Philo is right. The New York Times was reporting fact. But pictures , and front page articles,Thursday and Saturday were overkill. Don’t know about Friday, threw it out without looking. I’m a New Yorker who has lived in Manhattan most of my adult life. Each time something 9/11 happens, it’s big news here. And I have to hear about the 9/11 families grief. It’s hard to take when you had your own personal tragedy the next month and still feel that to bring it up would be unseemly. Espeically since I have made peace with it, but the wound that seemed so healed begins to fester.
I think that the theater is better so many other places. There are good restaurants everywhere. If I ever miss Manhattan I can fly in and/or watch any Law & Order franchise. Law & Order has an almost timeless quality; it seems to portray a Manhattan that truly ended around 1996. Just what I think.
Shayna’s birthday party is rocking.
And be prepared for Sar’s on Friday. If you haven’t received engraved invites, I’m inviting you. Had a whole funny post on coffee mugs–have a set with pictures of an entire family, I can’t stand. Don’t know how I lost the post, but I don’t try to understand these things anymore. The post below is dark and shows my sorta bitchy side. If you think I’m all about niceness and don’t want to be disillusioned don’t read it. If you know me well, you’ve probably heard more on this subject–maybe one or two of you.
My non blogging friends are all excited as they think I’m coming out of hibernation. For the record was never hibernating, we just weren’t in the same place at the same time, or I was a very boring rendition of myself which is I guess the same as hibernating. Though I’m not usually the life of a party, I am with my friends, and actually was, sort of, until just about four and a half years ago. The following post is basically the reason why I lost that ability, but apparently am gaining it back
Oh right;still owe many comments. And South Florida is only in the running, in the post below because I do love tropical humidity, but I hate hurricanes, and began to go to California four years ago because it doesn’t have any. Then I fell in love with Santa Monica/Venice, and do feel that I belong there. My sister keeps pushing Long Island, while I’m looking for better weather, when I went to the Island after my mom died on estate business or for any reason, people were much more empathetic. They lost many people also, but I guess being physically removed, a bit, made a world of difference.
Yes I live in Manhattan. Yes I am sick of all things 9/11. I understand the importance of the tapes, but I sat down yesterday to relax and read the paper. Do admit that relaxing and reading a newspaper is a bit of an oxymoron these days.
I do consider every day that I have a bad day in Manhattan and don’t think about 9/11 to be a victory of sorts. I understand that The New York Times has to put articles about the tapes on its front page. But couldn’t the pictures be a bit smaller or I have no idea…..I couldn’t stop crying yesterday, and have no idea if I was crying for my dad or for the people who died or for the buildings or for the 9/11 families or for me.
I fell out of love with Manhattan in the late 80’s and could have transferred to San Diego in 1991, but then my dad died. My mom was getting older and more and more blind, I couldn’t leave.
After my mom’s sudden death a month after 9/11 I had to stay to settle the estate and for patriotic reasons. When I was finally free to leave, I stayed because of New York patriotism. This is an amazing city. But my fixed expenses have gone up 90% in the past eight years, most in the past four years–don’t believe me, email me, I’ll tell you the figures.
My 600 square feet of prime Manhattan real estate, if sold could give me more room, anywhere else in the USA. I’m tired of not having a real kitchen or dishwasher, washer/dryer, the simple things many of you take for granted. The cost of food is unbelievable.
In many ways we pay every day for 9/11. We do the citizens of New York, not the people who live other places. It’s not that I don’t want to be disloyal to a city that has given my family so much, it’s that I even have to think that way
Let the rebuilding begin. We need it. The 9/11 families experienced incomprehensible losses, but it’s been four and half years. Now remember I am a person who did loose my mom a month later and was told that for me to grieve for my mom was unseemly, so maybe I’m a bit jaded, cynical and also scared, but I need to heal also.
I know so many people who have moved four times in four years, kids who are in therapy, and more. Any New Yorker who says that they weren’t profoundly changed by 9/11 is either totally dense, totally stupid, unfeeling or lying.
A lot of people have given up reading newspapers. Life is easier that way. I can’t. The ghosts of my parents would haunt me–and I would have missed one of the best political cartoons I have seen, totally agree with, and it’s by a client and friend of Max’s.
It did a lot to take me out of the funk I was in yesterday, and no I’m not saying where I read it or who it was by. But I will thank the cartoonist/author later. In my present state, the wound seems healed but keeps reopening, it made me like it was a sign from the gods, or my parents or something.
