we would opt for, as far as I can tell, instead. So we’ve been here and, from where I sit, I don’t see leaving, either.

A History of Moving

I was talking this all over with Lauren the other day, on the day of our Gothamversary, and we were trying to see if there was an over-arching theory of my/our moves. I tried to replay it all to find the threads and motivations.

The first thing that staggered me was that eras that felt like eons were actually, thanks to the scope afforded by age, but brief moments. My entire number of years in California before I met Lauren was about four. The years of maintaining this blog before I met her was two. Our time in Austin was three years. Like I said, compared to a continuity of a decade in one place, those totemic eras of my/our history together now feel like months.

Loving California

I have loved California for so long. But it’s a toxic love for me. It’s a love predicated on a dream and a recollection and not an absolute fact. It’s seeing the blonde in the red VW Golf Cabriolet and wondering about how great it would be to “go” with her, but not realizing she’s an emotionally-stunting, cruel person.

I suppose I’m not the first person to fall in love with the idea of California and who needed therapy to figure out how to move on after. I first caught my case of feelings for her sometime in the last years of the 80’s (1989, I believe)

My dad had business in the City and he arranged for my sister, mom, and me to fly out to meet him. It must have been the dark ages, because I recall and evening flight with a plane change somewhere in the Southwest (Phoenix? Vegas? El Paso?) where I killed time by watching “Perfect Strangers.” I also remember people smoking in the plane. Yeah, it was a long, long time ago.

But getting there and seeing that other places weren’t perpetually hot made an impression. I remember Ghiradelli square (near the bars where I’d socialize years later) and shopping at the Emporium (a few blocks from which I’d live some years later), dinner at Scoma’s (which I’d avoid entirely years later), breakfast of sourdough English muffins amid 50’s jukebox tunes at Mel’s in Cow Hollow (a joy even still), the fog (a joy even still), and that cool gray city of mystery. I was in love.

Living California

A decade after that trip, I had the chance to take a job out in San Jose. During the recruiting trip I ate out, I rode in a convertible with the top down, I smelled the blossoms of the orange groves of San Jose (they existed still) and I thought: Yes, here’s where I’ll go next. Within a few years of that trip, I’d be living in San Francisco.

But in those latter years there, my relationship with the City was oscillating wildly as I tried to find a way to make her love me as much as I loved her. I failed to find a relationship. I failed to find roots or regularity. I’m not sure whether it is a failure of my constitution, but I kept waiting for a sign to light up like: “You’re here! Welcome! Never leave.” And it just never happened. I always felt priced out or stretched thin. It just wasn’t working.

I left to Australia for a brief time in hopes that things would get clearer. Maybe I was meant to be abroad there? While I loved Australia, I just couldn’t live on the other side of the Earth. So I found myself listless in Mountain View. I suppose this site really saw a lot of work in that era as I tried to learn OSX programming.

I am so thankful for the friends I had in that era, but the negatives were mounting up. I wanted the Bay to love me so much more than she was capable of doing.

I didn’t love the traffic and the driving; I didn’t love the consistently noncommital default way of her residents; I didn’t love the work-centrism of her culture. There’s only one more beautifully situated city than San Francisco, and that’s Venice. But that’s not the basis for a relationship. On top of that, I had a legendary case of burnout on my shoulders that I was not working through well. In modern times, we have many more supports in the tech industry for mental health and support. But at that time, I just kept falling waiting for some orientating something.

Like Emmylou Harris once sang: The funny thing about the blues when you’ve got ’em / you keep on falling ‘cuz there ain’t no bottom.

I’m thankful for that experience now because it’s made me a much better mentor to those who’ve needed career advice, but it’s not something I want anyone to have to face alone or without guardrails.

But a big change was coming and I couldn’t have seen it. And she’d help me stop the fall and give me an orienting relationship: my now-wife.

Running Home to Austin

Around 2005, I had a nascent relationship with a girl that I felt very strongly about. But as we were in the South Bay, life started to feel ever more…repetitive. But on the up side, everything for me was new again through her eyes. She was helping me move from beyond burnout, and I was trying to be the hero I wanted to be for her.

I was stressed out by my work. She was stressed out by her work. I wanted to keep healing and I wanted what was familiar, and she wanted to try something new, so in 2006 Lauren (spoiler!) and I started what would be a 3 year stint in Austin. Austin let me keep my current work and, to be frank, I had never really loved Houston or Dallas.

The best things about our life in Austin was proximity to friends, a slower pace life where there was room for hobbies, and that ineffable Austin thing. There were also our wonderful friends there, largely courtesy of the man who would officiate our wedding, Ryan. Swing dancing, Chuy’s, budget for travel, Latin classes at ACC/UT, and the Magnolia Cafe on Lake Austin marked our years. It was a place for us to safely incubate the germ seed of what would become our marriage.

