I miss New York.

It comes in waves, but when I'm in the middle of a wave, I miss it a lot. I don't know if it's the actual city of New York that I miss [and the city thus includes the sprawl around it, including Long Island, but as such: sprawl, and not for its own sake, in and of itself], or just the fact that that's the metropolitan area I'm familiar with. That is to say, [that's my new favorite turn of phrase, which I don't use nearly enough] if I was from some other city but had spent some time in New York, would I sill miss New York or would I miss the other city. Clearly impossible to tease those out.

My neighborhood in Cambridge is not entirely quiet, and the quiet/semi-quaintness of it is somethign I very much enjoy, but at times a wave will wash over me and I'll have a visceral image of some random smog and traffic-choke street in an outer borough, with non-english music blasting from a silver minivan, and I feel pangs of loneliness. I definitely more and more think about living in Northern California (maybe Marin county if I can afford it. or Oakland) or western Massachusetts, or maybe even somewhere more adventurous, but it seems like I may end up back in New York just out of sheer practicality.

Things that I take for granted, like the fact that I'm able to switch from my normal speech/dialect in the context of stories or quotations to a New York accent- this amuses people from other parts of the country to no end, and I don't quite understand why. Isn't it just like a bilingual non-accented English speaker being able to insert accented words from the other language into non-accented English speech patterns?

--Speaking of which-- I've received numerous comments of late, upon meeting new folks, about how I don't "sound" like I'm from Long Island. Life goal number 1: Check! --

But yeah, the way I explained it to someone recently, is that, you can easily find lots of diversity--cultural, economic, gastronomic, etc.--here, but you have to seek it out a bit harder than you would in New York, (at least the parts of New York, I'd be able to afford and want to live in) where it's just in your face, all the time. Which can get overwhelming, especially when combined with all of the development, gentrification and clear efforts ot marginalize that diversity and push it farther away from the "civilized" parts of New York that attracts the
throngs of tourists.

But any other place seems like sort of a joke, in comparison.At least any place that claims to be diverse and doesn't immerse you wholeheartedly in one particular culture, which as a different option would be fine, but this half-way, half-assed situation is just always a little depressing when you know what it's like to go all the way.