In several months the heavy metal band in my mouth should be marching to their own drummer and I won’t have to pay my dentists rent anymore for spending too much time in their offices.
I will be free to leave New York and plan to. I probably won’t sell my apartment at first but rent it, and I truly have no idea where I’m going to move. It’s between Southern California and Southern Florida, so far, with the first winning by a lot.
I will probably regret putting this up. I hate writing in anger though I often do.
It’s a truly beautiful day and I’m going to visit my best friend, Lucia, who often accuses me of personalizing just about everything. How can I not with 9/11? It’s only since i began blogging that I found people willing to listen and listen and listen….
Hey I am my dad’s daughter. We pontificate. And I deserve to heal as much or more than any 9/11 family, because nobody told them not to grieve. I was the person people would take their anger out on. I vowed never to allow myself to turn into an angry or bitter person; I forgot about sad. I too deserve to be happy.
Any comments about how spoiled I am will be deleted. As will any comments I truly dislike. Blogging is a platform for intelligent discourse not idiotic mumblings. Except of course if I write an idiotic mumbling post.
Am over the anger and hurt for now. 9/11 was sensational enough. Why do respected mainstream publications that are required reading in many households insist on sensationalizing it? It’s not fair to those of who weren’t eligible for free counseling.
I read an article in The Times the day of my mom’s funeral about families who had lost members around the time of the attacks and who felt short changed. Never saw a follow-up and I looked.
People are given more solace for the loss of their pet dog, or mouse, then we were. It’s been four and a half years, and I would like to work through my grief without constant reminders.
Oh man is this post right on.
I’ll start where you did, with the 9/11 tapes. I a NY Times print edition junkie but yesterday I just couldn’t buy it. The whole day I felt like there were whispers in the air–terrified voices that we’ve all tried to forget about. My disapproval of the War on Terror may have numbed me to its original motive, but every once and a while I become suddenly aware of where I live and how horrible that day was (I was in Baltimore on 9/11 so I can only imagine the day’s meaning for people who were here). I thought the Times went overboard with its front page sensationalism, it really bugged me.
Now, that’s now why I’m doing it, but I, too, am leaving New York very soon. I’m being enticed away by law school and I’ll be glad to have cheaper groceries and beers again. If you’re looking for a great place to land, try San Francisco, my home town. It’s not cheap, but it has a fresh and optimistic attitude that makes people fall in love with it. Whereas New York makes you want to put your head down and just GO GO GO, SF will make you look around and take a deep breath. Just my two cents.
I don’t think I’d do well in NYC–I considered it once for school and decided not to go that direction, but you should be commended for hanging in there.
As for South Florida and South California, I couldn’t do either, but then I’m not much of an urbanite. However, everytime I’ve been in San Deigo, the weather has been wonderful.
Not having been there at the time I admit to not having the same feelings as you but having been in DC I think I’m closer to it than the rest of the nation who I truly don’t think really had any lasting traumatic affect from it as they watched it as if they were watching a any television show.
The Times ..sometimes…more often than not these days …I just don’t get them.
I am still at the I love NY point . I hope to get an apartment next year possibly purchase one with money left to me..don’t know how this will work we will see… eventually I too may leave so keep a room open in eiher of those places and I’ll keep my Spanish up.
I hope you enjoyed the day. I walked a long way today and didn’t mind it at all.
I wasn’t in New York when 9/11 happened (I was in Dubai of all f&*^*%g places!) and it forever changed me and I cannot imagine someone having been there and not have been affected…
Stuffed Tiger is from San Francisco? Me like!!! Yep, you know my thoughts on where I’d recommend you move! Go to SF and when I move back we can be neighbors! *sigh* Now I am feeling melancholic…
Hey, ranting is good! I know a thing or two about ranting! 😉
I have visited NYC a few times during my life, and I have always felt that it was a great place to visit, but not somewhere I would want to live.
Boarding horses is too freakin’ expensive there.
I am planning to move also; if I had a choice between So-Cal and Florida, I would go to So-Cal. Just so that I could say “I live in So-Cal.”
9/11 was one of my motivators in joining the Guard.
My parents and brothers were in NYC on 9/11. All alone in new mexico, i realized just how far removed we are from things here.
Come to Santa Fe. On a good day, you might see Kevin Bacon (my husband saw him last week) buying fresh produce at a roadside market.
The air is clean, and the light is breath taking. It feels healthy to live here.
(sorry didnt mean to sound like a tourist ad)
I do think you’d like it though.
