"Five-hundred, Twenty-five Thousand, Six-hundred Minutes..."

....how do you measure, measure a year? In daylights, in sunsets, in midnights, in cups of coffee. In inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife. In 525,600 minutes, how do you measure a year in the life?"

Yes, I went as far as to quote the musical "Rent" to articulate my personal experience and relationship with New York CIty. Trite as it may sound, that lyric sample really does an excellent job of incapsulating the bevy of feelings I have in regards to the past year of my life.

Anniversaries often serve as an invitation for reflection. From a superficial standpoint they are nothing more than a recycled date. A tally on the calendar of our existence, an imprint in the history of time with its own unique vibration now happily swimming out there in the light-years. It is the manipulation of sentiment we inject into the anniversary that makes it cathartic, sacred, and potent with memories. This past Monday was my one-year anniversary of living in this divine and eternally sparkling city. I felt somewhat obligated to reflect upon these past twelve months as an attempt to gage what I've learned from the multitude of experiences that I've endured. Hopefully I've extracted a few nuggets of wisdom from the joyful, the sorrowful, and the bizarre occurrences that I've participated in, or at the very least, been exposed to.


I'll never forget the overwhelming sensation I had upon my initial landing at JFK. I had taken a one-way red-eye flight via Jetlblue airlines and was totally bleary-eyed and contained an eclectic mixture of exhaustion and irrepressible excitement in regards to my new life in my new world. Everything was stunning and somewhat startling to me during that first week, I felt like I was enveloped in a dream. By "dream" I mean it in a literal and figurative sense. I had accomplished and made a sweet dream a reality by successfully moving to my favorite little sprawl of land on this whacky planet, but every element of my new environment was so surreal.

I was talking to someone not too long ago who has recently moved to the city from the midwest and he is experiencing extremely similar sensations. He coined the dream-like perspective of it well by saying, "It's so surreal that I feel like an enormous cheese-log is going to start barreling down the street and everyone will start running from it naked." I'm paraphrasing a bit but hopefully you get the idea of how bizarre it can feel to be thwarted into such an intense environment.

I come from Sacramento, California. It is a medium sized city that has a fairly sizable population of five-hundred thousand peeps. I have never been a fan of the cultural climate on the West Coast. I just always found the personality of the region and the people within it to have a vapid quality that was unstimulating and suffocating in its banality. Of course, you can't paint everyone with the same brush according to their geographical position, but it is fairly undeniable that environments shape people ergo, they shape cultures. Basic anthropology.

Ever since my first visit to New York City and the East Coast in general, I've been infatuated with it. The area is a huge melting pot of cultures and richer than cheesecake in its diversity. Yes, it may be more abrasive than the west. Yes, it may be the financial mecca of the world thus attracting shoals of soulless money-making monsters. Yes, the weather, at times, is as erratic and frightening as a manic-depressive banshee on a ass-load of barbiturates. Yes, there are muggings. Yes, it is ridiculously expensive to live in a studio where your toilet is juxtaposed to your refrigerator. Yes, there are gnarly things. But you know what? It is consistently thrilling. The good, the bad, and the cockroaches.

The happiest incident I've experienced thus far along my New York journey would definitely be when I successfully crashed Bette Midler's massive charity fiesta, Hulaween, with one of my closest friends, Michelle. There's an entire blog entry about that specific incident so just click the link and devour it with you senses separately from this piece.

The worst experience that I've had to deal with was the inherent loneliness that initially accompanies a young baby bird that has just flown from her nest. I've missed my wonderful friends, my weird and lovely family, and my overweight and adorable dog Spiggy more than I could ever hope to successfully articulate. Being dumped in a place that is so unique from everywhere else on this planet and living in such a luxurious environment (rent-free, none the less) took its toll in shocking me. The apartment I live in now is bigger than the house I grew up in, I work for the most wonderful family in the Western Hemisphere, and every resource my ruby red heart could desire is at my fingertips twenty-four seven. As lovely as all of that sounds and is, it takes a bit for one such as myself to completely adapt to it.

Fortunately, I have had Michelle with me as a dear friend pretty much since day one of moving here so there's always been at least one person to confide in and cathart with. Though, the brand of loneliness I endured was a healthy thing and I expected it entirely prior to moving here. My dad forewarned me wisely too by telling me, "In a city of seven million people, you'd be amazed at how lonely you can feel." Too true. Though, retrospect and distance have helped shape my perceptions of my life and who I am like no two other contributing factors I can imagine. I've made a healthy nest of friends and acquaintances by now and feel much more socially acclimated, however, I'm grateful that I was allotted the opportunity to evaluate my hometown and past in complete and objective isolation.

I've witnessed and participated in a miasma of bizarre experiences but am too stubbornly elusive to share them all at this time. So, I'll just give you all one little sampling. In early December, I had the pleasure of hosting one of my absolute best friends, Evan, as a visitor. Our entire week together was cinematic and chocked with adventure, however, the one that resonated the most was the day we attended a live taping of "The Dr.Keith Ablow Show" at NBC Studios. We had never heard of this self-anointed clown before and liked it that way. The only reason we accepted the tickets were a) none were available for Conan O' Brian and b) we were attracted because of the opportunity to mock something as absurd as a "forensic psychiatrist" on daytime television. After Evan and I caught a few clips of the Keith Ablow show we were addled with anticipation and irony-inspired enthusiasm.

When we arrived at the studio for the taping, some bitchy gay man immediately assessed our aesthetic and demographic then proceeded to seat us according to only that. Once seated I was able to see the general seating chart of very specific looking gaggles of people. In the very front rows there were at least a dozen platinum blonde broads that would make Dolly the cloned sheep envious of their resemblance to one another. As Evan put it in his blog about New York, it was "diversity in syndication." The subject matter of the show involved a close look at a thirty-year-old man who has been in college (because he loves the environment, lifestyle, and enlightenment), for thirteen years. I admired the dude and thought he was a Rennassaince Man. Dr.Keith Ablow and the audience antagonized his choices be shoving conservative and conventional ideology down his throat. Evan and I are actually visible in the episode that aired and you can see us rolling our eyes and flailing indignantly as a reaction to Ablow being a blow-hard. Being in that atmosphere and seeing its sterile, polished, and packaged look was so surreal but it really was like sitting in the heart of American culture. It was sad realizing that this was the mainstream.

On Monday, the twenty-ninth of January, the official date of my one-year-anniversary with the city, I had a pretty shitty day. I mean that quite literally too as the highlight of my day was when a pigeon shit all over me, which, oddly enough, is supposed to be good luck. I won't get into why my day was so wretched but suffice it to say, conditions have improved drastically and I feel sound again. I remember whenever I was about to go on stage during my theater saturated days in Sacramento, I would loosen my jaw and warm up my diction prowess by saying the tongue twister/mantra "You know you need unique New York," over and over. Little did I know that I was subconsciously manifesting my future and, lo and behold, here I am with it in the present.