Maude is clearly ready for the big move to Boston. But am I?
The answer, as far as I can tell, is yes. I've had a rocky love affair with New York, but it's time to close this chapter in my life. Maybe I will live here again someday, but maybe it's just not in my blood. You can take the girl out of the Midwest but you can't take the Midwest out of the girl.
A good friend recently quoted Joan Didion's stunning essay on leaving New York on his blog, and not to seem like a copycat, but I'm going to quote it too. It perfectly captures the bittersweet feelings I have about leaving this exhilarating and bewildering city. To read the entire essay, click here. You won't regret it. Here are some of my favorite excerpts-- part of why I am going to graduate school for writing is to learn how to write something as powerful and true as this.
Goodbye to All That (1967)
It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was....
Part of what I want to tell you is what it is like to be young in New York, how six months can become eight years with the deceptive ease of a film dissolve, for that is how those years appear to me now, in a long sequence of sentimental dissolves and old-fashioned trick shots—the Seagram Building fountains dissolve into snowflakes, I enter a revolving door at twenty and come out a good deal older, and on a different street. But most particularly I want to explain to you, and in the process perhaps to myself, why I no longer live in New York. It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city only for the very young....
Nothing was irrevocable; everything was within reach. Just around every corner lay something curious and interesting, something I had never before seen or done or known about...I could make promises to myself and to other people and there would be all the time in the world to keep them. I could stay up all night and make mistakes, and none of them would count.
Only the very young and the very old may recount their dreams at breakfast, dwell upon self, interrupt with memories of beach picnics and favorite Liberty lawn dresses and the rainbow trout in a creek near Colorado Springs.
The rest of us are expected, rightly, to affect absorption in other people's favorite dresses, other people's trout.--Joan Didion, "On Keeping a Notebook" It occurs to me that writing a blog is indulgent in the same way that sharing your dreams is, so I figure it's not a big leap to write a post about my dreams. Which, of late, have all been anxiety dreams and fairly easy to interpret. It bothers me when the meaning of my dreams is so transparent; I get insulted on behalf of my subconscious, feel like it should be more clever. I shouldn't literally be dreaming about the real things in my life that are worrying me, but figurative, highly abstract representations of those things. I went to an Ivy League school, goddammit.Last night, I dreamed that I cheated on my boyfriend with Richard Blaise from Top Chef. I do not find Richard Blaise attractive and if he ever tried to make me eat his bacon ice cream, I would vomit on his face. What I kept thinking, as I was fellating Blaise, was "how I am going to explain this to Noah?" (Noah = boyfriend) Sure, I have had the occasional sex dream about David Cook (who hasn't?), but fantasizing about our new American Idol and a Top Chef cast-off of questionable sexual orientation are two very different things. Troublesome trout indeed.This dream was followed by one in which I was trying to get my collegiate women's a cappella group, Whim 'n Rhythm, on time to a concert in the Hamptons. But somehow I got sidetracked and found myself wandering inexplicably around a mall, shoplifting cosmetics. And finally--yes, I had all 3 of these dreams last night--I was at an audition for NYU's acting graduate program, frantically trying to remember the lines to a monologue I haven't performed in months. I have this dream and several variations of it all the time, even though I haven't auditioned for anything in the past six months. It's the actor's version of the academic stress dream everyone seems to have, the one where they are supposed to take a final exam they haven't prepared at all for.
Oddly, I've never had that dream, or the one where you are in public and suddenly realize that you are naked. My humiliation/body shame dream is much stranger -- I'm in the company of friends, usually at someone's apartment or at a party, and suddenly I realize that I am masturbating in front of them. Like, I somehow just forgot that you don't do that in public. Unless you're this man: 
So, here's what I have deduced from a careful analysis of my dreams: I'm fucking stressed out. Or, as my former therapist helpfully phrased it in almost every session we had, "Katie, it sounds like you're having some difficult feelings that are making you anxious." Thanks, Freud.