Pia-
As a current resident of So Cal (San Diego county) I would welcome you here with open arms. It’s kiind of pricey here too, but not nearly the baggage that NYC carries with it- by that I mean the constant feelings surrounding 9-11.
Not to imply that I forget the tragedy of that day- I think of it regularly, and what the implications of that day has brought to our lives and our world. But I don’t have to walk by the places it happenned day in and day out- a chance to focus on all the other problems and yes, the good things too.
Come to SoCal- I’ll help you unpack.
I grew up in NYC. I was born in Brooklyn and raised in Manhattan, on St Marks Place. I lived close to NYC until high school, but my family stayed close and I’ve always been a regular visitor. I’ve been living back here for the last year (it’s a year alread, ga!).
I was in Baltimore on 9/11. I had friends who worked in the Twin Towers (all either away for meetings or not yet arrived on the day of) and I had other friends on their way to the Towers for meetings. I think that makes me pretty lucky. But the scar that is our empty skyline haunts me.
I remember the first time I came back to New York after 9/11. I was on Amtrak, heading into the city at sunset. When the train was passing through north Jersey, about to cross the river, I looked out the window and I didn’t know where I was. I honestly did not recognize NYC without the Twin Towers dominating the skyline. This wasn’t New York, this wasn’t where I was raised.
That hasn’t changed in the four plus years since the attack. It still cuts me to walk past the whole that is Ground Zero. I’m enraged to see Asian and African immigrants hawking Twin Towers memorabilia alongside the Towers. I’m going to have to find a way to deal with that, as I’m moving down to West St at the end of the month and I’ll inevitably walking past Ground Zero more often.
Watching movies shot in NY before 9/11 is hard for me — I get filled with rage seeing shots of the Twin Towers the way they should be standing. Spike Lee’s intro to 25th Hour, with the light monumet to the Towers does the same.
I think you’re right Pia. 9/11 did irrevocable damage to the souls of New Yorkers. It’s not something people who never got to see our city with the Twin Towers standing will ever understand. While I was living in Hawaii, a lot of my friends and coworkers would ask about 9/11 and if the loss of the towers made that much of a difference. I’d tell them that our skyline was our soul and now something was missing. They’d understand how it hurt us, but not get that it was truly their loss too.
I hope you find a living situation that works. This city is too damned expensive and there’s no harm in leaving. You’ll always be a New Yorker, leaving never changes that…
I have a cousin who was there during 9/11… was in the subway when all hell broke loose. She has since moved because things were becoming way to expensive for her. She, to this day, will not talk about that day. She lost a lot of dear friends.
Yes, come one come all to my virtual B-Day Party… I promise a good time… as virually possible…
I still can’t believe it’s been 4 and a half years…
There’s got to be a way to get people to stop responding to sensationalism. It is a facilitator of far too much that’s rotten in our national character.
How much of the times articles was sensationalism? It is dramatic historical evidence that I frankly didn’t have the stomach to read or listen to. Now, “Flight 93” and its trailer is sensationalism and I hope and pray the makers of that film have the sense to donate every penny they make to the 9/11 victims’ fund or better yet, to the families of troops who have died fighting Bush’s war in Iraq.
I remember my visit to NYC in August of 2002 after finishing shooting the last scenes of a movie there. Walking through Central Park and looking up to get my bearings and coming up empty … it was pysche shuddering. Took me a few minutes to regain what is left of my stability. Bits of my stability was forever lost on 9/11.
Pia, I’m not saying we stop paying attention to 9/11 or stop memorializing. Of course of lot of this (especially the political/war on turr’sm) is sensational.
I wish it had never happened. I wish I could think about it in a real, authentic way and not either start crying or trek to Pakistan to personally kill bin Laden. I wish that a friend of mine from high school hadn’t killed himself the night of September 10th, 2001. I wish I wasn’t a New Yorker and didn’t cut to my soul with the fall of the Twin Towers.
But I write this and realize I’m lying. I’m glad I connect to this event because I know it will never have the faux meaning that the senationalists want it to have for me. I know that, like you, my pain is based on my growth in this city. I don’t want it trivialized and I don’t want it reinflicted every time someone wants to post ratings, TV or political.
But you are right Pia. There’s a lot of great cities out there with great things to offer. I’m partial to San Fran (where most of my NYer friends move after NYC) or Baltimore (Bawlmer hon’). Leaving New York is an exciting idea and I think you should embrace it. You’ll miss it, but you can visit. Or watch Law & Order.
drained and losing steam…best of luck pia…