The City that Never Sleeps

Where am I? Still blogging regularly at The Corner and Planet Gore. This (among many other things) is my job now, people. My post on Zodiac today is probably of interest to a few of you.

What else? New York is still a towering mystery to me. Washington felt big when I got there, but by the time I left, it felt small. The city felt busy at times, but rarely crowded (Adams Morgan on a Saturday night is the exception, not the rule). There are only a handful of areas to go on a Friday night, only a half dozen movie theaters you need to worry about going to, only a few malls and shopping areas of note. Things seemed clean. The buildings never reach past about 15 stories. I felt like, given a couple of years and a budget, I could probably manage to eat at every decent restaurant in town. I could see all the museums and take all the tours. Given enough time, it would be possible to more or less finish the city--and then keep up with the new stuff as it opened.

New York, on the other hand, with its endless sprawling corridors of restaurants and delis and laundromats and shops, feels infinitely more vast--if D.C. is a hulking solar system (orbiting the sun of the federal government), New York is a giant swirling galaxy, lit by a million suns, with many more million planets in orbit. Stopping at every one is impossible; even finding ones of note sometimes seems daunting.

Of course, there are things to love: I'm just a few minutes walk from the lovely Prospect Park; because of the subways, travel, in some ways, is easier than in Washington; there are always people out and about, walking, talking, going about their business. The city has more energy than any place I've ever been.

I have no doubt that the place will become more familiar, feel smaller, become more predictable. I'll settle in and find a routine. But somehow, I suspect that it will never entirely feel old and familiar to me, that it will always seem at least a little bigger than I can imagine, that there will always be something fresh, new, exciting, and uncertain, waiting just down the block.