I think we would have been fine as a couple in the Bay, but there was something about deepening our bond in my old college town, surrounded by friends and my family that made learning how to be a couple easier. I’m not going to pretend that I was (or am) the perfect boyfriend, but I tried my best to listen and learn. It was bumpy at first: I recognize that those bumps are what happens when you’re 20-something and living with someone. The worst fights I can remember happened there.

But we never gave up and I’m so glad we didn’t. But after a few years, San Francisco was calling again and this time for both of us. While we’d been away, there’d been a market crash (2008), but new and interesting ideas were afoot again the Facebook/Instagram/Social Web era in tech was getting started and pulling talent and ambition into that peninsula. Lauren wanted to do programming; I wanted to do more technical stuff and change up my career. I think we, as a strengthened us, were looking for career challenges that were different. It was hard to leave those friends behind, they’ve never been replaced.

San Francisco

We moved back to San Francisco proper with a plan of being San Franciscans living and working there. I changed roles and then changed jobs. Lauren started working in technology as well. We bought a condo. We were just a couple, standing before a city, asking it to love us.

We quickly found ourselves working our way into a certain model of tech-worker culture. For better and for worse, I daresay that culture has infected American culture: podcasts, programmer dudebros, and a rapacious love of lucre.

On top of that, the political polarization which feels so inescapable now was beginning it sorting. In my youth, you could have farm boy Democrats who like Willie and Ann Richards in Texas. In my youth, you could have a San Francisco that was the home of Metallica and Journey and working class folks. Those places don’t exist anymore – or don’t advertise themselves. It’s sad, we’ve lost amicability and an ability to appreciate and tolerate. I don’t know who fired the first shot and it doesn’t matter, but the loyalty test of cultural issues in both places where lack of curiosity about others is a badge of honor was entrenching.

On top of that, while we had taken a huge leap in getting a mortgage, as rents went up, our mortgage remained fixed. We lived lean, but couldn’t get priced out. Our friends were and were leaving. Additionally, due to time of life, people were getting married, and then priced out and were leaving. It started to feel more and more like we were on our own island. And yeah, it was a beautiful island, and yeah we could take our beautiful car (and eventual beautiful dog) to the beautiful surrounds of the Bay area, but it wasn’t adding up to be quite enough. And that’s when we got the chance to visit New York in the summer of 2016.

As we got back on the plane, I turned to Lauren and said something like: “I think we’re going to move there” and she agreed. So I had opted for San Jose, and we had opted for Austin, and we had opted for San Francisco, but now we were opting for New York.

Ten Years On: Opting For

So here we are, ten years on from having opted for New York.

In large part it’s because there’s nothing I would opt for instead of the life we have in Manhattan. Yes, there’s more space to be had in the suburbs, but “more square footage, more problems.” The first rattle out of the box, you have to get a car, and insurance, and gas. And that is the very tip of a very large iceberg. Arguably our son’s education needs might suggest the suburban life, but only arguably so. And on top of that, with winter looming outside of my window as I type this, suburban life means leaving in the dark and returning in the dark. For Lauren it means the same plus day care or isolation in the suburban fields à la Betty Draper. Yikes.

My specialized skills in tech education are really well regarded by my employer. Choosing something else would require a lot of planning to make ends meet. NYC is expensive, but the loss of social capital and role shift is a dramatic downside to going anywhere else. We would have to find a mammoth beacon to opt for to make that downside work out.

Also, as my study abroad time and years in SF suggested, we’re big into urbanism (although we didn’t know that word until after we were in San Francisco): We like walking to the grocery and I biking to work. That kind of dense urban design isn’t really well served outside a few cities in America.

When Lauren and I blue sky daydream about life abroad there are a few places that attract due to their history or exoticism like where Paris, London, Tokyo, Milan. But when we take that exercise to its next step: upon returning would you go somewhere else? We think long and hard and generally opt for New York again. Our other likely candidates have also worked to make it easy to opt against them: I don’t like the political culture of Texas anymore. I feel unwelcome. I stay away. I don’t like the social culture of San Francisco anymore. I feel unwelcome. I stay away. I think the political culture of San Francisco is also chaotic and erratic at this point. I hope it finds a consistent bearing, but I opt against it.

And lastly, there’s something about New York, my original ancestor opted for it. There’s something about being here and seeing an “Established 1898” sign and knowing: “We were already here then.” I like having that. I hope my son likes having it too.

So Are you New Yorkers (Yet?)

“Are you a New Yorker Yet?”

Lauren and I talk about this sometimes. It’s not like the mayor comes by with a medal.

On the other hand, I/we’ve:

Learned Manhattan so well that it feels kinda small when I think about it
I’ve bought a sandwich on every major avenue
There are delis I miss and stores that I can’t remember what was there two stores ago
Endured a pandemic here
Shouted down taxis
Shouted down a racist man harassing an interracial couple
Endured 3 presidential elections
Been scandalized by (too-)scanty shorts in March
Biked through Times Square
Gotten library cards

Maybe?

Conclusion

So, for the foreseeable future we’re a Manhattan family. The world will continue changing, quoque mutabimus.

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