This Is Not the Life I Ordered - Reading the Sunday Times

 Something Facebook reminded me that I wrote a year ago today: 

Decided to take a rare leisurely look through the NYT for nothing specific, but to just gallivant through it like someone might walk around the Met on a gray weekday afternoon. These days I usually read the Times with a quick and swift purpose, the way a prisoner eats: taking in just enough sustenance to keep me alive and then using that fuel for my humdrum in-the-know life. But today I wanted the indulgence of the NYT, which is how I have read it for most of my life, primarily when it was on paper and just turning the page could find you someplace unexpected that you would never have normally navigated on purpose. I learned a lot on my way from Arts and Leisure to Dining Out. This is how I used to read it before it became this practical-serving resource of reliable views and thoughtful perspectives on news I'd find scrolling down my Timeline or hearing in chirps on CNN and MSNBC. This is the way I used to read the paper, when I read it on paper. Especially on Thursdays and Sundays, when some of my favorite arts, lifestyle and culture sections were featured. Today I started with Magazine, a regular part of my weekly culture diet from college until about the last four or five years (blame digital), and realized I don't know who the hell anyone is anymore. Seriously. All these people, these Dippas and Duas and Twigs and Lil Somebodys. Who the fuck are these people? They might be timely but they didn't seem very Times-y. The only person I recognized was Philip Roth and he's two generations before me. Glided over to T Mag and there was a Zac Posen cooking video (talk about someone who's won the life lottery...) but I haven't cared for the style world since the mid-aughts. Btw, does Sunday Styles even still exist? I skipped the Books section of the paper because I could build a whole separate library of books I bought over the pandemic that I haven't even cracked open yet. Just so strange because I used to get so excited reading these sections of the NYT and now I'm one of those people I used to pity, despise and look down upon: the person who doesn't know what's up. Over the last few years I've often lamented 'le mort de cool.' But maybe cool isn't dead. Could it be that maybe, just maybe, I'm just not cool anymore? #cuesexandthecitymusic #myinnercarrie

This Is Not the Life I Ordered - My New New York City Neighborhood Crush

 Taking buses everywhere now, instead of riding the crazy trains with the local bat-eating Ozzy Osborne lunatics that now run the streets and subways of New YUCK City, has added hours to my travel time, but it's also forced me to explore neighborhoods that I never really spent a lot of time in. Of all the years I've lived in New York in three different "tours" over the last 25 years, one area I never really spent a lot of time in is the Upper West Side, which may surprise some people. I had one good friend who lived there for many years, but I didn't really get into that neighborhood, or anywhere in Manhattan above 23rd Street, for a really long time. Like many over the last decade and some change, Hell's Kitchen became a destination. And then a few years ago Harlem became a home. The sturdy and adult Upper East Side just south of my former East Harlem residence was a place where my dentist once was and the museums are, and a lot of restaurants that I like. A good neighborhood for jogging along Fifth Avenue. But the UWS was kind of at once a place I felt like I knew well enough (from films and books) but didn't need to really know. I never spent much time there. Some good bookstores, my ex-therapist's office, that was what I went over there for. But now that I have to transfer from the M60 to the M104 to get to my "nice gym" (as opposed to my neighborhood gym), I have fallen in love with this neighborhood. And I have not fallen in love with a New York neighborhood since probably 1999, when a 'wild-child' lover introduced me to the world beyond the obvious attractions of the East Village. Now I'm crushing on the Upper West Side for its diners (I love diners!), it's really good looking and well-dressed people (in a grownup way, as opposed to a rock star/model Soho/LES/West Village way), and it's general sexy intellectual vibe. It's nice to walk around the city and feel relatively safe and not have to look over your shoulder for thugs and lunatics between keeping your eye on the ground for dog crap like I have to live in my new neighborhood, Central Harlem, which was once a really nice part of the storied uptown village. I can't afford to live on the UWS right now, unfortunately, but for me that's one of the things I have never stopped loving about New York: where you live and where you sleep don't have to be the same place, or even anywhere near one another.